I wanted to state clearly why I was baking, seeing as my sister thought it was utter nonsense and made sure to tell me so over the phone—speaking in that brisk, certain way of hers, as if reading instructions off a tin. I told her I simply hadn’t the time to debate it with her, at least not that hour of the morning. She replied, “Karen, you’re bound to drive up to three different farmyards and hand folks pie before you let on that they’ve been robbing a widow,” and I told her that pretty much summed it up.
In a short while, I’d be heading out to three separate properties to inform those households that they had my hay and I wanted it returned. Every last one of them had paid for it. Every last one of them genuinely believed they were performing a neighborly kindness. You don’t just march up to people like that empty-handed and start an argument—not where I come from. You bring an offering, you sit down, and you lay it out straight.
I baked three rhubarb pies with lard crusts, just the way Tom’s mother showed me back during our first year of marriage, standing beside her stove in a kitchen that always smelled of fresh coffee and cut hay, gently guiding my fingers without ever raising her voice once. I pulled the last pies out of the oven right at one in the morning. By five, Ben wandered down and found me asleep in the armchair, my apron still tied around my waist and flour caked white along one forearm where I’d nodded off against the counter without realizing.
“Need me to come along?” he asked.
“I need you to grease the loader on the 4020 and make certain the bale spear is attached,” I said. “And after that, I need you to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Can’t say yet.”
That was the honest truth, too. I had no idea if anybody would even be showing up.
To comprehend why I sat in that chair at five in the morning with three pies cooling on the tabletop, you have to rewind a week—back to a Tuesday that began like any other, my boots still soaked from the morning dew on the north eighty, with zero inkling of what was lying in wait for me at my own kitchen table.
Dwayne spoke his piece at that very table on a Tuesday morning, exactly three days after we laid his brother to rest. He delivered the news the way a man recites the daily price of diesel. He rested his cap on his knee with a cup of my coffee in front of him, and behind him on the counter sat eleven casserole dishes marked with masking tape on the bottoms so I’d know whose was whose—because that is simply how a Nebraska community responds when a man passes away in his own hayfield at fifty-three years old. They bring food. They don’t know what else to offer.
I had just stepped indoors from the north eighty. My boots were still damp from the grass.
“Run that by me again,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice.
“I said you don’t have any use for it.” He nudged his coffee cup a quarter-turn across the oilcloth—a nervous tic he’s had ever since we were all kids together, sitting at this exact table waiting to ask Tom if he could borrow the grain truck. “I baled it Thursday and Friday nights, exactly like I promised you I would. Two hundred and twelve bales. Good-looking hay, too. Tom always laid it down nice.”
“I’m well aware of the count. I walked up there this morning to look at the field.”
“Then you noticed they’re gone.”
“I spotted the leftover twine and tire tracks, Dwayne. That’s all that was left.”
He nodded as though I had just confirmed he was right.
“I sold ’em,” he stated. “The whole lot. Seventeen hundred dollars. By the time I subtracted the twine, the fuel, and two nights of labor, it just about evened out. So there’s nothing to hand over to you, and I didn’t figure you’d want me making up arbitrary numbers.”
Let me spell out what seventeen hundred dollars actually means, in case you’ve never had occasion to buy hay. It translates to eight dollars a bale. That particular summer, a large round bale of alfalfa and brome—twelve hundred pounds of it—was fetching seventy bucks anywhere you looked in Custer County, and even more if you could hold out until January. Two hundred and twelve bales amounted to nearly fifteen thousand dollars standing right there in my pasture. I did that math sitting right at that table, totally on autopilot, the way you calculate figures you’ve known your entire life, and I watched the total register while realizing, in that exact second, that my brother-in-law hadn’t simply miscalculated. A mistake is when you misread a market value. This was something entirely different.
He hadn’t sold my hay. He had cleared it out.
“Eight dollars a bale,” I said.
“I wanted it gone fast.” At last, he looked me in the eye. Dwayne has Tom’s eyes, that exact pale gray, and that week I could barely stand looking at them in another man’s face, because every time he stared straight at me I felt my husband looking back from behind a stranger’s features. “Karen, use some common sense. You’ve got forty pairs running on summer grass and a boy still finishing high school. You aren’t going to pull those cows through a Nebraska winter on your own. You’ll be taking them to the sale barn by October, and you know it. And a woman without cows has no need for hay.”
“And once the cattle are gone?”
“Then you’ll want to talk about selling the property.” He settled his cap back on his head. “When you get to that point, you come to me first. That’s Dad’s ground. It ought to stay in the family.”
And there it was, laid out completely bare next to the sugar bowl, plain as a grain elevator ticket. No hay meant no cattle. No cattle meant no reason to hold onto a quarter section eleven miles out of Broken Bow. And a widow with no incentive to stay will naturally grab the first offer from relatives—especially relatives who have been so terribly helpful, who brought over the tractor to mow the lawn without being asked, who turned up at the funeral home with the proper suit already pressed.
I glanced over at the casserole dishes. I looked at Tom’s chore jacket hanging from its usual nail by the door, because I still hadn’t managed to make my hand reach out and take it down.
I didn’t scream. I’ve never been one for screaming, and I was far too exhausted that week to start.
“Well,” I said. “Thanks for all the trouble, Dwayne.”
He blinked. I suspect that wasn’t the reaction he had braced himself for.
“It took two nights of work,” he said.
“I know it did. I brought you out a sandwich Thursday night, remember? And a thermos.” And I had. I’d hauled it up over the hill at ten o’clock in the dark, watching the baler lights flicker back and forth, and I had stood by the fence crying simply because my husband’s brother was bailing my husband’s hay—telling myself that the tears were just grief finding a new place to rest, that Dwayne was doing a kind thing, that I ought to be grateful. “I just have one question.”
“Shoot.”
“Who bought them?”
He could easily have kept it to himself. But Dwayne was secretly proud of how efficiently he’d unloaded it all, and I imagine a part of him believed that once I heard the names—respectable local names, good neighbors—I’d accept that the deal was closed and couldn’t be undone.
“Arlen took eighty,” he answered. “Gene Pokorny took a hundred for his backgrounding operation. And that young couple living off the oil road, Steve and Kim, they took the final thirty-two for her horses.”
“Arlen,” I repeated.
“He rolled up Sunday afternoon with his flatbed. Gene sent the semi on Monday while you were down in Kearney.”
Arlen had stood by the graveside on Saturday holding his hat against his chest. He was seventy-eight years old, and he had steadied my elbow as we walked back to the car.
“What did you tell them?”
Dwayne’s ears flushed red. It was the only tell he gave the entire morning that he knew the weight of what he’d done.
“I told them you were packing it in,” he said. “That you wanted the field cleared off, and the neighbors might as well have the feed just for the cost of the baling.”
“So they’re under the impression I made them a gift of it.”
“They figure they did you a favor.”
I stood up and poured his leftover coffee straight into the sink, partly because it had gone stone cold, but mostly because I needed something to occupy my hands.
“Dwayne,” I said, my back turned toward him. “Today is Tuesday. Every single one of those bales could be stacked back along that road fence by Sunday, and not a single soul would ever have to hear a word about it from me. Not one. I mean that.”
The silence stretched out long enough for me to hear the ticking of the clock.
“It’s already done, Karen,” he said.
The screen door banged behind him as he left. His pickup truck turned over and started up. Pete, our aging black-and-white farm dog, didn’t even bother lifting himself off the porch to watch him go—and Pete always got up for everybody.