The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

I heard that an old friend of Dad’s had asked him, out by the fuel pumps, whether his mother’s cows were eating well this year.

Brent quit going to the early service at church. Kim said he told her he was busy. Kim said he was not busy.

Kim said he sat in the pickup in the yard some mornings with the engine running and did not go anywhere at all.

It did not make me happy to hear it. I want you to know that. I did not want my brother shamed.

I wanted my mother’s cows fed, and I wanted my brother to remember who he was.

In the middle of August, Wyatt went to a high school football scrimmage in town with his friends.

Brent was there, sitting high in the bleachers by himself, the way he does. Wyatt went up and sat next to him.

I did not know about it until later. Wyatt told me in the truck on the way home, staring straight ahead out the windshield.

“Uncle Brent asked me how many bales we had,” Wyatt said. “I told him a hundred and eighty-one. He asked me why I was out there every night, in the heat, when I could be home.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him Grandma said if she had to sell the cows she’d have to sell Buck too, because Buck can’t be alone, and that she’d cry. I told him I’d never seen Grandma cry except at Grandpa’s funeral, and I didn’t want to see it again.”

I had to pull over. I sat on the shoulder with the hazards on and my hand over my mouth for a minute, and Wyatt sat there red in the face, embarrassed, thinking he had done something wrong.

“Did I mess something up?” he asked.

“No, baby,” I said. “No. You didn’t mess anything up. What did Uncle Brent say?”

“He didn’t say anything,” Wyatt said. “He just sat there. Then he got up and left before the second half.”

September came in hot and dry. School started, and I was back on the bus route in the mornings, which meant I hayed in the evenings after the clinic and after the bus, from about five-thirty until it was too dark to see the windrow.

Mom kept coming with her tea. By September she wore a light jacket over the yellow blouse, and she brought a thermos of coffee too, for after the sun went down.

She stood at the edge of the road and counted the bales out loud as they came off the trailer at her barn.

“Two hundred and twelve,” she would say, writing it on the inside of the barn door with a stub of carpenter’s chalk. “Two hundred and twenty-six.” Dad used to keep the count the same way, on the same door. You can still see his numbers from years ago under hers, faint, if the light is right.

One night in late September, after the boys had gone to wait in the pickup, Mom and I stood in the barn together looking up at the stack.

It was nearly to the second tier of the loft. It smelled the way a barn should smell in the fall.

“Your dad used to chalk the last bale,” she said.

“Chalk it how?”

“His initials and the date. On the last bale of every year. He’d put it on the top of the stack, and when we fed it out in the spring, he’d say, well, Darlene, that’s the year.” She laughed a little. “He had a funny way of making his R. A big loop on the top, like a sail. He did it on my letters when we were courting.”