Chapter One: Six Inches
The rain came through on a Thursday night in the middle of May, the kind of storm the Flint Hills get maybe once in ten years. It rolled in from the southwest around nine o’clock with lightning so steady you could have read a newspaper by it, and then it simply sat over Chase County and emptied itself. I lay awake in my house in Cottonwood Falls listening to it hammer the roof, and I thought about my father alone in the farmhouse eleven miles south, and I thought about his hay.
By morning the rain gauge on Dad’s porch post read six inches, and the creek behind his barn had climbed out of its banks and spread across the bottom like a brown lake. I drove out at seven in my county truck, splashing through water on the low places of the section road, and found his pickup gone from the yard. The house was empty. His coffee cup was still warm on the kitchen counter beside the radio, which was turned to the farm report out of Emporia, the way it has been every morning of my life.
I found him at the edge of his south hayfield a little before noon. He was standing at the fence line with his cane planted in the mud and his feed cap pushed back, perfectly still, the way he stands when a cow is calving and there’s nothing to do yet but watch. He didn’t turn around when I pulled up. I got out and walked over and stood beside him, and then I saw what he was looking at.
A gully ran right through the middle of the field. It started at the north fence, where the ground slopes down from the neighboring quarter, and it cut across forty acres of the best brome and alfalfa in the county in a long, crooked line toward the creek. It was raw brown dirt with roots hanging out of the sides like torn threads, and in the middle, where the slope was steepest, it was deep enough to hide a pickup truck. The water had carved it in one night.
Dad didn’t say a word. He just looked at it for a long time, and I stood beside him and didn’t say anything either, because in our family you don’t talk while a man is taking something in. After a while a meadowlark landed on the fence post next to him and sang, and Dad finally moved. He reached out with the tip of his cane and touched the lip of the gully where the sod hung over the edge, and a chunk of it broke loose and fell in.
“Fifty years,” he said quietly. “I’ve cut this field fifty years.”
Chapter Two: The Best Ground
My father’s name is Leroy Haskell, and he is seventy-six years old. He was born in the white farmhouse at the end of the lane, in the front bedroom, the same year his father bought this place with a loan from the Federal Land Bank and a handshake. He has run cattle on it his whole life, and for most of that life he has put up hay for those cattle off the same forty acres on the south side, the field we always just called the south hay.
It is the best hay ground in Chase County. Everybody says so, and Dad will tell you so if you give him half a chance. The soil is deep and dark there, washed down off the hills over ten thousand years, and the brome comes up thick and green in April and the alfalfa underneath it grows like it means it. In a good year, Dad would put up two cuttings off those forty acres, eighteen hundred small square bales the first time and twelve hundred the second, and every one of them went into the loft of the big red barn to carry his cows through the winter.
When I was nine, he started taking me with him to the hayfield. I rode on the hay rack behind the baler while he drove the old Farmall, and in the afternoon we’d stop under the cottonwood at the edge of the field and he’d pour me coffee out of his green Stanley thermos, mostly milk and sugar, in the little cup that screwed onto the top. I thought I was the most grown-up girl in Kansas. I still remember the smell of fresh-cut alfalfa and diesel and that sweet, terrible coffee.
My mother died nine years ago, of a stroke, at sixty-four. After that, it was just Dad on the place, and the cows, and the south hay. My sister Joanie lives three miles north with her husband and their two boys, and I live in town, and between the two of us we look in on him most days. He doesn’t make it easy. He still gets up at five and feeds his cows and checks his water tanks, and when he fell off the stack wagon three summers ago and busted his hip, he was back out in the pasture with a walker inside of six weeks.
