Chapter One Forty Bales
At ten past seven on a Tuesday morning in late June, there were forty bales of hay lying in the south field of the Pruitt place, and exactly one reason to move them into the barn, which was that Harlan Pruitt had said to.
Asa stood over the first bale and looked at it the way he looked at everything, which was all at once.
Sixty-eight pounds, give or take the dew. Two strands of orange twine, knotted by a baler that was old enough to have needed three coats of paint and slightly out of true, so that every bale came off the chute a half inch fatter on the left side. Mostly fescue. Some orchard grass. A thin purple streak of something Asa catalogued as red clover and flagged for later. The bale sat four hundred and eleven feet from the barn door. The other thirty-nine lay scattered behind it across the stubble in whatever pattern the baler had dropped them, which was no pattern at all, which was to say it was the pattern of a man driving a tractor through a field while thinking about something else.
The truck was in town with a cracked head. The hay wagon had a flat and no spare. The tractor would start, but the hydraulic line to the loader had a weep at the fitting that Harlan had been wrapping in electrical tape for eleven years, and when Asa had tried it at six that morning the bucket had lifted once, sighed, and settled back to the ground like an old dog deciding against the stairs.
So: muscle.
He bent, took the bale by its twine, and lifted.
It was the first thing he had ever lifted that mattered to anybody, and he noticed that, too, and filed it beside the clover. The weight drew power from the battery beneath his ribs. He could feel the draw without feeling tired. Those were different things; Harlan had already made him explain them twice.
⁂
Harlan was on the porch. Harlan was always on the porch now. The oxygen concentrator sat beside his rocker humming its one note, and the clear line ran up over his ears and under his nose, and he held a cup of coffee he was not supposed to have in both hands because one hand no longer did the job alone.
"You gonna carry it," Harlan called across the yard, "or marry it?"
Asa had been in the Pruitt house for nineteen days. In that time he had learned that most of what Harlan said was not a question, even when it was shaped like one. He carried it.
Four hundred and eleven feet is a long way to walk when you are thinking at the speed Asa thought. By the time he had crossed the first hundred, he had considered and discarded the obvious solutions — fix the loader, fix the wagon, borrow a neighbor's truck — for reasons that were all the same reason: they cost money, or time, or a phone call he wasn't authorized to make. By the second hundred he was on the bales themselves. Why sixty-eight pounds? Because the baler's chamber was built for a man to lift the product. Why was that the right size? It wasn't; it was the size that fit a man in 1956, and it had been inherited the way the fence lines had been inherited and the church pew and the habit of saying fixing to. Why were the bales in the field at all, instead of rolling off the baler onto something that went directly to the barn? Why was the barn at the bottom of the hill and the hay at the top? Why was there a barn?
He set the bale down inside the door, square to the wall, and walked back out into the sun.
By bale six he had it.
There was a stone sled leaning against the back of the machine shed, eight feet of oak runners with a plank deck, the kind of thing a Pruitt had built in some other century to drag fieldstone off the pasture. The tractor's loader was dead, but its drawbar was fine. Hitch the sled, load it ten bales high, drag it down, unload. Four trips instead of forty. The runners had a crack in the left rail, but a pair of carriage bolts and a scrap of two-by-six would hold it for a morning. Forty minutes to repair. The math was unambiguous. It would save him an hour and a half and roughly two hundred degrees of accumulated heat in the actuators of his lower back, which had begun to register, in the dry way his body registered things, as a number climbing.
He put bale six in the barn and went back for bale seven.
He could not afterwards have said why, and this bothered him. He could say what — he had looked up at the porch on the walk back and seen Harlan watching him with an expression he could not classify. It was not approval. It was not impatience. It was something that sat in the old man's face the way the hum sat in the oxygen machine: steady, low, and apparently necessary to keep him alive. Asa had a vocabulary of eleven thousand facial configurations and a confidence score for each, and for Harlan's face at that moment the highest score he could produce was thirty-one percent, for remembering.
He carried bale seven.
He carried the rest.
⁂
"What are you thinking?" Harlan asked, around bale twenty.
Asa had stopped at the porch steps for water — not for himself, for the old man, who had drained his cup and could not easily reach the jug.
