The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

Reed looked at me over the top of the load, and I just nodded. Let him, I meant. Let him help. It was his grandfather’s baler too.

When the last windrow went through, Tucker shut off the power takeoff and the whole field went quiet. You could hear the cicadas in the cottonwoods and the creek running low over the rocks.

Grandpa said, “Bring me one of those.”

Tucker carried a bale over and set it on the ground by the window. Grandpa leaned out as far as he could and put his hand on the strings. He pulled one up with his finger and looked hard at the knot.

“Good knot,” he said. “Who timed those knotters?”

“Cordell helped us,” Tucker said. “But Reed’s the one who found the bad knife.”

Grandpa looked over at Reed, who was standing behind his brother and turning red as a stop sign.

“Then you’ve got the brain for it,” Grandpa said. “That’s the hard part, son. The rest is just muscle.”

Reed told that story to everybody he met for the rest of the year, including our pastor, the mailman and two different dogs at the clinic.

I drove Grandpa back to the assisted living in the late afternoon. He was tired, but he held a twist of brome in his hand the whole way, and he wouldn’t let the aide take it from him when we got him inside.

When I came the next Sunday after church, that twist of hay was on his dresser, propped against the frame of my grandmother’s picture.

“I want to hear it again next summer,” he said, before I had even sat down.

“You will, Grandpa,” I said. “First cutting. I’ll come get you myself.”

I would like to tell you Brock and I were close after that, but that isn’t how families work, and it isn’t how men like Brock work either. He was polite at the Labor Day picnic. He nodded at me in church. He kept sending me horse people.

I could have reminded him of it every time I saw him. I didn’t. I had what I wanted, and Grandpa had heard his baler run. Rubbing it in would have taken something away from both of those things.

The next May, on a Saturday morning, bright and cool, I was out by the shed with the boys getting the baler ready for another season. Tucker was greasing fittings. Reed was checking the knotters, even though he had checked them twice already that week.

Brock’s pickup pulled into the yard and stopped by the elm.

He got out and stood by the baler for a while, just looking at it. He put his hand flat on the bale chamber, the same way Grandpa had put his hand on those strings.

“I had thirty-one calls last winter,” he said. “Thirty-one. People wanting squares. Most of them women by themselves.”

“I know,” I said. “You sent every one of them to me. I appreciated it.”

“There’s a woman out by the lake with four mares,” he said. “She says she won’t take round bales. She’s tried for two years to get somebody to put up squares for her, and she’ll pay ten dollars a bale.”

He took off his cap and turned it around in his hands. He looked at the baler, then at Reed by the knotters, then back at me.

“Jana,” he said. “Could I borrow Grandpa’s baler?”