Part Two: Jake

My husband was Staff Sergeant Jacob Whitfield.

Jake, to everybody. He was twenty-eight years old. He served nine years in the United States Army. Two deployments to Afghanistan. One to Iraq. He was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on the Tennessee line. Forty minutes from our farm.

He died on May 12th.

It was a training accident. A night exercise. A Black Hawk helicopter went down in a field on the Kentucky side of the base during a routine air-assault drill. Seven soldiers were on board. Two died.

Jake was one of them.

He’d been through three combat deployments without a scratch. He came home every time.

He died forty minutes from his own front porch.

Two officers in dress uniforms knocked on my door at six in the morning.

I was in the kitchen in my bathrobe, making coffee. I saw them through the window. Walking up the gravel drive. Slowly. In step.

I knew before they knocked.

I’m April Whitfield. I’m twenty-seven years old.

I’m a vet tech at an animal clinic in Clarksville. I spend my days holding dogs while they get shots and cleaning up after cats who don’t want their teeth looked at.

I’ve been married to Jake for six years.

Part Three: Forty Acres

We met at a county fair in Montgomery County when I was nineteen.

He was showing his grandfather’s draft horse. A giant gray Percheron named Tank. I was working the 4-H livestock barn. Tank stepped on my foot. Jake apologized for twenty minutes.

He was twenty. Home on leave from basic training. Tall and lean, with a buzz cut and a sunburned neck and the slowest smile I’d ever seen.

He asked me to ride the Ferris wheel.

I said yes.

We got married two years later.

We bought forty acres outside Adams, Tennessee, from my grandfather when he moved into assisted living. He sold it to us for less than half what it was worth.

“I’d rather you have it than some developer from Nashville,” Grandpa said.

It’s not much. Forty acres of rolling hayfield, a little white farmhouse with a tin roof, a red barn with a sagging hayloft, and a creek along the back line.

We didn’t farm for a living. We couldn’t. Jake was in the Army. I had my job at the clinic.

But we made hay.

Jake loved hay.

I don’t know how else to say it. He loved the smell of it. He loved the sound of the baler. He loved stacking bales in the barn on a hot July evening with sweat running down his back.

He said it was the only thing that ever made his head quiet.

After his deployments, when he couldn’t sleep, when he jumped at loud noises, when he sat on the back porch at three in the morning staring at nothing—

He’d go out and cut hay.

We sold square bales to horse people in Clarksville and Springfield. We made maybe four thousand dollars a year.

It barely paid for the tractor repairs.

He didn’t care.