The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

“Ninety a bale, Mom,” my brother said, and he set his cap on the table beside the sugar bowl like he was setting down a bill. “That’s family price. At the sale barn they’re getting a hundred and fifty.”

Mom had her coffee cup in both hands. She stirred it with the little spoon that came with Grandma’s set, around and around, and she did not drink any of it.

“How many would I need?” she asked him, very quietly, the way she asks the doctor a question she already knows the answer to.

“With the stalks? Fourteen, if the winter’s decent. Sixteen if it isn’t.” Brent looked at the window instead of at her. “That’s twelve hundred and sixty dollars, Mom. Maybe fourteen-forty. I can’t do better. I’m sorry.”

I was standing at the counter with her mail in my hand.

I had only stopped by on my way home from the vet clinic to drop off a sack of mineral and pick up a pie tin. Nobody had planned for me to hear any of it.

It was the middle of June, and already the whole county looked like the end of August.

The pasture behind the house had gone the color of a paper sack. The creek was down to puddles you could step across.

Brent is my older brother. He is 44 and I was 39 that summer.

He farms the home place, all 200 acres of it, the hay meadow and the cropland and the strip along the river, and he has farmed it since Dad died four years ago.

He has never paid Mom a dime of rent for it. That was the arrangement, and nobody ever wrote it down. Dad’s ground, Dad’s son, and Mom’s quiet way of keeping the family farming the family land.

Ground like that would rent for better than ten thousand dollars a year around here. Mom never asked for it.

She asked for one thing, which was that Brent put up her winter hay off the meadow, the way Dad always had.

And now he was sitting at her table, in Dad’s chair, telling her what it would cost her.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Mom said. She put the spoon down on the saucer very carefully, so it would not clink. That is how I knew how upset she was.

“Mom.” Brent rubbed his face with both hands. “You’ve got to think about the cows too. You’re 74. Fourteen head and that old horse. Maybe this is the year.”

“Buck is twenty-six,” Mom said. “Where would Buck go?”

Brent did not answer that. He picked up his cap, said he had to get back to the sprayer, and went out the back door. His pickup threw gravel all the way down the lane.

I set the mail on the counter. I did not say anything for a minute, because I was afraid of what would come out of my mouth, and I have tried my whole life not to be a person who says the first thing.

“Don’t,” Mom said, without looking up.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re about to. Sit down and have some coffee with me, Shelby. It’s still warm. I made it for Brent and he didn’t touch his either.”

So I sat down in my own chair, the one I sat in from the time I was in a booster seat, and I drank my brother’s coffee, and my mother and I looked out at the dry pasture together for a long while.