The Keys I Left on His Table

I want to tell you about the last page of the story, because it is the part I think about most, and it is also the smallest.

That night after supper I went out to the garage, to the shelf above my workbench. The place where the three ledgers had sat for fifteen years was empty. Katie had brought the third one home from Ron’s barn, but she’d put it away somewhere of her own. I had not asked.

I had a new notebook, a plain spiral one from the drugstore, a dollar and a quarter. I had bought it on my first day at Ron’s, and I had not known why. I opened it up, and I found a pen.

I wrote the date at the top of the first page. March seventh.

Then, underneath it, I wrote: 4 to 8 at Ron Stenger’s. 62 cows milked. Paid $19 an hour. Cash on Fridays.

I looked at that last line for a long time.

For fifteen years of evenings I had written down what I put into that barn, and what I got back was a handshake that turned out to be a number on a closing statement. Now I was writing down a day’s work, and next to it, in the same hand, was the thing that came back to me for it.

It was a small, plain, honest line.

I closed the notebook and turned off the light.

When Carla and I talked about it later, in bed, she asked me whether I thought Ansel would ever call.

I told her I did not know. Maybe he would, and maybe he’d never find the words. What I told her was that I had left every key I owed him on his table, in front of his friends, and I had kept none back.

“And the ground?” she said. “The back eighty?”

“It’s a wind company’s now.”

“Do you mind?”

I thought about it. I thought about the spring that never froze, and the place near it where Carla wanted the house, and the two heifers on the ridge in the brown grass. I thought about a good deal that I had wanted and would never have.

“I mind,” I said. “But I think I minded more all those years, carrying it.”

She took my hand under the wool blanket her mother had given us. Carla did not say anything else, and neither did I.

In the spring, when the grass came in on Ron’s creek pasture, Katie and I walked Pearl and Daisy down there on halters, one on each side of the gravel road, the whole half mile. Katie sang to them, off key. The creek was running high and brown, and the redwings had come back to the cattails.

At the gate she stopped and turned around. She looked across the field, up toward the ridge, where the first foundation forms for the towers had just been poured. They were small and gray from where we stood.

“It’s a different view,” she said.

“It is.”

“I like this one better.”

I looked at her. She was looking at the heifers, and she was not crying. She had on a plain green sweatshirt with a hole in the elbow, and her hair was coming out of its braid.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Because this one’s ours,” Katie said. “Nobody gave it to us. We just walked here.”

I opened the gate, and she led the heifers through.