EPILOGUE: ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE
I’ve thought a lot, since, about the difference between justice and repair.
Justice is a clean thing. It’s a ledger, with a column for what was taken and a column for what’s owed, and a judge in a black robe to balance the two. I believe in it. I’d have sat in that courtroom, if I’d had to, with my chin up and my hands folded, and told the truth in a clear voice.
But justice, as it turned out, was not what I needed. I needed two hundred and twelve bales of hay, and a brother-in-law who would eventually lift a bale of his own free will, and a neighbor who would hold my elbow at a grave and mean it.
That doesn’t mean I was kind. I’d like to say it did. I wasn’t kind. I was practical, and a little cold, and very tired, and I made a calculation in a kitchen at one in the morning with rhubarb on my hands. If it had gone another way, if Arlen had shut his door, if Gene had laughed, I’d have called the sheriff the next day and not lost a night’s sleep.
What I learned is that people will surprise you, if you give them a way to be better than they are. Most of them won’t take it. But a few will, and those few are the ones who keep a country running.
Tom knew that. He’d known it all his life. It’s why he buried a cash box in a field, and a letter beside it, and a line in a notebook that said check the west corner. He didn’t trust himself to say it out loud. So he left it in the one place I’d be sure to walk.
The following June, a year to the week after Tom’s last cutting, we put up the north eighty again.
It was a good year, wet in spring and warm in May, and the grass came on thick and sweet. Arlen’s nephew ran the baler. Gene brought his own tractor and showed up uninvited, and Ben drove the rake. Dwayne, who had come every Saturday through the winter and had quietly kept coming through the spring, worked the stackyard beside me, loading bales onto the flatbed with a steady, uncomplaining rhythm.
Marlene brought lunch. Ada sat in a lawn chair under the cottonwoods, a blanket over her knees and a hat on her head, watching her two sons work.
At noon, we all sat in the shade of the barn. There were nine of us. Ben sat beside me with a sandwich in one hand, and Dwayne sat across from us, and the young Reyes couple, who had become friends, had brought a casserole and a baby in a basket. Arlen told the story of the winter of ‘78, when a blizzard buried his barn and he dug out the cows with a snow shovel and a prayer. Gene corrected him on three points. The baby cried and was passed around.
When the plates were empty and the sun had slid past its peak, Dwayne cleared his throat.
“I have something to say.”
Everyone looked up.
“I’m not good at this,” he said. He turned his hat in his hands. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it for a year. I don’t have the words Tom had. He didn’t have many, either. But he had the right ones.”
He took a breath.
“I took something from this family. Not just the hay. I took the idea that I was part of it. For fifty years, I thought I was on the outside, looking in, and I took it out on the people inside. And Karen—” His voice broke. “Karen gave me a way back. She didn’t have to. She’d have been right not to. And I want you all to know that I’ll spend whatever years I’ve got trying to deserve it.”
Nobody spoke. A breeze moved through the cottonwoods.
Ada reached out from her lawn chair and put a hand on his arm.
“That’s enough, son,” she said softly. “You said it.”
I looked across the circle at Ben, who was watching his uncle with an expression I couldn’t read. Then, slowly, my son stood. He crossed the grass and held out his hand, and Dwayne looked at it for a long moment as if it were something precious.
He took it.
They shook once, firmly, the way men do. Then Ben pulled his uncle to his feet and, to everyone’s astonishment, including his own, wrapped both arms around him and held on.
Dwayne stood rigid for a second. Then he laid his big, scarred hands against my son’s back, bowed his head, and held on, too.
I sat with my sandwich going warm in my lap, and I didn’t look at anybody. I looked at the field, at the long green rows running out to the horizon, the swaths of cut hay curing in the sun, and the line of the old windbreak where the cottonwoods used to stand.
The meadowlark was singing. It was the same one, or its grandchild. The song went up and over the hill, bright and unhurried, as though the whole country had been waiting to hear it.
I took Tom’s notebook out of my pocket. I’d carried it every day for a year. On a fresh page, under the last line he’d written, I put my pencil down and wrote my own.
N80 up. Heavy. Enough for everyone, and then some.
Then I closed it, put it back, and went to help load the truck.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
