The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

Being broke is a reason. I understood the reason. I have been broke. We had years in the eighties and early two thousands, before Gil and I married and after, where every month was a juggle.

But being broke has never once given anybody the right to short a boy who did the work.

There were things I could have done. I could have driven over there myself and said what I thought.

I could have told his wife, my sister-in-law, who is a good woman and would have been ashamed. I could have called their mother, who is eighty and lives in town.

But you do not sue your husband’s brother over five hundred and forty dollars, and you do not start a war at Thanksgiving over it either.

More than that, I wanted Cody to learn what fair looks like. He was going to see a fight soon enough in his life. I wanted him to see the other thing first.

So I let it sit. That was the hardest part, letting it sit.

On Sunday at church Vance and his wife sat three pews up on the other side, and Vance did not turn around, and I sang every verse of every hymn and kept my eyes on the book.

Cody did not say anything about it all weekend. On Monday he went out and walked beans for the family up the road for eight hours at ten dollars an hour and came home and did not mention the four-wheeler once.

That was what got me. He had stopped talking about it, like a boy who has decided not to want something.

On Tuesday morning I was at the post office casing mail at seven-fifteen, sorting letters into the slots for my route, when my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket.

I do not usually answer at the case, but it was Elsie Rademacher, and Elsie does not call unless she needs something.

Elsie lives a mile south of us on the same gravel road.

She was sixty-nine that summer, a widow going on six years, and she kept four old horses on forty acres because her late husband had loved them and she could not bear to sell them. Two of the four were past twenty-five.

“Noreen, I hate to bother you at work,” she said. She always says that.

“My hay’s down and baled, three thousand squares on the wagons, and the two boys from church who always stack for me can’t come. They both got on at the window plant in town, and good for them, but I’ve got rain coming Thursday night.”

I knew those wagons. A man from her church, a retired fellow, baled her ground on shares every year with his old New Holland baler, and those same two boys stacked it in her loft.

Three thousand squares feeds four horses through an Iowa winter, give or take, if you are careful and the winter is not too long.

“I hate to ask,” she said. “I know Cody’s been at his uncle’s. I’ll pay what everybody pays, fifteen cents a bale. I’ve got the money in the bank. I just need two strong backs before Thursday, and I don’t know who else to call.”