Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

Two Cold Days

He kept his word. I’ll give him that, and I gave it to him then too, though only in my own head.

The next Saturday, I was out checking cows when I heard his tractor down in the creek bottom. I drove up on the hill and parked where I had parked that first day.

He had a log chain around the first bale and was dragging it up the bank, backing the tractor slow, the chain singing tight. A wet round bale weighs a great deal more than a dry one. It wanted to come apart, and it wanted to slide back.

He got it up on the flat and left it there, steaming in the cold. Then he went back down for the next one.

It took him all of Saturday and most of Sunday. Eleven bales, one at a time, with the creek ice cracking under the tractor tires at the edge and the wind coming down the bottom the whole time.

I watched from the hill some of both days. I didn’t help him. I didn’t wave. I didn’t drive down.

I want to be honest about that, because it is not my proudest part. I could have brought a thermos down. I could have run the chain for him and saved him a hundred trips up and down off that seat. I didn’t.

I told myself that was his consequence, and it was. A man ought to pull out with his own hands what he pushed in with his own hands. My dad would have said the same thing.

But part of it was also that I was still hurt, and I wanted him to feel me up there on that hill. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

On Sunday afternoon, when he dragged out the last one, he shut the tractor off and sat there a minute. Then he climbed down and looked up the hill at my truck for the first time.

He lifted one hand. Not a wave, exactly. More like a man saying, there, it’s done.

I lifted mine back. Then I drove home.

December

December went by the way December does out here. Short days, long chores, the cows bunched up on the south side of the windbreak. Alden came home from Kansas the second week, thinner and tired, and slept for most of two days.

Kent and I did not talk. We waved on the road when we passed. We stood on opposite sides of the fellowship hall at a funeral for an old neighbor, and that was all.

Aunt Vi noticed. Aunt Vi is Kent’s mother. She is seventy-four and she notices everything. She caught me one morning on my route when I brought her mail to the door, because she can’t make it down the lane in the ice anymore.

“Something’s wrong between you and Kent,” she said.

“It’s between me and Kent, Aunt Vi.”

She looked at me a long time with those pale eyes of hers, the same as Grandpa’s.

“He’s not doing good, honey,” she said. “Since Janelle left. He won’t say it. But he’s not.”

I knew Kent’s wife had moved to Grand Island the spring before, and that it had not been friendly. I knew he had Clara most of the time. I did not know much more than that, because Kent does not talk, and I had not asked.

“I know,” I said, though I didn’t, not really. I went back to my route.