Four in the Morning
It was four in the morning when I started.
The stars were still out over the east ridge, hard and white, the way they get in Tennessee in June before the humidity rolls in. The field was black and silver. Every blade of grass held a drop of dew, and when I stepped off the gravel and into the hay, it soaked my jeans to the thigh before I’d taken ten steps.
June timothy. Gold at the tips. Up to my knee.
I could smell it. Sweet and green and a little like summer rain on hot pavement. That smell has been in my lungs since I was four years old.
I had the mower deck set low on the little Ford and crawling.
First gear. Barely above idle. The headlights threw two pale beams across the hay, and the sound of the engine was the only noise for a mile in any direction except the frogs down at the pond.
Behind me, the white arbor waited in the dark.
Two hundred folding chairs sat in wet rows on the mowed grass in front of it. Wooden chairs, white, rented. I’d helped set them up the night before, every one of them, while my sister stood on the porch with a clipboard and told me where they went.
Two big white tents stood at the edge of the field. Forty by sixty. Sides rolled up. Strings of lights waiting in the dark for somebody to plug them in.
By two o’clock that afternoon, my sister would marry Scott Hendricks right there. Under that arbor. With this field behind her.
My name is Laney Tidwell. I’m thirty-four years old.
I own eighty acres of hay ground outside Shelbyville, Tennessee. Timothy and orchardgrass on the bottom forty, fescue and clover on the hill. Two cuttings a year if the rain cooperates, three if God’s in a good mood.
I sell square bales to horse people from Nashville and round bales to the cattle men in Bedford County. I teach agriculture at Cascade High School to pay the bills that the hay won’t.
I inherited the land fourteen months ago.
From my grandfather.
Part Two: Grandpa Earl
Earl Tidwell worked that ground for fifty-one years.
He bought it in 1972 with money he’d saved from driving a milk truck. It was worn out then. Grown up in sedge grass and blackberries. He cleared it by hand. He limed it and seeded it and fenced it. He built the barn himself, the one at the top of the lane, with oak he cut off the back of the property.
He loved that land the way some men love a woman. Quietly. Without making a fuss about it. He’d walk the fields every evening after supper with his hands in his pockets, just looking.
He raised me and Megan after our dad walked out.
I was nine. Megan was six. Dad had a job driving long-haul for a trucking company in Nashville. One day he drove a load to Texas and didn’t drive back.
Mama didn’t know what to do. She was twenty-nine with two little girls and a job at the Walmart deli counter. She couldn’t pay rent. She couldn’t pay day care.
So we moved in with her daddy.
Grandpa Earl had been a widower for three years by then. He lived alone in the farmhouse at the end of Tidwell Lane. Four bedrooms. A wraparound porch. A kitchen that hadn’t changed since 1975.
He gave Mama the downstairs bedroom. He gave me and Megan the two rooms upstairs. He moved himself into the little room off the kitchen that used to be a pantry.
He never once complained about it.
I followed him everywhere.
From the first week, I was out the door before breakfast. In the barn. In the fields. On the tractor seat beside him, holding on to the fender. He taught me to drive the little Ford when I was eleven. He taught me to rake hay at twelve. He taught me to run the baler at fourteen.
He taught me to read the sky. To know when the hay was dry enough to bale by twisting a handful and listening to it crackle. To set the mower deck high enough to leave something for the second cutting.
He taught me everything I know.
Megan never came to the field.
I used to think it was because she didn’t want to. That she thought farm work was beneath her. She liked clean clothes and painted nails and sleepovers in town. She liked the mall in Murfreesboro and the movie theater in Shelbyville.
She stayed in the house with Mama.
I didn’t think much about it. We were different. That’s all.
I was the one in the field with Grandpa. She was the one in the kitchen with Mama.
That was just how it was.
Part Three: The Will
Grandpa died last April.
He was eighty-seven. His heart. He’d been slowing down for a couple of years. He couldn’t run the baler anymore, so I ran it. He couldn’t climb up on the tractor, so I did that too. But he’d still sit in his lawn chair at the edge of the field every evening and watch me work.
One night in April, he didn’t come out to the field.
I found him in his chair on the porch. He’d been watching the sunset over the hay.
His will was simple. One page. He’d written it himself and had it notarized at the bank in Shelbyville.
He left the house to Mama. She’d lived in it for twenty-five years. It was hers.
He left me the eighty acres.
The lawyer read the reason out loud, because Grandpa had written it right there in the will.
I leave the land to Laney because she will keep it hay. She won’t sell it to the developers. She won’t put houses on it. She’ll keep it the way I kept it.
He left Megan his savings account.
Eleven thousand dollars. And his watch. A gold Hamilton he’d worn every day for sixty years.
Megan didn’t say anything at the lawyer’s office. She took the envelope with the bank papers. She took the watch. She thanked the lawyer.
She didn’t look at me.
On the drive home, Mama said, “Well, that’s fair. Earl always did love you two the same.”
Megan stared out the window.
I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t think it was about fair. I thought it was about who would take care of the land. Grandpa knew Megan didn’t want it. She’d never wanted it. She’d never once set foot in the hayfield.
At least, that’s what I thought. 