The Widow Who Paid My Son Fair

She did not say a word about any of it. She just looked over at Cody, and then at me, and gave a small nod, and went back inside.

We said goodbye to Elsie. She hugged me, which she had never done before, and she patted Cody’s cheek and told him to come by for a sandwich any time he was going past.

She drove off with her grain and her fly spray, and Cody and I sat in my car in the gravel lot with the windows down.

He took the money out of his pocket and laid it on his knee and counted it again. All of it, the twenty included.

Four hundred and fifty dollars. Then he put it back in his pocket and looked out the windshield at the dock, at the bales, at the flatbed pulling away.

“Mom,” he said. “Is it wrong that I’m glad they heard?” I thought about it before I answered. I wanted to get it right. “No,” I said.

“You didn’t say one bad word about anybody. Mrs. Rademacher paid you what’s fair, out loud, the way she does everything. People heard what fair sounds like. That’s all.”

He nodded. Then he said, “I want to give Uncle Vance’s ninety to the church.” I asked him why. “Because I don’t want it,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel like mine.” So on Sunday he put four twenties and a ten in the offering plate, folded small, and did not tell anyone but me.

Word gets around a small county faster than the weather. By Monday it had gone through the feed store, the co-op, and the coffee crowd at the café on Water Street.

Nobody said much of anything to me directly. But on my route, three different people said, “Heard your boy’s quite a hand with hay,” and smiled.

What I did not know until later was that Vance had a crew problem coming. He had more hay down in August, his second cutting, about three thousand squares he had already promised to buyers.

And the boys around town who usually stacked for him in a pinch had all, somehow, gotten busy.

One had found work at the window plant. One said he had a ball tournament. One just did not call back.

The word in that part of the county was that Vance Pahl paid a dollar for a day’s work and called it family, and nobody’s son wanted to be family that summer.

So Vance stacked his own second cutting. Him and his wife, mostly, and one weekend his grown daughter came up from Cedar Rapids to help.

I drove past his place on my route in early August and saw him at the top of his elevator in the heat, shirt soaked through, pulling bales off the chain by himself.

Cody stacked Augustin’s eighteen hundred that Tuesday and Wednesday and came home each night with a hundred and thirty-five dollars cash and a sunburn and a big grin.

He did the other man’s eight hundred in August. Then the bean-walking family up the road called and asked if he’d put up their straw.

By the end of August he had stacked hay and straw for four different families. He came home every night tired and dirty and happy.