Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

The Phone Call

My husband, Alden, was not home that week. He is a lineman for the public power district, and an ice storm had come through central Kansas the weekend before. Half the crews in our part of Nebraska went south on mutual aid.

He called me that night from a motel in Salina, the way he did every night he was gone. He sounded worn through. They had been setting poles in the ice for four days.

I told him all of it. He listened without saying a word, which is what Alden does. When I finished, he was quiet a while.

“Want me to come home and talk to him?” he said finally.

I thought about it. Alden and Kent had always gotten along. They hunted pheasants together most falls. But this was not Alden’s to carry, and it was not Alden’s family ground.

“No,” I said. “He’ll hear it from me.”

“You going to call the sheriff?”

“No.”

“Anne, that’s thirteen hundred dollars.”

“I know what it is.”

He let it go, because he knows me. But I’ll tell you what I told him later, when he was home and we were sitting on the porch steps in our coats.

You do not put your own cousin in the county paper over hay on Grandpa’s ground. Not when your two dads are buried side by side at the cemetery north of town.

A deputy would have come out, and written it down, and Kent would have been a man in the sheriff’s log for the whole county to read on Thursday. And for what? To get eleven wet bales back?

I didn’t want him punished in front of strangers. I wanted him to fix it. There’s a difference, and it took me a while to learn it.

The Mailboxes

I didn’t see Kent for a week. That was not hard to do. His place sits back off the road behind a shelterbelt, and with the cold, nobody was out more than they had to be.

But everybody has to get their mail. And I am the one who brings it.

On Wednesday the next week, I came up the county road on my route and saw his pickup sitting by the row of mailboxes at the corner, where his lane meets the gravel. He was standing beside it, waiting on me. Or waiting on his mail. I couldn’t tell which.

I pulled over and got out. I left my route car running.

He looked tired. Kent is a big man, broad through the shoulders like his dad, and he usually stands like it. That morning he stood like somebody had let half the air out of him.

“Kent,” I said.

“Anne.”

I handed him his mail. A seed catalog, the light bill, something from the bank. He held it without looking at it.

“I watched you,” I said. “From the hill. I saw all eleven.”

He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t say he wasn’t. He just looked down at the gravel between his boots.

“Those bales come out of the creek before the thaw,” I said. “Before they rot and wash on down to the Hendersons’. They’ve got cattle watering on that creek a mile down.”

That was the true reason, and it was also the one I could say without my voice shaking. Rotting hay in a creek is not something you leave for your neighbors.

He nodded slowly.

“I’ll get them,” he said.

That was all. He didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask. I got back in my car and finished my route, and I was halfway to the next corner before I let myself breathe out.