Black and Paid For
Part One: The Hayfield
Dustin had just dropped a bale out the back of the baler when Shane’s silver sedan pulled up at the field edge.
It was the second week of June. Late afternoon. Hot and still, the kind of Tennessee heat that sits on your shoulders like a wet towel. I was on the old Ford tractor, pulling the square baler down the windrows on the lower twenty. Dustin was walking behind, picking up bales and stacking them on the hay wagon.
The baler thumped and clanked. The bale chute dropped another one onto the stubble. Dustin grabbed it by the strings and swung it up onto the wagon.
Then he stopped.
He was looking past me. At the gravel road at the edge of the field.
I looked over my shoulder.
A silver Nissan Altima had pulled off onto the grass. Clean. Shiny. Way too nice for a hayfield.
I knew the car.
Jake had been gone thirty-one days.
Part Two: Jake
My husband was Staff Sergeant Jacob Whitfield.
Jake, to everybody. He was twenty-eight years old. He served nine years in the United States Army. Two deployments to Afghanistan. One to Iraq. He was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on the Tennessee line. Forty minutes from our farm.
He died on May 12th.
It was a training accident. A night exercise. A Black Hawk helicopter went down in a field on the Kentucky side of the base during a routine air-assault drill. Seven soldiers were on board. Two died.
Jake was one of them.
He’d been through three combat deployments without a scratch. He came home every time.
He died forty minutes from his own front porch.
Two officers in dress uniforms knocked on my door at six in the morning.
I was in the kitchen in my bathrobe, making coffee. I saw them through the window. Walking up the gravel drive. Slowly. In step.
I knew before they knocked.
I’m April Whitfield. I’m twenty-seven years old.
I’m a vet tech at an animal clinic in Clarksville. I spend my days holding dogs while they get shots and cleaning up after cats who don’t want their teeth looked at.
I’ve been married to Jake for six years.
Part Three: Forty Acres
We met at a county fair in Montgomery County when I was nineteen.
He was showing his grandfather’s draft horse. A giant gray Percheron named Tank. I was working the 4-H livestock barn. Tank stepped on my foot. Jake apologized for twenty minutes.
He was twenty. Home on leave from basic training. Tall and lean, with a buzz cut and a sunburned neck and the slowest smile I’d ever seen.
He asked me to ride the Ferris wheel.
I said yes.
We got married two years later.
We bought forty acres outside Adams, Tennessee, from my grandfather when he moved into assisted living. He sold it to us for less than half what it was worth.
“I’d rather you have it than some developer from Nashville,” Grandpa said.
It’s not much. Forty acres of rolling hayfield, a little white farmhouse with a tin roof, a red barn with a sagging hayloft, and a creek along the back line.
We didn’t farm for a living. We couldn’t. Jake was in the Army. I had my job at the clinic.
But we made hay.
Jake loved hay.
I don’t know how else to say it. He loved the smell of it. He loved the sound of the baler. He loved stacking bales in the barn on a hot July evening with sweat running down his back.
He said it was the only thing that ever made his head quiet.
After his deployments, when he couldn’t sleep, when he jumped at loud noises, when he sat on the back porch at three in the morning staring at nothing—
He’d go out and cut hay.
We sold square bales to horse people in Clarksville and Springfield. We made maybe four thousand dollars a year.
It barely paid for the tractor repairs.
He didn’t care.
Part Four: Three Brothers
Jake had two brothers.
Shane was the oldest. He’s thirty-three now. He sells cars at a big dealership in Clarksville. Chevy and GMC. He’s good at it. Salesman of the Month eleven times. He’s got a framed photo of himself shaking hands with the regional manager.
He has a wife, Brittany, and two little girls. Kaylee and Madison. Six and four. A big brick house in a new subdivision off Highway 41. With a two-story foyer and a three-car garage.
A house he couldn’t afford.
I knew that. Everybody knew that. Jake used to shake his head about it.
“Shane’s always one paycheck from the edge,” he’d say. “Always has been.”
Dustin was the youngest.
He’s twenty-four. He works first shift at a tire shop in Clarksville. Big O Tires on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard. Six-thirty to three.
He’s quiet. Like Jake. Tall and lanky, with Jake’s slow smile and a faded green ball cap he’s worn since high school. He lives in a little rented trailer on the edge of town.
He doesn’t say much.
He doesn’t need to.
Jake’s parents are Ron and Debbie Whitfield. They live in a brick ranch in Clarksville. Ron retired from the post office. Debbie works at the library.
Ron had a heart stent put in that spring. In April. A month before Jake died.
He hadn’t been the same since the funeral.
Part Five: The Gratuity
The Army paid me the death gratuity four days after Jake died.
If you’ve never been a military spouse, you might not know what that is.
When a soldier dies on active duty, for any reason, the Department of Defense pays a one-time benefit to the family. A hundred thousand dollars. Tax-free. To help with immediate expenses.
It goes to whoever the soldier designated. Usually the spouse.
Jake designated me.
His wife. On the form. In his handwriting. Signed and dated three years earlier, when he re-enlisted.
Beneficiary: April Whitfield. Relationship: Spouse. 100%.
The money was in my bank account on May 16th.
I didn’t touch it.
I couldn’t.
I didn’t touch anything that month.
I didn’t go back to work. I didn’t answer my phone. I didn’t open the mail. I slept in Jake’s T-shirts. I didn’t wash them.
The hay grew. Nobody cut it. 