The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

Brock had both doors of Grandpa’s machine shed rolled open when I pulled into the yard that first Tuesday in June, and the morning light fell straight across the old red baler like it was on display.

He was standing beside it with a tape measure in one hand and his phone in the other. He didn’t look up until I was close enough to smell the grease and the old hay dust.

“Scrap man’s coming Thursday,” he said. “Three hundred bucks, and he hauls it himself. Best offer I’m going to get on a thing like this.”

I looked at the baler. A New Holland 268 Hayliner, the paint faded to the color of a barn that has seen fifty winters. The pickup teeth were bent in a few places, and the bale chamber still had chaff in it.

“That’s Grandpa’s baler,” I said, and I heard my own voice come out smaller than I meant it to.

“It’s a boat anchor, Jana.” He laughed, not mean exactly, just sure of himself. “Nobody bales small squares anymore. I’ve got two round balers that do in a day what this did in a week.”

I want to be fair to my cousin, because that is how Grandpa raised us. Brock is 46. He farms close to 2,000 acres in northeast Kansas, Grandpa’s ground plus everything he has rented and bought since, and he works harder than almost anyone I know.

To a man running that many acres, a sixty-year-old baler is not a memory. It is a thing in the way. It takes up a stall in the shed where a newer planter could sit out of the weather.

But there was one thing he hadn’t done, and it was the thing that made my face go hot standing there in the shed doorway.

“Does Grandpa know?” I asked him.

Brock rolled up the tape measure with a snap. “Grandpa’s 88 and lives in a room with a call button. He doesn’t need to know about every piece of iron I move.”

“He bought that baler new, Brock. Off the lot. He tells that story every Christmas.”

“In 1962. I know the story. Everybody knows the story.” He shrugged. “He signed the machinery over to me when he went into the home. It’s mine to deal with.”

And that was true. I had been at the kitchen table the day Grandpa signed those papers, two winters ago, after his fall. The land went into a trust for all of us, and the machinery went to Brock, because Brock was the one farming it.

So I could not tell Brock he had no right. He had every right. I could have called his dad and started a family fight, but Uncle Dale had his own heart troubles and didn’t need a war over a baler, and my own dad passed four years ago.

“I’ll give you three hundred for it,” I said.

Brock laughed again, louder this time. “What are you going to do with a square baler? You work at a vet clinic. You give dogs their rabies shots.”

“Then you won’t mind selling it to me,” I said. “Same money as the scrap man, and you don’t have to wait till Thursday.”

He looked at me like I had told him I was going to raise ostriches. Then he shrugged and stuck out his hand. “Cash. And you haul it off before Thursday, or the scrap man takes it anyway.”