your uncle sat in our kitchen and told me what he’d done, and I could have called the sheriff, and I’d have been right.”
“Yes.”
“And then what? A deputy comes, takes a statement. There’s a report, maybe a charge. A year goes by. A lawyer gets involved. Meanwhile your grandmother, who is eighty-four and lives in Dwayne’s basement, has to choose between her sons. You and I stand up in a courtroom and watch a man cry who is, God help us, your father’s only brother.”
“He deserves it.”
“Maybe he does.” I kept my voice steady. “But hay doesn’t wait for justice, Ben. Cows eat every day. I had about four weeks to get this stack back before the weather turned. If I’d gone the other way, I’d have been right, and the cows would have been at the sale barn, and we’d have had our principles and
no ranch.”
He was quiet.
“I didn’t want to win,” I said. “I wanted the hay back. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“What if they hadn’t helped?”
“Then I’d have called the sheriff,” I said. “Tomorrow. I told myself that on the drive over. I’d give them each a chance to do the right thing, and if they didn’t, I’d stop being polite.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m not a saint. I’m just a woman who figured out which fight to pick.”
He stared at his boots for a long time. Then, quietly, so only I could hear it, he said, “Dad would have done it that way.”
“I think he would.”
“He’d have cut the hay, and then he’d have said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and gone to get a drink of water.”
I laughed, and a tear slipped out, and I let it.
“That’s exactly what
he’d have done,” I said.
I did not tell Ben the rest. I didn’t have the words yet.
That night, after the trucks had rumbled away and the yard was quiet, I went out to the stackyard alone with a flashlight. The wind had dropped. The stars were out, thousands of them, hard and white over the Sandhills, the way they get when there’s no moon and nothing for fifty miles to blot them out.
