The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

It was the Olsen place. Bud Olsen’s hay barn.

Bud is in his eighties and still puts up his own alfalfa, and everybody in town knows that barn because it is the big red one you can see from the highway.

First cutting had come off the week before.

Everybody in the county had been fighting rain, and a lot of people baled that hay a little before it was dry enough because they were afraid of losing it.

I knew what that meant, because my dad had taught me when I was a girl. Hay put up too wet heats inside the stack.

It cooks itself for a week or two, and then one afternoon it finds air and it goes up all at once.

Mike came in from the yard because he had heard the tones through the window. He looked at me, and I looked at him.

“She’ll be on that truck,” he said.

“I know it.”

“Get in the pickup,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

We got there about twenty minutes after the first tones. There was smoke you could see from five miles off, a thick yellow-brown column standing straight up in the still air.

We pulled off on the shoulder at the edge of Bud’s hayfield, well back, out of the way.

There was already one pickup parked down there by the ditch, and I knew it before I could see the plate.

It was Dad. He had heard it on his own scanner.

He was sitting behind the wheel with the window rolled down and his arm on the door, and he did not turn his head when we pulled in behind him.

Ward’s engine was there, the red pumper from our station, parked at the end of the barn lot by the water tank.

Ward was on the pump panel himself. With him were two retired men from our department, both past seventy, pulling hose.

That was all. That was everybody Ward could get on a weekday afternoon.

Bryce was at work at the grain elevator two counties over, and the rest of our roster was in the field or in Salina or at a desk somewhere.

Then Dale’s truck came over the hill from the east with its lights going. It pulled in behind Ward’s and four people got out of it in full gear.

One of them had a long red-brown braid tucked up under her helmet. I could see the end of it hanging out the back of her collar.

Hay fires do not get put out the way a house fire does. You cannot drown a stack of round bales.

The water just runs off the outside, and the fire keeps burning down in the middle where you cannot reach it.

What you do is protect everything around it.

You keep water on the nearest buildings, and somebody with a loader pulls the burning bales out of the stack one at a time and spreads them out in the open where they can burn down.

Bud’s machine shed sat about forty feet from the hay barn. Inside it was his tractor, his baler, and his swather, which is the better part of his whole operation.

A neighbor showed up with a loader tractor and started pulling bales.

Dale and Tessa took a line off Ward’s engine and set up between the barn and the machine shed and kept a wall of water on the shed.

Ward could have put one of his own men on that line. He did not have one to spare.