The Gate In The North Fence Line

The Week Before Christmas

The hay I bought that fall came from a man near Pierre, in South Dakota, that Dewey at the co-op found for me. Big round bales of grass hay, about thirteen hundred pounds each, thirty-four bales on a semi. It cost me more than I ever paid for hay in my life.

The trucker was supposed to bring it the week before Thanksgiving. It got pushed to the second week of December because of the weather up north, and then to the week before Christmas.

It snowed eight inches on the fifteenth. The wind came up behind it and drifted the section lines shut, and the county did not get our road plowed for two days.

I was out every morning at first light chopping ice on the stock tank with an axe, because the tank heater had quit, and feeding the last of my own bales to the cows.

On the morning of the eighteenth I was out at the tank by the yard, still in the dark, with the axe on my shoulder and my breath freezing on my scarf. The yard light hummed. The cows were bawling for their breakfast.

I heard a pickup on the road before I saw it.

The headlights came slow up my lane through the drifts, and it was the white Ford. It pulled in by the machine shed and stopped. The engine shut off.

Bart got out. He did not walk toward me at the tank. He walked to my front porch, up the three steps, and knocked on my front door.

He did not know I was out in the yard. He stood there on the porch with his cap in one hand, under the yard light, and waited for me to come to the door.

I set the axe down against the tank and walked across the yard in the snow.

What He Said on My Porch

He heard me coming when I was halfway and turned around. He looked at me standing in the yard and then at the door behind him, like he did not know which way to face.

“You’re up,” he said.

“Cows are up,” I said. “So I’m up.”

I stopped at the bottom of the steps. He stayed at the top. The key on the baling twine was hanging on the nail right beside his shoulder. He had not touched it. I do not think he had seen it.

“Polly,” he said, and stopped.

I waited. The yard light buzzed. One of my cows bawled again down by the tank.

“I’m out of hay,” he said.

He said it to the porch boards. Then he made himself look up and say it again, to me.

“I’m out of hay. I’ve got four days left, if I stretch it. There’s nobody selling within three hundred miles. I’ve been on the phone for a month.” He swallowed. “I’ve got sixty head on the ground and they’re going to start dying, and I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

I did not say anything. I did not want to make it easier for him, and I did not want to make it harder either. I just wanted him to finish.

“And I cut your fence,” he said. “In August. I cut it in three places. I went out at midnight with my lineman’s pliers and cut it and walked my cows through and went home and went to bed.”

His voice cracked on the word bed.

“I told myself I was going to tell you in the morning,” he said. “Then you were out there with your stretcher at six, and Clem was there, and Thea, and I could not. I just could not do it.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” I said. “In August. Why didn’t you just drive over and ask?”

He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it.

“Because I stood by your dad’s shed after his funeral,” he said, “and told you it was too much for a woman alone. And then I watched you put up every bale on this place for two years, and I sold a third of my cows in July, and I was going to come over here and ask you for hay?”

He shook his head.

“I could cut a wire,” he said. “I couldn’t knock on a door.”