Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

The Yard

When I pulled into his yard, the light was just coming up gray.

The barn was the old pole barn our dads put up in 1981. Half the roof had come down on the north side, the trusses folded in like somebody had stepped on a cardboard box. Tin hanging off at angles, snow piled over everything.

Under it was his hay. I could see the ends of the bales poking out of the wreck, buried and soaked through where the snow had come down with the roof.

His calves were along the fence of the lot by the barn, about forty of them, steers and heifers he’d weaned in the fall. They were bawling, all of them, standing in snow up to their bellies and looking at that broken barn.

Kent came around the corner of the barn with a scoop shovel in his hands. He was covered in snow from the knees down. He had been out there a long time.

He saw my truck and he stopped dead.

Clara came running out of the house in her coat and boots, not zipped, and ran right past him. She climbed up on my running board before I even had the door open.

“I told you she’d come,” she said, to her dad, over her shoulder. “I told you.”

Kent didn’t say anything for a long time. He just stood there in the snow looking at the six bales on my flatbed and trailer.

Then he walked over and leaned the shovel against a fence post.

“I can’t pay you for these, Anne,” he said. His voice came out rough.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I mean it. I can’t.”

“And I mean it. I didn’t ask.”

I backed the trailer up to the lot gate. Clara opened it for me, the way she had seen her dad do a thousand times. I got out with my knife and cut the net wrap on the first bale and started rolling it out for the calves along the clean snow.

They came to it like they hadn’t eaten in a day, and maybe they hadn’t.