“I want the hay up,” he told me in June. “I’ll be damned if I’m leaving you short.”
“Tom, the hay can wait. The hay can be bought.”
“Not at what they want for it.” He looked at me over his coffee, his face gone gaunt, his eyes the same pale gray they’d been the day I met him. “Let me do this, Karen. It’s the one thing I know how to do.”
So I let him.
Arlen came back at nine-thirty. I heard the flatbed grind up the yard and stop.
When I stepped onto the porch, he was standing beside the truck with his arms crossed. In the bed behind him, stacked and roped, sat sixteen big round bales, green-gold, the twine still tight. I knew that hay. I could have picked it out of a thousand. Tom always cut the north eighty at the same angle, with a little hook at the corner where the old windbreak had been, and the windrows ran slightly crooked there.
