The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

I had to look away for a second. Doyle saw me and very carefully looked somewhere else, which is the kindest thing a man can do.

That was when Quentin pulled over.

I saw his pickup come down the section road from the east, the way it had every morning that week. I saw it slow down at the gate, the way it had every morning.

And this time it stopped.

He sat in the cab for maybe a minute. Then the door opened and he got out. He stood by the fender looking at the field. At the men in the straw. At the D6 parked off to the side. At Dad, standing at the edge of the new waterway with his cane.

Then he climbed through the fence and started walking across the hay.

He walked straight toward Dad. He had one hand on his shirt pocket, the way a man does when there’s something in it he’s not sure he wants to take out.

The men in the straw slowed down. Bud straightened up with a flake of straw in each hand. Nobody stopped working exactly, but nobody was working very hard anymore, either.

Dad turned around on his cane to meet him.

I stayed where I was, on the track. This was not my conversation. I had said everything I had to say with the blade.

Quentin stopped about six feet from Dad. He looked down at the waterway, then up the length of it to the north fence, then back at Dad.

“Leroy,” he said.

“Quentin.”

For a while that was all. The meadowlarks were going again. One of the church kids yelled something about a grasshopper the size of a mouse.

Quentin took his hand off his shirt pocket. He pulled out a folded check and held it a minute, and then he didn’t hand it over. He just looked at it.

“I had a check made out,” he said. “Forty-eight thousand. I was going to bring it by tonight. Thought maybe you’d decided.”

“I did decide,” Dad said.

Quentin nodded slowly. He folded the check in half again, and then in half again, and put it back in his pocket.

“I guess a field that isn’t ruined is worth a lot more than I offered for one that was,” he said.

Dad didn’t say anything to that.

Quentin looked back down at the strip, at the straw, at Doyle and Bud and the young fellow from church, at me up on the track. His face had gone red, but not mad red. The other kind.

“I wasn’t trying to cheat you, Leroy,” he said finally. “I want you to know that. I was trying to save my own neck, and I told myself I was doing you a favor. That’s the truth of it.”

“I know it is,” Dad said.

“I shouldn’t have come to the fence on Monday. Not like that. Not four days after.”

“No,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t have.”

That was the hardest thing anybody said all week, and Dad said it quiet, looking right at him. He didn’t add anything to it. He let it sit there.

Quentin took it. He stood there and took it, and I’ll give him that. He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He just nodded, once, and looked at the ground.

Then he did something I didn’t expect.