That was all he said. It was the most words I’d ever heard him use at once.
Tom Haller was not a talker. He was a leaner, a looker, a man who communicated by standing next to you and squinting at the same horizon. When he was happy, he whistled through his teeth. When he was worried, he fixed things that weren’t broken. I once found him at midnight on the shop floor rebuilding a hydraulic cylinder that worked fine, and I sat beside him on an overturned bucket and said nothing, and after a while he said, “Doctor called about the test.”
“And?”
“Not good.”
“All right,” I said, and put my hand on his back.
It was pancreatic. By the time they found it, it had been growing for a year. They gave him six months, and he took four, and spent most of them on the tractor.
