The next morning I went out before work to look at it again, because I could not leave it alone.
The camper had a blue tarp over its back corner, tied off neat, with a five gallon bucket hung under the low spot to catch the drip. Nobody had moved the camper an inch. I checked. It was still a foot over the line, exactly where Vince left it.
And on the dry end of the workbench somebody had spread a clean shop towel, and on the towel, laid out in rows by size the way Len kept them, was every tool out of that top drawer. His dad’s box wrenches. The socket set I gave him in 1989. His folding rule, his chisels, the little brass plumb bob. Every one of them had been wiped down and oiled. I could smell it. The drawer itself was standing on end against the wall to dry, with a fan on it.
There was no note.
I stood in my husband’s shed at a quarter to seven in the morning, in my work vest with my name on it, and I cried over a set of sockets like I had not cried since the funeral. It was not grief so much. It was that a young man who had known me three weeks, and never knew Len at all, had looked at a dead man’s tools and seen what they were.
When I thanked him that evening, Kurt went red to the ears.
“They’re good tools,” he said. “It didn’t seem right.”
He never brought it up again.
Vince found out the way people find out anything in Hughes County. Somebody at the gas station asked him how he liked sharing a shed with the Schmidt boys.
He came out the second Saturday of November. Kenzie was with me, because Kim works every other weekend at the hospital and Kenzie comes to the farm. She is ten. She has Len’s cowlick and she asks questions the way some children pick at a scab, steadily and with interest.
We were in the shed. Kurt was up on a stepladder changing a light tube over the east combine, Joel was underneath holding the ladder, and Kenzie was on a bucket at Len’s workbench sorting his sockets back into their case by size, because Kurt had shown her how to read the numbers.
I heard the pickup before I saw it. It came up the lane faster than Vince drives, and it did not stop at the house. It went right on past the south door and around the shelterbelt, bumping across the hay ground, and it pulled up at the open north end.
My brother got out. He is sixty-six, a big square man with our dad’s hands, and he was wearing his orange cap because West River deer opened that morning and he had meant to be gone by now.
He walked in the north door and he stopped.
Two green combines. Swept concrete. A blue chalk line with the tongue of his wagon hanging over it.
He looked at all of it for a long moment. Then he looked at me.
“Donna, who let these people into Len’s shed?”
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