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

“Eight dollars a bale,” I said.

“I wanted it gone quick.” He finally looked at me. Dwayne has Tom’s eyes, the same pale gray, and that week I could hardly stand to see them in another face, because every time he looked at me straight I felt my husband looking back out of a stranger. “Karen, be sensible. You’ve got forty pairs on summer grass and a boy who’s still in high school. You are not going to feed cows through a Nebraska winter by yourself. You’ll have them at the sale barn by October, and you know it. And a woman with no cows does not need hay.”

“And when the cows are gone?”

“Then you’ll want to talk about the place.” He set his cap on his head. “When you do, you talk to me first. That’s Dad’s ground. It ought to stay with the name.”

So there it was, all of it, laid out on my table next to the sugar bowl, plain as a grain elevator receipt. No hay meant no cows. No cows meant no reason to keep a quarter section eleven miles out of Broken Bow. And a widow with no reason to stay will take the first offer from family, especially if family is the one who has been so much help, who brought the tractor around to mow the yard without being asked, who showed up at the funeral home with the right suit already pressed.

I looked at the casserole dishes. I looked at Tom’s chore coat, still on its nail by the door, because I had not been able to make my hand take it down.

I did not scream. I have never been a screamer, and I was too tired that week to start.

“Well,” I said. “Thank you for the trouble, Dwayne.”

He blinked. I do not think it was what he had come braced for.

“It was two nights of work,” he said.

“I know it was. I brought you out a sandwich Thursday, remember? And a thermos.” I had. I had walked it up over the hill at ten o’clock at night, with the baler lights going back and forth in the dark, and I had stood at the fence and cried because my husband’s brother was putting up my husband’s hay, and I had told myself that the crying was only grief finding a new place to land, that it was good of Dwayne to do it, that I should be grateful. “I just have one question.”

“All right.”

“Who bought them?”

He could have refused to tell me. But Dwayne was proud of how fast he had moved it, and I believe some part of him thought that if I heard the names, good names, neighbors, I would understand it was settled and could not be undone.

“Arlen took eighty,” he said. “Gene Pokorny took a hundred for his backgrounding lot. And that young couple on the oil road, Steve and Kim, they took the last thirty-two for her horses.”

“Arlen,” I said.

“He came Sunday afternoon with his flatbed. Gene sent the semi Monday while you were gone to Kearney.”

Arlen had stood at the grave on Saturday with his hat against his chest. He was seventy-eight years old and he had held my elbow going back to the car.

“What did you tell them?”

Dwayne’s ears went red. It was the only sign he gave, the whole morning, that he knew what he had done.

“I told them you were selling out,” he said. “That you wanted the field cleaned off, and the neighbors might as well have it for the cost of the baling.”

“So they think I gave it to them.”

“They think they did you a favor.”

I got up and poured his coffee down the sink, because it had gone cold and because I needed to do something with my hands.

“Dwayne,” I said, with my back to him. “It is Tuesday. Every one of those bales could be back along that road fence by Sunday, and nobody would ever have to hear one word about it from me. Not one. I mean that.”

It was quiet long enough that I heard the clock.

“It’s done, Karen,” he said.

The screen door slapped behind him. His pickup started. Pete, our old black-and-white dog, did not get up off the porch to see him go, and Pete got up for everybody.