PART 2: THE WEST CORNER
Gene Pokorny lived four miles east on a ranch his grandfather had homesteaded. He was fifty-three, a big sunburned man with a graying beard, the sort who would argue with a fence post for the sheer pleasure of it. He and Tom had gone to school together. They’d fought once, in the eighth grade, over a girl who married neither of them, and had been loud, affectionate enemies ever since.
He arrived in his own truck at noon, with Arlen behind him. I was in the stackyard directing traffic with a clipboard, because I’d needed something to do with my hands. Ben sat on the tractor beside me, shifting bales into rows with the loader. He hadn’t spoken all morning. I could see his jaw working beneath the brim of Tom’s old Pioneer cap, which was a size too big and kept sliding over his eyes.
Gene climbed out and planted his hands on his hips, surveying the stackyard. Twenty-three bales sat in tidy rows. Every few minutes, another one thumped to the ground off Arlen’s flatbed.
“A hundred bales,” Gene said. “I’ve got the rest of ’em on my trailer. Figured I’d bring ’em back.”
“You didn’t have to come yourself.”
“I did.”
“Gene, you paid for that hay. It’s fair—”
“Karen.” He pulled off his cap and crushed it in both fists. “I’m going to say something, and I want you to let me finish. I paid your brother-in-law eight dollars a bale for hay that was worth seventy. I knew it. I knew it the second he named the price. And I told myself, ‘Well, the widow needs cash, and Dwayne’s family, and who am I to ask.’” He stared at the cap. “That’s what I told myself. What I actually thought was, ‘This is a hell of a deal.’”
I said nothing.
“I’m a greedy old man,” he said. “I took advantage of your grief. I’d like to give it back, and I’d like it if you’d let me say sorry, and if you’d tell Tom I’m sorry the next time you visit.”
My throat closed. I looked up at the sky, a hard, high blue, where a hawk wheeled above the shelterbelt.
“He’d tell you to quit your hollering and get the trailer unhitched,” I said.
Gene laughed, a cracked, helpless laugh, and wiped his face with the cap.
“That’s about what he’d say,” he said.
By three o’clock the stackyard was nearly full. By five, two hundred bales stood in neat rows, and the tracks on the north eighty lay clear and bare against the dusk.
Two hundred.
I counted again. I walked the rows with my clipboard, tapping each bale, and came up twelve short.
“The young couple,” Arlen said, at my elbow. “They’ve got the last thirty-two. Fellow by the name of Reyes, new to the county. They bought the old Lindgren place. You’ll want to talk to them yourself.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
“I could drive you.”
“I’ve got a pie.”
“You’ve got a pie for everyone,” Arlen said, and for the first time all day his mouth twitched toward a smile.
At the end of the row I counted twelve more and realized, with a small cold shock, that Gene had unloaded his full hundred and had also brought a dozen from his own stack. I didn’t ask. I looked at him across the yard, big and bearded, sipping coffee from the thermos Ben had handed him, and I understood that some debts never show up on paper.
Ben climbed down from the tractor. He crossed the dust toward me with his father’s loose-limbed stride and stopped.
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to call the sheriff.”
“I know.”
“I still do.” His voice shook, just slightly. “He took it. He took it, and he lied to Arlen, and he lied to Gene, and he told them you were selling the place. He told them you wanted to. I stood in this yard and watched him. And you just baked a pie.”
I looked at my son. He was already tall like Tom, with Tom’s shoulders and my stubborn chin, and his eyes were red-rimmed and furious. Seventeen years old. He’d driven a tractor since he was nine.
“I want to tell you why,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I think I do.” I set the clipboard on a bale. “Your father died on a Tuesday. We buried him on a Saturday. And on the Tuesday after, your uncle sat in our kitchen and told me what he’d done, and I could have called the sheriff, and I’d have been right.”
“Yes.”
