The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

His leather gloves were stuck in his back pocket, where he always keeps them now, like a man who might be called to work any minute.

He saw the bales on the dock. I watched him see them. He stopped walking for a second, and his face did something I did not like.

Then he looked at me, and I just nodded at him and kept walking toward Elsie’s tailgate, and he followed me.

“There’s my hay crew,” Elsie said, loud enough to carry, the way she says everything. She taught fourth grade in Decorah for thirty-one years, and a teacher’s voice does not go away when the teacher retires.

She let down the tailgate with a clang, and set her purse on it, and opened it, and took out a white bank envelope.

Cody stood at the tailgate. I stood behind him, a step back. He did not know what to do with his hands.

He put them in his pockets, then took them out, then held one out a little, the way you hold out your hand when you are not sure it is your turn.

Elsie opened the envelope and began to count. She did not count to herself.

She counted the way people her age count money, out loud, one bill at a time, laying each one in his palm. “Twenty,” she said. “Forty. Sixty. Eighty. One hundred.”

At the dock, the man who had been handing down bales stopped. I saw it from the side of my eye.

He had a bale on one knee, about to swing it down, and he stopped and looked over at us.

“One-twenty,” Elsie said. “One-forty. One-sixty.” She did not hurry. “Three thousand bales, put up in two days, ahead of the rain, the finest stacked loft I have had since my husband passed.” She laid down another bill. “One-eighty. Two hundred.”

The man on the flatbed had stopped too. Both of them were watching now. Elsie surely knew it.

She did not look over there even once. She just kept counting, steady and loud, laying twenty after twenty into my son’s sunburned hand.

“Four hundred,” she said. “Four-twenty, four-forty.” She laid down a ten. “Four hundred and fifty dollars. Fifteen cents a bale, same as everybody pays.” She folded the empty envelope and put it back in her purse.

“Thank you, Cody. You did a man’s work, and I’m proud to pay a man’s wage for it.”

Cody stood looking at the money in his hand for a long time. Four hundred and fifty dollars, all in twenties and one ten, more money than he had ever held at one time in his life.

His jaw worked a little. I thought for a second he might cry, and I thought if he did, I would too.

Then he did something I did not expect. He counted off one twenty with his thumb and held it back out to her.

“This is for the sandwiches, Mrs. Rademacher,” he said. “And the tea, and the bars. You didn’t have to do all that. Please take it.”

Elsie looked at the twenty. Then she reached out and took his hand in both of hers, money and all, and folded his fingers closed over the bill.