We put up the rest of Retta’s third cutting that afternoon, about three hundred bales. Grandpa watched every one of them from the passenger seat of my Buick with the window down, humming “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
Brock didn’t leave. He stood at the end of the field with his hands in his pockets for a while, watching. Then, without saying anything, he climbed up onto the hay wagon beside Reed and started stacking.
My cousin, who farms two thousand acres and has three hired men, stood on a hay wagon in his good jeans and his John Deere cap and stacked small square bales by hand in the August sun.
I watched Reed show him the crisscross pattern. I watched Brock get it wrong, then get it right. I watched him stop, halfway through the load, and stand very still with a bale in his arms, looking at nothing.
Later he told me what he’d been thinking. He’d been trying to remember sitting on top of a load of hay as a little boy, falling asleep on the way home.
“I still can’t remember it,” he said. “But I can feel it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
When we finished, I drove Grandpa back to Prairie View. It was almost six. The aides helped him back into his wheelchair, and I pushed him down the long hallway toward his room.
At his door, he stopped me.
“Jana.”
“Yes, Grandpa?”
“Thank you.” His voice was rough. “For buying it. For not telling me. For letting me hear it one more time.”
“It’s not one more time,” I said. “It’s every summer, Grandpa. I’ll come get you every summer. As long as you want.”
He looked up at me with his watery blue eyes.
“Then I’d better live a while longer,” he said.
I kissed his forehead and left him there by his window, looking out at the parking lot, still humming.
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