Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

What Clara Said

Clara came over from the fence then, her cheeks red from the cold and her boots full of snow. She looked from her dad to me and back.

“Are you guys done being mad?” she said.

Kent laughed, a real laugh, the first one I’d heard out of him in a year. It came out of him like something breaking loose.

“Yeah, Clara,” he said. “We’re done.”

She climbed back up on my running board and put her arms around my neck through the open window, cold coat and all.

“Thank you for bringing the hay, Aunt Anne,” she whispered. “I didn’t want any more calves to die.”

I held on to that girl a long time. Over her shoulder, I could see Aunt Vi on the porch, still wrapped in her quilt, crying without making a sound.

I’ll tell you the truth. I cried too. Right there in the cab of my truck in Kent’s yard, with the heater blowing and my cousin standing in the snow looking at his boots so he wouldn’t have to watch.

Alden

Alden got home at eight that night, after sixteen hours on the lines. I was sitting on the porch steps in my coat, waiting for him, even though it was ten below.

He sat down next to me without a word and looked out at the yard.

“Bale yard looks thin,” he said.

“Three left.”

He was quiet a minute. “Kent?”

“Kent.”

“Twenty?”

“Twenty.”

He nodded slowly. Then he put his arm around me. “We’ll buy hay at the end of the month,” he said. “I’ll call Hendersons tomorrow. They had extra.”

That was all. That was the whole conversation. That is why I married him.

Spring

Kent showed up in my yard on a Saturday in March, before the frost was even out, with his truck and a stock trailer. He had a check in his hand.

“I sold six of those calves,” he said. “They came out good. I want you to have this for the hay.”

“We talked about this.”

“I know what we talked about. This is for the eleven in the creek. The haying is for the twenty.”

I looked at the check. It was for thirteen hundred dollars, written out in his blocky hand that looks just like Grandpa’s.

I wanted to tear it up. I didn’t. I understood, standing there, that he needed me to take it. A man needs to pay his own debts if he’s going to stand up straight again.

“All right,” I said, and put it in my coat pocket. “Thank you, Kent.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Then he helped Alden fix the hinge on my bale yard gate that had been sagging for two years, because that’s the kind of thing you do instead of saying more.