The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

She held them there, her old hands around his young ones. She did not say anything at all. She just shook her head, slowly, and kept holding on.

I stood behind my son and kept my mouth shut, because my throat had closed up and I could not have said anything if I had tried.

I looked up at the sky over the feed store. It was very blue. I thought about her husband singing in the loft, and about my dad, and about how some people just know what fair is.

At the dock, the man who had stopped with the bale on his knee set it down on the flatbed. He pulled off his work gloves and tucked them under his arm.

He looked at Cody for a moment, then looked down at the stack of bales he had just paid Vance two-fifty apiece for. Then he climbed down off the dock and walked toward us across the gravel.

He was maybe sixty, lean and brown from the sun, in a feed cap and a snap shirt with the sleeves rolled.

He nodded to Elsie, and he nodded to me, and then he put out his hand to Cody, who had to switch the money to his left hand to shake it.

“Augustin,” the man said. “I keep six horses out past Freeport.” He looked at Cody’s arms, scratched from wrist to elbow.

“You stack that loft for Mrs. Rademacher?” Cody said yes sir, him and his mother. The man nodded slowly. “You stack any for anybody else this summer?”

Cody hesitated. I watched him decide whether to say it. “My uncle’s,” he said finally. He did not say anything else.

He did not say how much he had been paid or not paid. He did not look at the dock. He just said it, plain, and let it lie there.

The man named Augustin looked back at the dock, at the bales, and then at Cody again. I could see him putting it together.

Everybody in that part of the county knows who sells hay off that dock. And everybody had just heard Elsie Rademacher count out fifteen cents a bale, loud and clear, like everybody pays.

“Huh,” he said. That was all he said about it. Then: “I’ve got eighteen hundred squares coming off the field next week. My regular kid broke his wrist on a trampoline, of all the fool things. You free Tuesday? I pay fifteen cents, same as Mrs. Rademacher. Cash at the end of each day.”

Cody looked back at me. I did not nod or shake my head. It was his business, his back, his summer.

He turned back to the man and said, “Yes, sir. I’m free Tuesday.” Augustin said good, and told him where the farm was, and said to bring a water jug because his loft was a hot one.

The other man on the flatbed had been listening all this time. When Augustin went back to the dock, the two of them talked for a minute with their heads together.

Then the second man walked over too and asked Cody if he could do a load of about eight hundred in August. Cody said yes to that one too.

Faye, the woman who runs the feed store counter, had come out onto the dock by then with her clipboard to check the load. She had seen most of it.