PART 1: THE PIE AND THE TRUCK
The Last Cutting
Arlen Voss set his hat on his head slowly, the way he did everything, like a man handling something that might break.
“Karen,” he said. “Stay where you are. Finish your pie.”
“Arlen, I didn’t come to ask you for—”
“I know what you came for. You came with a rhubarb pie and your husband’s name in your mouth, and you didn’t ask me for one thing.” He pushed open the screen door. “That’s why I’m going to get my truck.”
I sat alone at his kitchen table with two slices of pie and a clock ticking above the stove. The room smelled of coffee and Murphy’s oil soap. A feed-store calendar hung on the wall, still turned to August, and I realized that Dorothy, Arlen’s wife, who had died two winters earlier, must have been the one who flipped the pages.
I studied my hands. They were wind-chapped and split at the knuckles, hands that had held a hymnal on Saturdays and a casserole dish ever since. I hadn’t cried in front of the boy. I hadn’t cried at the funeral. I had cried exactly once, on the kitchen floor with Tom’s chore coat in my lap, and I didn’t plan to do it again until the first snow.
Through the window, I watched Arlen cross the yard. He was seventy-eight, bowlegged, rounded at the shoulders. He climbed into a faded green Ford with a flatbed and a hay spike, and he never looked back at the house.
Tom and I bought the place in 1998: a hundred and sixty acres of Nebraska Sandhills grass, a house that leaned, and a barn that leaned worse. We were thirty-one. We had a dog, a pickup with a cracked windshield, and eleven thousand dollars borrowed from his mother. The banker in Valentine studied our paperwork for a long while and said, “You folks understand this is hard country.”
“Yes, sir,” Tom said.
“You understand it doesn’t care whether you’re nice.”
“We’re counting on that,” Tom said. The banker laughed and signed.
We were never rich. We ran a small cow herd, forty pair at our best, and put up our own hay on the north eighty and the creek bottom. We sold calves in October, paid the bills in November, and held our breath through January. Tom hauled for the co-op in the winters. I taught third grade at the school in Merriman until Ben came, and afterward I kept the books for half the ranches in the county.
We had one child, which was one more than the doctors had promised. Ben arrived at the end of a long, bad stretch, when I’d stopped speaking the wish aloud and Tom had started leaving the porch light on all night, as though we might have a visitor. He was born on a February night with the wind screaming out of the northwest. Tom held him in one hand like a loaf of bread and said, “Well. I’ll be.”
That was all he said. It was the most words I had ever heard him string together.
Tom Haller was no talker. He was a leaner, a looker, a man who communicated by standing beside you and squinting at the same horizon. When he was happy, he whistled through his teeth. When he was worried, he fixed things that weren’t broken. I once found him at midnight on the shop floor rebuilding a hydraulic cylinder that worked perfectly well. I sat down next to him on an overturned bucket and said nothing, and after a while he said, “Doctor called about the test.”
“And?”
“Not good.”
“All right,” I said, and laid my hand on his back.
It was pancreatic. By the time they found it, it had been growing for a year. They gave him six months. He took four and spent most of them on the tractor.
“I want the hay up,” he told me in June. “I’ll be damned if I’m leaving you short.”
“Tom, the hay can wait. The hay can be bought.”
“Not at what they want for it.” He looked at me over his coffee, his face gone gaunt, his eyes the same pale gray they’d been the day I met him. “Let me do this, Karen. It’s the one thing I know how to do.”
So I let him.
Arlen returned at nine-thirty. I heard the flatbed grind up the yard and stop.
When I stepped onto the porch, he stood beside the truck with his arms folded. Behind him, stacked and roped on the bed, sat sixteen big round bales, green-gold, the twine still tight. I knew that hay. I could have picked it out of a thousand. Tom always cut the north eighty at the same angle, with a little hook at the corner where the old windbreak had stood, and the windrows ran slightly crooked there.
My hand flew to my mouth.
“Eighty bales,” Arlen said. “I only put up sixteen this trip. My back’s not what it was. I’ll make another four runs this afternoon and have the rest at your place by dark.”
“Arlen.”
“I paid your brother-in-law eight dollars a bale.” His voice was flat. “I figured that was a fair price for a favor. I figured you’d asked him to sell it cheap, to a friend, on account of the hard time you were having.” He looked at the ground. “I should’ve known better. Dwayne Haller never did a favor in his life that didn’t cost somebody.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I could’ve called you.” His jaw worked. “I stood next to you at the grave, Karen. I held your elbow. And three days later I drove into your yard, and a man told me you were selling out, and I never picked up a phone.”
“People believe what they’re told.”
“People ought to check,” Arlen said. “That’s what I’m ashamed of.”
I came down off the porch. I think I’d rehearsed a speech in the night, but all that came out was, “Thank you.”
“Don’t.” He raised a hand. “Don’t thank me. I’m not giving you anything. I’m returning what’s yours.” He nodded toward the bales. “Where do you want it?”
“The stackyard behind the barn.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Arlen, I’ll pay you back the eight dollars, all of it—”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” He turned, and for the first time that morning he looked straight at me. His eyes were wet. “Tom pulled my wife’s truck out of the ditch the night she died. Did you know that? The ice storm, the night before she passed. I couldn’t get there from the hospital, and he went out at two in the morning with a chain. Never said a word to me about it. Dorothy told me herself.” He swallowed. “I’ve been looking for a way to pay that back for two years.”
I stood very still.
“Eat your pie,” he said gruffly. “I’ll go get Gene.”
