I said nothing.
“I’m a greedy old man,” he said. “I took advantage of your grief. And I’d like to give it back, and I’d like it if you’d let me say sorry for it, and if you’d tell Tom I’m sorry the next time you visit.”
My throat closed. I looked up at the sky, which was a hard, high blue, and a hawk wheeled above the shelterbelt.
“He’d tell you to quit your hollering and get the trailer unhitched,” I said.
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 came up short by twelve.
