The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

When Cody came out of the shower, Gil asked him straight what his uncle had said.

Cody stood in the hallway in clean jeans with his hair dripping and told it plain, the way we raised him to tell things, without adding anything to make it worse.

Vance had walked him out to the barn and looked up at the loft, the one Cody had filled in six days of ninety-six degree heat. He had said it was a good job mostly.

Then he said Cody had broken about a dozen bales, dropped them off the elevator and split the strings, and that bales were money and money was tight.

“He said hay’s down to nothing this year,” Cody said. “He said he’d make it up to me some other way. He said family helps family, and I wasn’t some hired man.” Cody swallowed.

“Then he gave me the pop.” He tried to make it sound like nothing. He did not manage it.

A dozen bales. Out of four thousand two hundred. I have stacked hay since I was eleven years old on my dad’s place over by Castalia, and I can tell you that a crew that only breaks a dozen bales in a loft that size is a careful crew. At the price he was getting, a dozen bales is about thirty dollars of hay.

Gil put his cap back on. “I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

Cody said, “Dad, don’t,” and Gil put his hand on the boy’s shoulder for a second and said, “Eat your supper.” Then he went out, and I heard his pickup go down the lane in the light that was still bright at seven.

Gil was gone an hour and ten minutes. When he came back, he did not come in right away. I watched him through the window over the sink.

He sat in the truck with the engine off, and then he got out and walked around the yard once before he came in.

He went to the sink and washed his hands. He washed them a long time, longer than they needed, with the bar of orange soap, and I knew he was getting his words in order.

I dried the last plate and waited. Twenty-one years married teaches you when to wait.

“Hay’s down to two-fifty a bale off the wagon,” Gil said finally.

“Last year he was getting four. He’s got a payment on that new truck he can’t make, and the bank called him. He’s scared, Noreen. I’ve never seen him scared like that.” He dried his hands.

“So he took it out of a fifteen-year-old,” I said. I did not raise my voice. I have never been a yeller.

My mother was a yeller, and I decided when I was about nine that I would get where I was going some other way.

“I told him that,” Gil said. “I told him it was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, and he said he’d make it right when he could. Then he said I didn’t know what it was like, since I had the good ground. That’s an old one. Dad’s been gone eleven years and we’re still having that fight.”