The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

Spring and summer

In April, during calving, a heifer got out through a hole in the fence on the east side, between our place and Myles’s. Merritt found her at daylight in Myles’s pasture with a new calf.

He went out to fix the hole that afternoon and found it already fixed. New wire, two new steel posts, stretched tight. Nobody said who did it.

In May, someone mowed the ditches along our road. We hadn’t asked anybody to. Merritt drove over to the township shed and asked, and the township said they hadn’t gotten to our road yet.

In June, Gavin Becker brought a bottle lamb to the club’s spring meeting, and I learned that Gavin’s grandpa, the one who had died, had been Myles’s friend from the Army. They’d both been at Fort Riley in 1974.

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just held on to it.

In August, at the Brown County Fair in Aberdeen, I saw Myles standing at the rail of the sheep barn during the 4-H lamb show. He was alone, way at the back, with his cap pulled down.

Gavin showed his lamb. He was so small next to it that it looked like the lamb was showing him. He got a red ribbon, and he was thrilled, because red is better than white.

When I looked back at the rail, Myles was gone.

The ask

The first week of October, the club met again, and somebody asked about the hayride.

There was a quiet. Everybody looked at me. Tiffany looked at the floor.

“We’ll have one,” I said. “Second Saturday, same as always. Same place.”

“Kara,” one of the dads said. “Is that a good idea?”

“I think it’s the only good idea,” I said.

I didn’t know yet if that was true.

That Saturday, the week before the ride, I fed the cows with Merritt at six, and then I walked out the back door and across the pasture toward the east fence line.

It was the same walk Myles had made the October before. Half a mile through the brome grass. The cottonwoods at the old homestead were yellow. A pheasant got up out of the draw and scared me half to death.

I climbed through the fence at the gate, walked up the rise and into his yard.

He was outside, splitting wood behind the house. When he saw me, he set the maul down against the block and just stood there.

“Kara,” he said.

“Hi, Myles.”

He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He finally put them in his coat pockets.

“Merritt know you’re here?”

“He knows,” I said. “He’s the one who said I should be the one to come.”

Myles nodded slowly.

“Myles, the club is doing the hayride again. A week from today. Same place. The back forty.”

He looked away, out toward the shelterbelt.

“I want you to drive it,” I said. “Every ride. All of them. Del’s tractor.”

He looked back at me then. His eyes had gone wet, just at the edges, the way an old man’s eyes do when he’s not going to let it go any further.

“And I want you to tell the kids about the homestead,” I said. “Your grandparents. The dugout and the shanty and the stone house. I don’t know any of it right. I didn’t even know the year.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. A truck went by on the blacktop a mile off. I could hear it.

Then Myles took his cap off and held it in both hands in front of him.

“Before you ask me that,” he said, “you ought to know why I did it.”