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.
