My Brother-in-Law Sold All 212 Hay Bales Three Days After My Husband’s Funeral So I Asked One Question: “Who Bought Them?”

I looked at my hands. They were wind-chapped and cracked at the knuckles, hands that had held a hymnal on Saturday and a casserole dish ever since. I had not cried in front of the boy. I had not cried at the funeral. I had cried only once, on the kitchen floor with Tom’s chore coat in my lap, and I had not planned to do it again until the first snow.

Through the window, I watched Arlen cross the yard. He was seventy-eight, bowlegged, stooped at the shoulder. He got into a faded green Ford with a flatbed and a hay spike, and he did not look back at the house.

Tom and I bought the place in 1998, a hundred and sixty acres of Nebraska Sandhills grass with a house that leaned and a barn that leaned worse. We were thirty-one. We had a dog, a pickup with a cracked windshield, and eleven thousand dollars borrowed from his mother. The banker in Valentine looked at our paperwork for a long time and said, “You folks understand this is hard country.”

“Yes, sir,” Tom said.

“You understand it doesn’t care whether you’re nice.”

“We’re counting on that,” Tom said, and the banker laughed, and signed.

We were not rich. We never were. We ran a small cow herd, forty pair at our best, and put up our own hay on the north eighty and the creek bottom, and we sold calves in October and paid the bills in November and held our breath through January. Tom worked off the place, too, hauling for the co-op in winter. I taught third grade at the school in Merriman until Ben came, and kept books for half the ranches in the county after.

We had one child, which was one more than the doctors had promised. Ben came at the end of a long bad stretch, when I’d stopped saying the wish out loud, and Tom had taken to leaving the porch light on all night, as though we might be visited. He was born on a February night with the wind screaming out of the northwest. Tom held him in one hand like a loaf of bread and said, “Well. I’ll be.”

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