Gene laughed, a cracked, helpless laugh, and wiped his face with the cap.
“That’s about what he’d say,” he said.
By three o’clock the stackyard was nearly full. By five, there were two hundred bales in neat rows, and the north eighty’s tracks were clear and bare against the dusk.
Two hundred.
I counted again. I walked the rows with my clipboard, tapping each bale, and
up short by twelve.
“The young couple,” Arlen said, at my elbow. “They’ve got the last thirty-two. Fellow by the name of Reyes, new to the county. They bought the old Lindgren place. You’ll want to talk to them yourself.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
“I could drive you.”
“I’ve got a pie.”
“You’ve got a pie for everyone,” Arlen said, and for the first time all day his mouth twitched toward a smile.
I counted twelve more at the end of the row and realized, with a small cold shock, that Gene had unloaded his full hundred and had also brought a dozen from his own stack. I didn’t ask. I looked at him across the yard, big and bearded, sipping coffee out of the thermos Ben had handed him, and I understood that some debts don’t show up on paper.
Ben climbed down from the tractor. He walked to me
across the dust, with his father’s loose-limbed stride, and stopped.
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to call the sheriff.”
“I know.”
“I still do.” His voice shook, just a little. “He took it. He took it, and he lied to Arlen, and he lied to Gene, and he told them you were selling the place. He told them you wanted to. I stood in this yard and watched him. And you just baked a pie.”
I looked at my son. He was tall like Tom, already, with Tom’s shoulders and my stubborn chin, and his eyes were red-rimmed and furious. Seventeen years old. He’d driven a tractor since he was nine.
“I want to tell you why,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I think I do.” I set the clipboard on a bale. “Your father died on a Tuesday. We buried him on a Saturday. And on the Tuesday after,
