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.
“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.
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