The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

It was the best-looking loft I have ever seen. Tight and square, every tier crossed, the stack running from the back wall to six feet from the door.

Three thousand bales. Enough to feed four old horses through the winter. I had helped stack it, but most of it was his.

“It looks good,” Cody said quietly. “Right?” He was asking me. He wanted to know, the way a boy wants to know when the last man he worked for told him he had broken bales.

I said, “It’s the best loft I’ve seen since your grandpa’s,” and I meant every word of it.

Elsie called the next morning at seven, before I left for work. “I want to pay him properly,” she said.

“Not out of my checkbook on the kitchen table. I’ve got to go into town Saturday anyway for grain and fly spray. I’ll stop at the bank Friday afternoon. Can you meet me at the feed store, say noon on Saturday?”

Saturday came up bright and hot, ninety-six degrees by the bank sign in town, and the rain had cleared everything out so the sky was hard blue.

I worked my route that morning and got done at eleven-thirty. Cody rode along on the last loop, which he does sometimes on Saturdays, and we drove straight to the feed store.

The feed store sits on the edge of town by the old railroad grade, a long steel building with a gravel lot in front and a raised loading dock along the side.

They sell feed and seed and fencing and fly spray, and in the summer they sell hay off the dock on consignment for a few local growers.

Vance was one of those growers. He had been for years. People who wanted a few bales for their horses and did not want to drive out to the farm could pull up to the dock and buy them by the bale or by the load.

And that summer, most of what was on that dock came out of his loft.

The loft my son had stacked. I knew it before I even parked.

I could see the bales on the dock from across the lot, square and green, and I knew they were Vance’s because I had seen Cody’s scratched arms every night for a week.

There were two pickups at the dock. One had a flatbed behind it, and two men were loading square bales onto it from the dock, one handing down and one stacking.

I did not know either of them by name, but I had seen them both around. Horse people. Vance’s people. The ones who paid him two-fifty a bale.

Elsie’s pickup was already parked in the lot, an old Ford with the tailgate facing the dock, maybe forty feet off.

She was standing beside it in a lavender blouse and jeans, her white hair pinned up, holding her purse in both hands. She waved when she saw us.

Cody got out of the car slowly. He had worn a plain gray T-shirt, his brown hair shaggy over his ears because he would not sit still for a haircut, and the shirt was already dark down the back with sweat just from the car ride.