“I’m a greedy old man,” he said. “I took advantage of your grief. And I’d like to give it back, and I’d like it if you’d let me say sorry for it, and if you’d tell Tom I’m sorry the next time you visit.”
My throat closed. I looked up at the sky, which was a hard, high blue, and a hawk wheeled above the shelterbelt.
“He’d tell you to quit your hollering and get the trailer unhitched,” I said.
Gene laughed, a cracked, helpless laugh, and wiped his face with the cap.
“That’s about what he’d say,” he said.
By three o’clock the stackyard was nearly full. By five, there were two hundred bales in neat rows, and the north eighty’s tracks were clear and bare against the dusk.
Two hundred.
I counted again. I walked the rows with my clipboard, tapping each bale, and came up short by twelve.
“The young couple,” Arlen said, at my elbow. “They’ve got the last thirty-two. Fellow by the name of Reyes, new to the county. They bought the old Lindgren place. You’ll want to talk to them yourself.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
“I could drive you.”
“I’ve got a pie.”
“You’ve got a pie for everyone,” Arlen said, and for the first time all day his mouth twitched toward a smile.
I counted twelve more at the end of the row and realized, with a small cold shock, that Gene had unloaded his full hundred and had also brought a dozen from his own stack. I didn’t ask. I looked at him across the yard, big and bearded, sipping coffee out of the thermos Ben had handed him, and I understood that some debts don’t show up on paper.
Ben climbed down from the tractor. He walked to me across the dust, with his father’s loose-limbed stride, and stopped.
