My Brother in Law Sold All 212 Hay Bales After My Husbands Funeral

I want to say plainly why I baked, because my sister thought it was foolishness and told me so on the telephone, the way she tells me most things, fast and certain, like she’s reading off a label. I told her I did not have time to argue it with her, not that morning, and she said, Karen, you are going to drive into three yards and give people pie before you tell them they’ve been robbing a widow, and I said that was about the size of it, yes.

I was about to drive into three yards and tell three households that they had my hay and I wanted it back. Every one of them had paid for it. Every one of them thought they had done a kindness. You do not walk up to people like that empty-handed and start in. Not where I come from. You bring something, you sit down, and you tell it straight.

I made three rhubarb pies with lard crust, the way Tom’s mother taught me the first year we were married, standing at her stove in a kitchen that smelled like coffee and cut hay, correcting my hands without ever once raising her voice. I had the pies out of the oven by one in the morning. Ben came down at five and found me asleep in the chair with my apron still on, flour dried white along one forearm where I’d leaned on the counter without noticing.

“You want me to come?” he said.

“I want you to grease the loader on the 4020 and make sure the bale spear’s on it,” I said. “And then I want you to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

That was the truth too. I did not know if anybody was coming.

To understand why I was sitting in that chair at five in the morning with three pies cooling on the counter, you have to go back a week, to a Tuesday morning that started like any other, with my boots still wet from the dew on the north eighty and no notion at all of what was waiting for me at my own kitchen table.

Dwayne said it at my kitchen table on a Tuesday morning, three days after we buried his brother. He said it the way a man tells you the price of diesel. He had his cap on his knee and a cup of my coffee in front of him, and behind him on the counter sat eleven casserole dishes with masking tape on the bottoms so I would know whose was whose, because that is what a Nebraska community does when a man dies in the middle of his own hayfield at fifty-three years old. They bring food. They do not know what else to bring.

I had just come in from the north eighty. My boots were still wet from the dew.

“Say that again,” I said. I did not say it loud.

“I said you don’t need it.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth, the way he does when he’s working himself up to something, a habit he’s had since we were all young together and he’d sit at this same table waiting to ask Tom for the loan of the grain truck. “I baled it Thursday night and Friday night, like I told you I would. Two hundred and twelve bales. Good hay, too. Tom laid it down pretty.”

“I know how many. I walked up there this morning to look at them.”

“Then you saw they’re gone.”

“I saw the twine ends and the tire tracks, Dwayne. That’s all I saw.”

He nodded as if I had agreed with him about something.

“I sold them,” he said. “All of it. Seventeen hundred dollars. And by the time I took out twine and fuel and two nights of my time, it about came out even. So there’s nothing to hand you, and I didn’t figure you’d want me making up a number.”

I am going to tell you what seventeen hundred dollars means, in case you have never bought hay. It means eight dollars a bale. That summer a big round bale of alfalfa and brome, twelve hundred pounds of it, was bringing seventy dollars anywhere in Custer County, and more if you could wait until January. Two hundred and twelve bales was close to fifteen thousand dollars standing in my field. I did that arithmetic sitting right there at the table, automatically, the way you do sums you’ve done your whole life, and I watched the number arrive and understood, in the same instant, that my brother-in-law had not made a mistake. A mistake is when you misjudge a price. This was something else.

He had not sold my hay. He had gotten rid of it……………READ MORE NEXT PAGE 2