“And then what? A deputy comes, takes a statement. There’s a report, maybe a charge. A year goes by. A lawyer gets involved. Meanwhile your grandmother, who is eighty-four and lives in Dwayne’s basement, has to choose between her sons. You and I stand up in a courtroom and watch a man cry who is, God help us, your father’s only brother.”
“He deserves it.”
“Maybe he does.” I kept my voice steady. “But hay doesn’t wait for justice, Ben. Cows eat every day. I had about four weeks to get this stack back before the weather turned. If I’d gone the other way, I’d have been right, and the cows would have been at the sale barn, and we’d have had our principles and no ranch.”
He was quiet.
“I didn’t want to win,” I said. “I wanted the hay back. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“What if they hadn’t helped?”
“Then I’d have called the sheriff,” I said. “Tomorrow. I told myself that on the drive over. I’d give them each a chance to do the right thing, and if they didn’t, I’d stop being polite.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m not a saint. I’m just a woman who figured out which fight to pick.”
He stared at his boots for a long time. Then, quietly, so only I could hear, he said, “Dad would have done it that way.”
“I think he would.”
“He’d have cut the hay, and then he’d have said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and gone to get a drink of water.”
I laughed, and a tear slipped out, and I let it.
“That’s exactly what he’d have done,” I said.
I did not tell Ben the rest. I didn’t have the words yet.
That night, after the trucks had rumbled away and the yard went still, I walked out to the stackyard alone with a flashlight. The wind had dropped. The stars were out by the thousands, hard and white over the Sandhills, the way they get when there’s no moon and nothing for fifty miles to blot them out.
I walked the rows and laid my hand on the bales. They were cool and slightly damp with dew, and they smelled the way hay smells in September, sweet and green and a little like tobacco. Somewhere in the grass, a cricket worked through its last warm nights.
The notebook was in my coat pocket. I took it out, held the flashlight on the last page, and read it for the fortieth time.
N80 down. Heavy. Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.
I’d first read it as a bookkeeper’s note, a tally. Then I’d read it as a love letter, and then as an apology, and now, standing in the dark with the whole stack finally home, I read it for what it was. It was a man telling me, in the only language he trusted, that I would be all right.
Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.
And then some. I hadn’t understood that phrase. I’d taken it for an approximation, a rancher’s shorthand. But I’d counted two hundred and twelve bales on the north eighty when I walked it in July, and Tom had told me that was the whole cutting. Two hundred and twelve. With forty pair, I’d need two hundred, maybe two-ten, to get through to May.
And then some. Two more bales. Maybe.
I turned the notebook over. On the back, smudged and nearly invisible, was one more line in pencil. It hadn’t been there when I’d read it before, or I hadn’t looked.
Check the west corner.
I stood with the flashlight shaking in my hand.
The west corner of the north eighty is where the old windbreak used to be, a row of cottonwoods that Tom’s father planted in 1962 and the drought took in 2012. Tom had cut the stumps out himself. He’d left a corner of rough ground, never worth cutting, a patch of cheatgrass and sandbur that nobody bothered with.
I walked out there at first light with a thermos and a shovel. I don’t know what I expected. Dew soaked my boots to the ankles. The sun rose red over the ridge, and a meadowlark started somewhere ahead of me, a bright, liquid, impossible song.
In the corner, at the foot of a stump, a square of sod had been cut and set back in place. The edges were rough. Someone had done it quickly. I knelt, wedged the shovel under the lip, and lifted.
Underneath, wrapped in a feed sack, lay a gray metal cash box.
I sat back on my heels.
I knew that box. It was the one Tom’s father had used for the cattle money in the sixties, a dented thing with a broken latch that Tom had kept in the shop. I’d thought it lost. I lifted it out, brushed the dirt from the lid, and thumbed the latch.
Inside lay a stack of envelopes, rubber-banded, and a single folded sheet of paper on top.
My name was on it, in his square, careful capitals.
KAREN.
