PART 3: A WAY BACK
I unfolded it. My hands didn’t want to cooperate. The meadowlark sang on and on, as though nothing had happened to anybody, as though the world were only a pleasant morning in a good country.
Karen,
If you’re reading this, you found the corner. I knew you would. You read my notebook like scripture.
I’m sorry I’m not good at talking. I’m sorry I didn’t say more while there was time. I thought about it every day. I’d open my mouth and there was nothing in it but “pass the salt.”
Here’s what’s in the box. It’s been in the ground since 2016, the year the drought took the creek bottom and we nearly lost the herd. Remember that spring, when I said I’d gotten a good price on the old Case? I hadn’t. I sold it for twenty-two thousand, and I buried the money, because I was scared. I didn’t want you to know how close we came.
Then the calf prices came back, and I was too ashamed to tell you I’d hidden it. So I’ve left it there. Added a little each year. I’m not proud of the secret. But it’s yours.
Count it. It should come to about forty-one thousand.
That’s enough to pay off the note on the north eighty, with some left. I did the math. The place will be clear, and the cows will be yours, and you’ll have a year to decide what you want. Whether you want to stay. I think you’ll stay. But I never asked you, so I’m asking now, in the only way I’ve got.
Ben will want to ranch. Let him, if he’s still of a mind. But don’t let him do it out of guilt. Make him go to school first. Make him see another country. A man should have somewhere to come back from.
And Karen. About Dwayne.
I know my brother. I’ve known him fifty years. He’s not a bad man. He’s a scared one. He’s been scared since our dad died and left the place to me, because I was the eldest and the steady one, and Dwayne got the pickup and a hundred dollars. He’s never forgiven it. He’ll hurt you, if there’s a chance. Not because he hates you. Because he thinks, down deep, that he’s owed.
Don’t let him take the place. But don’t let him fall, either. He’s the only brother I’ve got. If you can find it in you, give him a way back.
It’s the hardest thing I’ll ever ask you to do.
I loved you every day.
Tom
I read it twice. Then I folded it in four and pressed it to my chest, and I cried the way I hadn’t been able to since the diagnosis, deep and ugly and unembarrassed, bent over with my forehead nearly touching the sod. The meadowlark stopped. Then it started again.
I did not tell Dwayne right away.
I thought it over for two weeks. I counted the money at the kitchen table: forty-one thousand, three hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and fifties, with a few hundred-dollar bills from the early years. I took it to the bank in Valentine and paid off the note on the north eighty. I put the rest into a savings account in Ben’s name and mine.
Then I went to see my mother-in-law.
Ada Haller was eighty-four and had lived with Dwayne and his wife Marlene in a split-level in Cody since 2019. She’d had a small stroke the year before and walked with a quad cane. She sat in the front room when I came in, watching a game show with the sound off.
“Karen,” she said. “Sit down. You’ve lost weight.”
“I’m all right, Ada.”
“You’re not. But you’re a Haller, so you’ll say you are.” She patted the arm of her chair. “I hear Dwayne caused trouble.”
I stared at her. “Who told you?”
“Marlene. She’s been stewing for two weeks. He’s been in a state.” Ada folded her hands in her lap. “I didn’t raise him to do that, Karen. I want you to know. Whatever he’s told you, I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“He’s frightened of you. Did you know that?”
I hadn’t.
“He thinks you’ll take the place away. That you’ll sell it and leave him with nothing. He’s never owned an acre in his life, and he’s fifty-six.” She shook her head slowly. “Tom should have given him a share. I told him so. But Tom said Dwayne would only sell it.”
“Tom was probably right.”
“Probably. But it left a splinter.” She looked at me, and her eyes were Tom’s eyes, pale gray and steady. “I don’t ask you to forgive him. I only ask that you don’t slam the door.”
I thought about the letter, folded in my coat.
Give him a way back.
“I won’t slam it,” I said.
I drove out to see Dwayne on a Sunday afternoon in October, after the first cold front had come through and the cottonwoods were turning yellow along the creek. He lived in a neat gray house with a three-car garage and a flag on the porch. A boat sat in the driveway under a blue tarp.
Marlene answered the door. She was a small, tired woman with gray-blonde hair and a worn gray cardigan. When she saw me, her face did something complicated.
“Karen,” she whispered. “He’s in the den.”
“Is he home?”
“He hasn’t left the house in a week.”
She led me through the kitchen. Dwayne sat in a leather recliner in front of a television that wasn’t on, a heavy, sandy-haired man in a flannel shirt, with Tom’s long jaw and none of Tom’s ease. He saw me in the doorway and went gray under his tan.
“I’m not here to fight,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“I brought something.” I held up the envelope. “Can I sit?”
He gestured to the couch. I sat and laid the envelope on the coffee table between us.
“The hay’s back,” I said. “You know that. Arlen and Gene returned it. They told me what you said. That I was selling out.”
“Karen—”
“I’d like to finish.” I kept my voice calm, the schoolteacher voice, the one that had held thirty eight-year-olds for twenty years. “You told two good men a lie, and they believed it because they trusted you, and because it was easier to believe than not. You told them I wanted to sell. I didn’t. I never did. And you knew it.”
His eyes stayed fixed on his hands.
