I walked the rows. I put my hand on the bales. They were cool and slightly damp with dew, and they smelled the way hay smells in September, sweet and green and a little like tobacco. Somewhere in the grass, a cricket was working through its last warm nights.
I had the notebook in my coat pocket. I took it out. I held the flashlight on the last page and read it for the fortieth
time.
N80 down. Heavy. Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.
I’d read it as a bookkeeper’s note at first. A tally. Then I’d read it as a love letter, and then as an apology, and now, standing in the dark with the whole stack finally home, I read it as what it was. It was a man telling me, in the only language he trusted, that I would be all right.
Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.
And then some. I hadn’t understood that phrase. I’d thought it was an approximation, a rancher’s shorthand. But I’d counted two hundred and twelve bales on the north eighty when I walked it in July, and Tom had told me that was the whole cutting. Two hundred and twelve. With forty pairs, I’d need two hundred, maybe two-ten, to get through to May.
And then some. Two more bales. Maybe.
I
turned over the notebook. On the back, smudged and nearly invisible, was one more line in pencil. It wasn’t there when I’d read it the first time, or I hadn’t looked.
Check the west corner.
I stood with the flashlight shaking in my hand.
The west corner of the north eighty is where the old windbreak used to be, a row of cottonwoods that Tom’s father planted in 1962 and the drought took in 2012. Tom had cut the stumps out himself. He’d left a corner of rough ground, never worth cutting, a little patch of cheatgrass and sandbur that nobody bothered with.
I walked there at first light with a thermos and a shovel. I don’t know what I expected. Dew soaked my boots to the ankles. The sun came up red over the ridge, and a meadowlark started somewhere ahead of me, a bright, liquid, impossible song.
