They’re for you.
She slowly untied the bows and unwrapped the bright paper and saw what was in the boxes. She began to cry then. The tears ran unregarded down her face. Oh, dear God, she said. She was crying. She hugged the two boys with the boxes still clutched in her hands. Oh God, what am I going to do about any of this?
McPherons.
Maggie Jones drove out to the McPherons’ on a cold Saturday afternoon. Seventeen miles southeast of Holt. Beside the blacktop there were patches of snow in the fallow fields, drifts and scallops wind-hardened in the ditches. Black baldy cattle were spread out in the corn stubble, all pointed out of the wind with their heads down, eating steadily. When she turned off onto the gravel road small birds flew up from the roadside in gusts and blew away in the wind. Along the fenceline the snow was brilliant under the sun.
She drove up the track to the old house set back off the road a quarter mile. Beside the house a few low elm trees stood leafless inside the yard that was closed in by wire hogfencing. When she got out of the car a mottled old farm dog scuttled up to her and sniffed her leather boots and she patted his head and went through the wire gate up to the house and knocked on the screen door. Above the steps was a little screened porch, the mesh mended in places with white cotton string where it had been torn or poked through with something sharp. Beyond was the kitchen. She went up the steps onto the porch and knocked again. She looked in, the kitchen was more or less orderly. The table was cleared of dishes and the dishes laid in the sink, but there were stacks of Farm Journals and newspapers loaded up against the far walls, and greasy pieces of machinery—cogwheels, old bearings, shank bolts—were set out on mechanics’ rags on each of the chairs except the two that were placed opposite each other at the pine table. She opened the door and hollered in. Hello? Her voice echoed, it died out in the far room.
She came back off the porch and out to the car. Now there was the far-off sound of a tractor muttering and popping, coming up from the pasture to the south. She walked down to it and stood around the corner of the horse barn out of the wind. She could see them now. Both brothers were on the tractor, Raymond standing up behind Harold, who sat behind the wheel driving an ancient red sun-faded Farmall with the canvas wings of the heat houser bolted over the block onto the fenders for protection from the wind, pulling an empty flatbed hay wagon. They’d been feeding cattle out in the winter pasture, hay bales and pellets of cottonseed cake, scattering the cake in the feed-bunks. They jolted through the gate and stopped and Raymond got off and swung the gate closed and climbed back on, and they came banging and clattering past the corrals and past the loading chute up to the barn. The lid on the tractor’s exhaust stack flapped with bursts of black smoke, then they shut the engine off and the lid dropped shut and suddenly Maggie Jones could hear the wind again.
She stepped away from the barn and stood waiting for them. They got down and approached her slowly, calmly, as deliberately as church deacons, as if they were not at all surprised to see her. They moved heavily in their winter coveralls and they had on thick caps pulled low and cumbersome winter gloves.
You’re going to freeze yourself standing there, Harold said. You better get out of this wind. Are you lost?
Probably, Maggie Jones said. She laughed. But I wanted to talk to you.
Oh oh. I don’t like the sound of that.
Don’t tell me I scared you already, she said.
Why hell, Harold said. You probably want something.
I do, she said.
You better come up to the house, Raymond said.