The Float My Father Pulled Down Main

The Hay

I am going to tell you about the hay, because that is the first thing anybody asks, and because I want you to know I have asked myself the same question many times.

Two winters ago we had the dry year. Everybody around Ord remembers it.

The pastures burned up by July, and by Christmas there was no hay to be had in Valley County for any price you wanted to pay.

I run about forty cows on the side, on my dad’s old ground, the way a lot of men around here do who have town jobs.

I am the foreman at the grain elevator. It is good work and steady, but it does not leave a man a lot of room in a bad year.

Lyle had put up hay that summer on some river ground he rents along the North Loup. He had more than he needed.

In January he sold me twenty big round bales at sixty dollars a bale, delivered. Twelve hundred dollars.

That was a fair price that winter. Maybe a little high, but fair. I did not argue it. He was family, and my cows were hungry, and he had the hay.

I paid him six hundred dollars by check the day he delivered.

The other six hundred I paid him in March, in cash, at the café on the square, over coffee and a cinnamon roll.

I remember it because I had to go to the bank first. Six one-hundred-dollar bills.

He counted them on the table and folded them once and put them in his shirt pocket. He said, “We’re square.” I remember he said that.

I did not get a receipt. You do not get a receipt from your wife’s brother at the café.

That is not how it works out here, and I would not want to live anywhere it did.

Then this past spring, in April, Lyle’s wife left him. She went to her sister’s in Kearney and did not come back. There were no kids. There had been thirty-one years.

I did not know the details then, and I do not know them all now. I know he stopped coming to church.

I know his yard went to weeds by June. I know Jolene called him every Sunday afternoon and he picked up about half the time.

And in August, at my mother-in-law’s birthday, he said to me, out by the grill, “You still owe me for that second half of hay.”

I told him I had paid it, at the café, in March, in cash.

He looked at me a long time. He said, “I’d remember six hundred dollars, Mack.” Then he walked back inside.

He brought it up two more times in September. Once on the phone, once in the parking lot after church, the one Sunday he came.

Each time I told him the same thing. Each time he looked at me like I was a stranger.

I never thought he would take it out on the kids. I want to be honest about that.

If I had thought it for one minute, I would have found another flatbed in August.