The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

Cody came in the back door at a quarter past six on a Thursday in July, three days after he had set the last bale in his uncle’s loft, and he did not stop at the refrigerator.

That was how I knew something was wrong. He had only ridden his bike over to Vance’s to collect his pay, and a fifteen-year-old boy always stops at the refrigerator.

He walked straight to the kitchen table and laid the money down flat, the way you lay down cards you are not proud of.

A ten and four twenties. Next to them he set a can of orange pop, still sweating from his uncle’s cooler.

I was at the stove browning hamburger for tacos. I turned the burner down and looked at the table, then at my son.

His face was burned red across the nose and the back of his neck, and his arms were scratched from wrist to elbow the way hay scratches you.

“That’s from Uncle Vance,” he said. “He says family helps family.” He said it to the table, not to me.

Then he went down the hall, and I heard the shower come on and run for a long time.

I stood there with the spatula in my hand and counted it twice, as if it might turn into more. Ninety dollars.

I did the math I already knew by heart, because I had done it with Cody in June when he was so proud of the deal.

Four thousand two hundred small square bales, thrown off the wagon and stacked in his uncle’s loft, at fifteen cents a bale. Six hundred and thirty dollars.

Vance had shaken his hand on it in the yard, man to man, and Cody had talked about nothing else for a week.

He wanted a used four-wheeler. He had one picked out from a fellow over by Ridgeway, a red one with a cracked fender, for eleven hundred dollars.

The six-thirty was going to be more than half of it, and the rest he figured to make walking beans and mowing the church yard.

My name is Noreen Pahl. I was forty-two that summer. I carry a rural mail route out of Decorah, a hundred and six miles of gravel and blacktop six days a week, and the rest of the time I am a farm wife, which means I am whatever the day needs.

My husband Gil farms with his brother Vance, or he used to more than he does now.

They grew up on the same ground north of town, in the hills along the Upper Iowa, and when their dad passed they split it. Gil took the row crops and some hay. Vance took the hay ground and the horse trade.

Gil came in from the shop at a quarter to seven. He saw the money on the table before he saw me, and he stood looking at it with his cap in his hand.

Gil is a quiet man. He has big hands and a slow way of thinking things through before he says them.

“That’s what Vance paid him?” he asked. I nodded. “For the whole loft?” I nodded again.

He set his cap on the counter, very carefully, the way he does when he is angry and does not want anybody to know it.