Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

January

The snow started on a Thursday in the middle of January. It was the heavy, wet kind that comes in off a warm spell, the kind that sticks to everything and doesn’t blow. By Friday night we had fourteen inches.

Then it rained on top of it. Freezing rain, most of Friday night, an inch of ice locking down over all that wet snow. I lay awake listening to it tick against the bedroom window.

Alden got called out at midnight. Lines were down all over the county under the weight of it. He kissed my forehead in the dark and went.

The phone rang at six in the morning. I thought it was Alden.

It was Clara.

“Aunt Anne?” Her voice was very small. “The barn roof fell down. It fell on the hay. Dad’s out there with a shovel and he won’t come in.”

I sat straight up.

“Is your dad hurt, honey? Is anybody hurt?”

“No. He was in the house when it went. It was so loud. The calves are scared. They’re all bawling.”

“Where’s Grandma Vi?”

“She’s here. She told me to call you.”

I want you to know I didn’t think about the bales in the creek. Not for one second. I thought about a ten-year-old girl standing in a cold kitchen listening to her calves bawl, and her dad out in the dark with a scoop shovel against a whole fallen roof.

“I’m coming, Clara. Tell your grandma I’m coming.”

Loading

I was in the tractor before the coffee finished. I didn’t even drink it.

My bale yard is behind the machine shed, out of the wind. I had twenty-three bales left there, the rest of my winter, plus the ones I’d been feeding off of. Twenty-three bales, thirty-one cows, and four months to grass. I was going to be buying hay before spring no matter what.

I did the math in my head while the tractor warmed up. It was not good math. But it was not math that could wait, either.

My flatbed will carry two round bales if you set them right. My bale trailer behind it carries four more. Six a trip. I figured four trips, and I’d take the last two on the truck alone.

Twenty bales. That would leave me three, and whatever Alden and I could buy at the end of the month.

I loaded in the dark with the tractor lights on and the ice cracking off the bale spear every time I backed up. My hands were numb inside my gloves by the second bale. I didn’t stop.

Six on, chained down. I climbed into the flatbed and pulled out onto the county road, slow, because the road was a sheet of ice under the snow.

It is a quarter mile to Kent’s lane. It took me fifteen minutes.