Nobody's Child Read Free Page B

flecked the bale with its sweet flesh, a cow dessert. Straws of timothy—cow salad — held the bales together with theirpithy shoots, miniature stalks the grass equivalent of sugar cane. Every bale carried Daddy’s touch. From the first fertilizer and lime application early in the season, to the roaring slice and crush of the mower-conditioner in June, Daddy crisscrossed that pasture time and again, year after year, to prepare the meal she would serve each morning all winter long. Love, laid up in long grassy bales, fed Angus beef stock, their second-best source of income after the tobacco.
    Every bale carried her touch too. She and Daddy put up hay the “old way,” square bales plopped one by one from the back of an old red McCormick baler, forty-pound bundles of hay thrown by Daddy up to her on the wagon, then stacked in the barn by Laura Ann. Each summer she pitched as many as ten thousand bales with Daddy, laboring in barns hot as ovens, sweat drenching her shirt and layered in the prickly grime of hay dust. Hay elevators creaked over rusty rails, bearing bales from wagon to Laura Ann, where she stacked for hours, a girl piling up forty-pound blocks. Those were summers filled with flies, barn snakes, mice, aching shoulders, blistered hands — and Daddy, encouraging her with the daily reminder that “hard work is the essence of the good life.”
    Laura Ann held another flake of summer above jostling black heads, its color stopping her: the dry crumbling remains of a pasture flower. Red pain. In it she saw Daddy, pitching a bale to her in August, his last day throwing hay. The bale missed the wagon and he fell, knees buried in fresh-cut grass, bent over in a horrible cough.
    Laura Ann dropped the hay, tumbling into the face of a heifer that pressed against bovine sisters for a meal. She stared at her hands, the red of Daddy’s blood on her fingers a vivid memory. Like the crimson that splattered his hands and mouth that day in the hay pasture when they first met his disease. It started that afternoon, in the dog days of summer. Daddy’s end.
    Minutes later, she shoveled more feed to swollen mothers who would drop calves within weeks. Corn, more of Daddy’s labor, nurtured new life in a circle she’d been part of for twenty years. She shoveled from bins that stood brimful with brilliant yellow cobs, laden by a father who wheezed through every load they’d gathered this past September. Nights were shorter then, with no strength for talk, unlike the years of her past with a vigorous daddy who loved their evenings together after a full day in the field and wood shop. Nights spent reading stories to each other from dozens of books, their favorite escape.
    A cat nudged her leg, drawing her back from the memory. Black purring nuzzled against her ankle. Laura Ann shoveled cobs to another waiting mouth, then took the barn cat in her arms, one of a dozen pets she’d never named. Arched in a bony inverted “U,” the cat purred as she stroked black fur, her hand raising crackles of static as she rubbed from head to tail. The barn cat pushed its head between her arm and side, seeking some warmth in the folds of a dusty brown barn coat, layered in hay dust from a thousand cold mornings in the loft.
    September had transitioned from the gathering colors of fall and bounty of yellow corn, to the beige of hospital corridors, pale blue of doctors’ scrubs, and the white of paper. Sheaves of paper. Documents to sign, authorizations to treat sickness that might recur, waivers, addresses, and always — promises to pay. “No insurance?” a voice asked nearly every day, incredulous. Day by day, she bore the epitome of hospital shame: a patient without health insurance. Too poor to buy a policy, unqualified for Medicaid because they owned a farm. Day by day, Daddy fought the disease while she battled the healthcare bureaucracy.
    Laura Ann set the cat down and walked along