The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

I drove to the bank in town and came back with fifteen twenty dollar bills in an envelope. Brock counted them on the hood of his pickup, every single one, and he laughed the whole time he did it.

“You’ll see,” he said, folding the money into his shirt pocket. “Nobody bales small squares anymore. You’ll be selling it to the scrap man yourself by fall.”

I didn’t answer him. I was already walking around to the top of the baler to look at the knotters.

I should tell you why I didn’t think it was a foolish thing to do, even though I know it looked that way to my cousin and probably to half the county.

I have worked as a tech at a mixed animal vet clinic for nineteen years. I give vaccines, I hold tails, I clean up after colic surgeries, and I listen to people talk while they wait for the doctor.

And for the last three or four years, the horse people have all been saying the same thing to me across that counter. They can’t find small square bales anywhere.

The big operations went to round bales and big squares a long time ago. They are cheaper to make and easier to move with a loader tractor. I understand why. I would do the same if I farmed 2,000 acres.

But a woman with two old geldings in a pasture behind her house cannot move an eight hundred pound round bale with her hands, and she cannot afford a tractor just to feed two horses.

She needs a bale she can pick up. A bale she can drop in a pickup bed, carry to a stall, and flake out by hand into a feeder. A small square, about fifty pounds, tied with two strings.

I had heard one client tell another she drove ninety miles into Missouri for a load of squares last winter. I had heard a retired schoolteacher say she paid eleven dollars a bale and was glad to get it.

I had been hearing it so long that when Brock said nobody bales small squares anymore, a little voice in my head answered him. Nobody but the people who need them most.

My boys were sitting on the porch when I came home that afternoon, the sun still high over the cottonwoods along the creek and the dog asleep under the swing.

Tucker is 16, tall and quiet like his father. Reed is 13 and talks enough for both of them. I sat down on the step between them and told them what I had done with three hundred dollars.

Reed’s mouth fell open. “You bought Grandpa Ansel’s baler? The red one? The one we used to ride behind?”

“For three hundred dollars,” I said. “Cash. Brock counted it twice.”

Tucker didn’t say anything right away. He has always been the one who thinks first. Then he said, “Does it run?”

“I have no idea,” I said, and Reed laughed so hard he nearly fell off the step.

Both boys had ridden on the hay wagon behind that baler when they were little. Grandpa would set them up on the bales with a jug of water between them and tell them to holler if a bale came up crooked.

He hummed “Bringing in the Sheaves” the whole length of every field, over the thump of the plunger. Reed was too young to remember much of it. Tucker remembered all of it, and I could see it in his face.