Ashamed
“Janelle left in April,” he said. “You know that. What you don’t know is she took half of what we had. I sold eighteen cows in the summer to make the payment on this place. I had to sell my own hay off the south quarter just to keep the lights on.”
He looked at the fallen barn.
“I’ve been going to the bank and the vet and the sale barn and asking everybody for time. Everybody. All year. And then I’m standing in that lot with my girl’s dead calf, and the one person I’d have to ask is you.”
“Why’s that worse?”
“Because you’re doing fine,” he said. “You and Alden. You’ve got your route and his job and your cows, and you’re doing fine. And I’m the one Grandpa used to say would hold this ground together. I’m the oldest. And I couldn’t keep a calf alive.”
He stood there in the snow and I saw the boy I used to chase across our two yards, the one who pulled me out of this same creek when I was seven and went through the ice.
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“I didn’t want to come stand in your yard with my hat in my hand,” he said. “So I did the stupidest thing a man could do instead. I was so mad at myself I couldn’t see straight, and I took it out on your hay. And I’m sorry, Anne. I’ve been sorry since the eleventh bale.”
The Answer
I sat there a long time with the window down and the cold coming in.
I could have said a lot of things. I could have told him how I sat in my truck watching him. How I counted. How I stood on that bank in the wind with my hay half drowned. How it felt when he didn’t look up.
He already knew all of it. That was the thing. He had been carrying all of it, the whole winter, the same as me.
“Kent,” I said. “You pulled them all out yourself. Two days in the cold. I watched you.”
“I know you did.”
“I should have come down and helped you.”
He shook his head. “No. You were right not to.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I took a breath. “But I’m going to tell you how this goes now, and you’re going to listen.”
He almost smiled. “You sound like Grandma.”
“Good. You’ve got twenty bales here. That gets you through the worst of it, and we’ll find the rest together. You’ll pay me back, but not in money.”
He waited.
“This spring, you’ll hay with me. My ground and yours. We’ll put it up together, both places, the way our dads did. You’ll run the rake and I’ll run the baler, and you won’t charge me a dime for your time, and I won’t charge you for mine.”
“That’s not paying you back. That’s just helping.”
“That’s what paying back is, out here,” I said. “Grandpa didn’t leave us that creek bottom so we could fight over it. He left it so we’d have to talk to each other.”