“I could have called the sheriff,” I said. “Ben wanted me to. I thought about it. You committed a crime, Dwayne. It’s called theft, and in Nebraska it’s a felony at that value.”
“I know.”
“But I didn’t. And I want you to understand why.”
He raised his head.
“It wasn’t for you,” I said. “It was for Tom.”
His face crumpled.
“He left something for you,” I said. “I found it in a box, buried in the north eighty, along with a letter. I’ve read it a dozen times. I wasn’t going to show it to you. I thought you didn’t deserve it.” I slid the envelope across the table. “But Tom wanted you to have this, and I think I owe it to him.”
Dwayne didn’t touch it. He only stared at the envelope with an expression I’d never seen on him, helpless and stripped, a child’s face on a man’s body.
“What is it?”
“The last page of the letter. He wrote it to me, but there’s a part for you.” I swallowed. “Read it.”
He opened the envelope with trembling fingers. He read for a long time. When he finished, he let the page fall into his lap and put both hands over his face, and his shoulders began to shake.
I sat and let him. Marlene had appeared silently in the doorway, one hand pressed to her mouth.
After a while, Dwayne spoke, his voice muffled.
“He knew.”
“He knew.”
“He knew all those years.” His voice cracked. “And he never said, he never once said anything. I thought he looked down on me. I thought he thought I was a failure.”
“He thought you were his brother.”
“I took your hay,” Dwayne said. “I took it a week after the funeral. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Karen. I don’t know why I did it. I stood in your kitchen and told you it came out even, and I knew it was a lie, and I said it anyway. I could see your face, and I said it anyway.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you scream at me?”
“I was too tired to start.”
He laughed, a broken, wet sound, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“I’m not offering that. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.” I stood. “But I’m offering something. Tom asked me to give you a way back, and I’m going to. There’s a condition.”
He looked up.
“You’ll come to the ranch on Saturday. You’ll work. You’ll help Ben haul the last of the bales to the winter pasture, and you’ll feed with him, and you’ll do it every Saturday until the first of the year, without being asked and without being paid. And you’ll go to Arlen and Gene and the Reyes couple and tell each of them the truth, in your own words.”
“I will.”
“You’ll apologize to Ben. He’s the one you’ve hurt most. He’s seventeen, and he watched his uncle steal from his mother the week his father died.”
Dwayne closed his eyes.
“I will,” he whispered.
“Good.” I picked up my coat. “Then we’ll see what comes after that.”
He came the next Saturday at six in the morning, in a pair of stiff new coveralls, carrying a thermos and wearing a shamefaced look. Ben was in the barn. From the kitchen window I watched the two of them face each other in the cold gray light, my son tall and rigid, my brother-in-law stooped, hat in hand.
I couldn’t hear what Dwayne said. It took him a long time. Ben stood motionless through all of it, arms crossed, jaw set. When it was over, a pause stretched on and on. A cow bawled in the lot. The wind lifted the corner of the tarp on the machine shed.
Then Ben said something short. Dwayne nodded. And my son turned and walked toward the tractor, and Dwayne followed a step behind, like a man trailing a funeral.
They fed for six hours. At noon I carried out sandwiches, and they ate on the tailgate side by side, not speaking, a thin shaft of sunlight lying across their boots.
On the third Saturday, I saw them laugh.
On the fifth, Ben showed Dwayne how to cut the twine so it came off in one piece, the way Tom had taught him, and Dwayne said, “My dad used to do it that way.” A pause. “Tom was better at it.”
“Dad was better at most things,” Ben said.
“He was.” Dwayne coiled the twine over his arm. “He was a hell of a man, your father.”
“You’re not bad,” Ben said, almost inaudibly.
Dwayne said nothing. But when I brought out the coffee, his eyes were wet.
The snow came the second week of November, early and hard, a four-day blizzard that closed the highway and buried the fences. I spent it in the barn with a flashlight and a bucket of calf feed. Ben went out every four hours to break ice. We lost no cattle. We lost no hay. The stackyard, under a foot of drift, stood solid and silent, two hundred and twelve bales, every one of them home.
On the fifth day, when the plow finally came through, a truck turned in at the gate. I thought it was the county. It was Arlen, in his green Ford, with a thermos and a coffee cake wrapped in foil.
“Dorothy’s recipe,” he said, climbing out slowly. “I’ve been trying to make it for two years. This is the first one that didn’t come out like a brick.”
“You didn’t have to come out in this.”
“I wanted to see if you’d lost anything.”
“Not one head.”
“Good.” He looked across the yard at the stackyard, where the drifts lay smooth and blue under the pale sky. “That’s good hay.”
“It’s Tom’s.”
“I know.” He took off his hat. “He was cutting that field when I moved here, Karen. Fifty-one years ago. He was ten years old, riding on his father’s fender. I looked at that boy and thought, there’s a man who knows what he’s doing.” He turned the hat in his hands. “I didn’t say it enough.”
“He knew.”
“Did he?”
“He did.”
Arlen nodded slowly. For a while we stood together, two old friends in the cold, looking out at the field.
“I’d like to put up your hay next summer,” he said. “If you’ll have me. My back’s gone, but I’ve got a baler and a nephew with time on his hands.”
“I’d pay you.”
“You’d feed me.” He grinned. “That coffee cake’s not the only thing I can’t cook.”
I laughed, and the sound carried across the snow.
