I want to say plainly why I baked, because my sister thought it was foolishness and told me so on the telephone, the way she tells me most things, fast and certain, like she’s reading off a label. I told her I did not have time to argue it with her, not that morning, and she said, Karen, you are going to drive into three yards and give people pie before you tell them they’ve been robbing a widow, and I said that was about the size of it, yes.
I was about to drive into three yards and tell three households that they had my hay and I wanted it back. Every one of them had paid for it. Every one of them thought they had done a kindness. You do not walk up to people like that empty-handed and start in. Not where I come from. You bring something, you sit down, and you tell it straight.
I made three rhubarb pies with lard crust, the way Tom’s mother taught me the first year we were married, standing at her stove in a kitchen that smelled like coffee and cut hay, correcting my hands without ever once raising her voice. I had the pies out of the oven by one in the morning. Ben came down at five and found me asleep in the chair with my apron still on, flour dried white along one forearm where I’d leaned on the counter without noticing.
“You want me to come?” he said.
“I want you to grease the loader on the 4020 and make sure the bale spear’s on it,” I said. “And then I want you to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That was the truth too. I did not know if anybody was coming.
To understand why I was sitting in that chair at five in the morning with three pies cooling on the counter, you have to go back a week, to a Tuesday morning that started like any other, with my boots still wet from the dew on the north eighty and no notion at all of what was waiting for me at my own kitchen table.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
