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 took 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 carried 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 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.”
