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.