He swathed it in long even windrows, and the whole yard smelled like cut hay for three days, that sweet green smell that gets into your clothes and your hair.
It dried perfect. Not a drop of rain.
On Monday our neighbor Wilbur Pederson came over with his baler and his two boys, and they baled it in small squares, and three neighbors came with hay racks to haul it off.
Nobody charged us a dime. Wilbur said Gordy had helped him with his calving in March and they would call it square.
That is how it works out here. Nobody keeps a ledger, but everybody remembers.
When the bales were off, Gordy hooked up the rotary mower and went over the whole field again, short, twice.
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He went around the cottonwood slow and careful, the way my father taught him.
When he was done, the stubble was smooth enough to walk on in Sunday shoes.
Brooke came out that evening after work and walked from the shelterbelt to the tree in her flip-flops, just to see.
“It’s perfect,” she said. She stood under the tree a long time with her hand on the bark.
The Friday before, Gordy and Cole and the Pederson boys went around to the four churches with three pickups and Wilbur’s flatbed trailer.
They loaded the chairs and tied them down and hauled them out.
They set them up Saturday morning in rows, ten across on each side of an aisle Cole had marked with baling twine and two stakes.
The chairs went every which way in color and style, but the rows were dead straight.
“Cattle buyer,” Gordy said, watching Cole sight down the rows. “He’d have them chairs lined up for the sale ring.”
Neighbors kept coming that morning, all morning. The Hagens brought six of their big round bales on a bale spear and set them along the field edge behind the chairs, for anybody who wanted to sit up high.
The little kids climbed them before nine o’clock and never got down all day. Somebody’s grandson fell off one twice and laughed both times.
Then came the organ.
My grandmother’s pump organ is an old Estey, walnut, with carved little shelves on the top for kerosene lamps that haven’t been lit since Eisenhower.
It sits in my front room. I learned to play on it when I was six.
Brooke learned on it too. She was four.
She would sit on my lap and pump the pedals while I played “Jesus Loves Me” with one finger, and she thought she was doing all of it.
A pump organ needs no electricity. You push the two pedals with your feet, the bellows fill, and the reeds sing.
That is all it ever needed. My grandmother played it through the Dirty Thirties by lamplight.