The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

“Uncle Brent is scared,” I said. “That’s different from mad. His crops didn’t make it this year, and he owes the bank money, and when people are scared they sometimes say things they shouldn’t. We’re not mad at him. We’re just going to feed Grandma’s cows.”

Cole nodded. Then he picked up another bale.

We had been at it maybe an hour when I saw her coming up the gravel road.

Mom, walking slow along the edge, in Dad’s old straw hat and her pale yellow blouse, her gray hair pinned up off her neck the way she has worn it every summer of my life.

She had a gallon jug of iced tea in one hand and a single glass in the other.

The sun was getting low behind her, and everything was gold, the road and the dust and the dry brown pasture on the other side of the barbed wire.

“I thought you might be thirsty,” she said.

I climbed down off the tractor and pulled my gloves off. My red cap was soaked through.

She poured the glass full and handed it to me, and I drank half of it and handed it to Wyatt, and he drank and handed it to Cole.

“Only one glass, Grandma?” Cole asked.

“Your grandpa always said one glass was enough for a hay crew,” Mom said. “Everybody drinks out of it, and nobody gets to be fancy.” Her voice went a little thick at the end, and she poured the glass full again and looked away down the road.

She came every evening after that. Every single evening, from the middle of July until the frost.

The straw hat, the yellow blouse or the blue one, the jug, the one glass. She never brought a second one.

Some nights she stayed and drove the pickup slow along the road while the boys and I loaded. Some nights she just stood at the edge of the gravel and watched us, and hummed, and I would catch “Bringing in the Sheaves” over the sound of the baler and have to look down at the windrow for a while.

I am not going to tell you it was easy, because it was not. The ditches that year were thin in places.

Some stretches made forty bales an evening. Some made eleven. One night along the Lindgren place we made four, and I nearly cried in the cab.

The barbed wire was the worst of it. You cannot mow tight to an old fence without the wire grabbing at you, and by the end of July I had worn through two pairs of leather gloves and had a scratch on my forearm that the doctor at the clinic, who mostly treats calves, looked at and said I should have a tetanus shot.

The knotter missed for the first time on July 22. Half a dozen bales came out the back tied on one string or none, and fell apart in the ditch.

I called Don, and he drove up in his pickup inside of ten minutes, in his slippers, with a toolbox.

He had it fixed by dark. He would not take anything for it.

He stood with Mom on the edge of the road and drank from her one glass and talked about the summer of 1976, when it was nearly this dry, and how Ray Kranz had cut the ditches that year too.

“He did?” I said. I had never heard that.

“Oh, sure,” Don said. “Everybody did. Your dad and I put up two hundred bales off the river road in ’76. Your mother brought tea that year too.” He looked at Mom. “Same hat, I think.”