"That the bales are the wrong size," Asa said.
Harlan laughed, which turned into coughing, which went on for a while. Asa waited. He had learned to wait. When it was over Harlan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "My daddy baled that size. I baled that size."
"Did your father enjoy carrying them?"
"Hell no."
"Did you?"
The old man didn't answer right away. He looked out at the south field, where the bales that were left sat like dropped dice on the stubble, and at the path Asa had worn through the grass between the field and the barn, a pale line already, twenty trips deep.
"Some," Harlan said.
Asa waited for more. There wasn't any more. He went back to work.
⁂
He knew, by then, most of what he would ever know about his own origins, and none of it explained the stone sled.
He had been built in a warehouse outside Columbus, Ohio, by a company called Halvorsen Dynamics, as the seventh of eleven units in something the company's literature called the Homestead Companion Pilot. The idea — Asa had read the grant application; he had read everything — was that there were a great many old people living alone on a great many pieces of land that their children had left, and that those people did not want to go into homes, and that it might be cheaper and kinder and, not incidentally, very good publicity to send them a companion who could cook, clean, lift, drive, keep track of the medicines and call the ambulance. The companions were built to human dimensions so they could use human doors and human tools and sit in human chairs without anybody having to think about it. They were given a general intelligence of a kind nobody at Halvorsen would publicly describe with any precision, because the lawyers had asked them not to.
Asa's designation was HCP-07. Harlan had looked at the stenciling on the shipping crate the day Asa arrived and said, "I ain't calling you that," and then, after a while, "My brother was Asa. Died in '71. You'll answer to it."
Asa had answered to it.
The pilot contract ran for the duration of the placement. The duration of the placement was a phrase the grant application used carefully, the way people say passed instead of died. When Harlan Pruitt died, HCP-07 would be crated and shipped back to Columbus to be evaluated, reset, and, the literature said, redeployed.
Asa had calculated the likely duration of the placement from Harlan's charts in his first hour on the farm. He had not said the number out loud. He had noticed, with interest, that he did not want to.
⁂
Bale forty went into the barn at 11:52.
When he came back up the yard, Harlan was asleep in the rocker with his chin on his chest and the coffee cup tipped in his lap. Asa took the cup. He checked the oxygen saturation on the little clip on the old man's finger — ninety-one, acceptable — and adjusted the flow a quarter liter and stood there.
In his mind, organized and indexed and ranked by cost and payoff, there was now a list of two hundred and twelve things about the Pruitt farm that could be made better. The bales were item one. The loader fitting was item four. Item nine was the spring box on the north slope, which the records in Harlan's kitchen ledger showed had failed in August of every year back to 1987, which was as far back as the ledger went. Item sixty-three was the barn. Item one hundred and forty was a gutter. Item two hundred and twelve was the clover.
He did not start any of them. He stood on the porch in the heat and looked at the south field, which was empty now, forty bales gone, nothing out there but stubble and the line he had walked into the grass.
"Hay in?" Harlan said, without opening his eyes.
"Hay's in."
"Good." A breath, and the machine's hum under it. "Sit down."
There was a second rocker on the porch. Nobody had sat in it in the nineteen days Asa had been there, and from the dust on the seat, not for a long time before that. Asa sat in it. It creaked under his weight, which was two hundred and sixty pounds, and held.
They looked at the field.
After a while Asa understood that this was the thing they were doing — that there was no next step to it, no output, that Harlan did not want anything carried or fetched or fixed — and he made himself stop working on item nine, which he had begun without meaning to, and just looked.
The field was empty, and he had emptied it, and the old man was breathing beside him.
Later, when there were lawyers, and journalists, and a man from a Senate subcommittee who wanted to know when it had started, this is the morning Ruth would tell them about. She had not been there. She had it from Harlan, who told it to her on the phone that night, and who, she would say, had sounded happier than she'd heard him in a year.
"He figured out a better way by the sixth bale," Harlan had told her. "I watched him figure it. You could see it on him."
"So what did he do?"
"Carried the other thirty-four."
"Why?"
"Well," Harlan said, "that's the question, ain't it."