The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

“We’ll need a tractor to pull it home,” Tucker said. “And somebody who knows knotters. I don’t know the first thing about knotters.”

“I know who,” I said.

Cordell lives two miles down the gravel from us. He ran the implement shop in town for thirty-one years before he retired, and he still has a shop behind his house with a wood stove and a radio that only gets the farm station.

He is seventy-six and moves slow, but his hands do not. When I called him that afternoon and told him what I had, he was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“A 268,” he finally said. “Your granddad’s? The one he bought off the lot in ’62? I sold him parts for that machine for thirty years.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Brock had the scrap man coming.”

“I’ll bring the tractor in the morning,” he said. “And don’t you let anybody touch those knotters till I see them. Not even you.”

He came at seven the next morning with his green tractor, an old one he kept as nice as the day it was sold. We hitched the baler and he towed it the six miles to our place at fifteen miles an hour while I followed behind with my flashers on.

Brock’s pickup passed us going the other way on the blacktop. He honked twice and waved out the window, grinning. I waved back. I wasn’t going to give him anything else.

We parked the baler under the big elm by our shed, in the shade. Then Cordell showed the boys the parts. The pickup reel that lifts the hay off the ground. The auger and the feeder fork that push it into the chamber. The plunger that packs it into a bale, stroke after stroke after stroke.

The needles that swing up through the bale at the end to bring the twine around. And the knotters, two of them, sitting up on top of the chamber like a pair of little iron hands folded in prayer.

“Everything else on a square baler is just muscle,” Cordell said. “This is the brain. Your granddad used to say a knotter is the closest thing to a miracle a farmer ever owns.”

Reed leaned in so close his nose almost touched the iron. “How does it tie a knot all by itself? Nobody’s touching it.”

Cordell grinned at him. “That’s what we’re going to find out, son. You and me and your brother. We’re going to find out together.”

It took us three Saturdays and most of the afternoons in between, whenever I got off early from the clinic. My husband drives a feed truck for the co-op four days a week, so on his days home he spelled me on supper and errands.

Cordell taught the boys the names. The billhook, which turns and catches the twine and makes the loop. The twine disc, which holds the end. The tucker fingers. The stripper arm, which pulls the finished knot off the billhook. The twine knife, which cuts it loose.

I ordered parts from the New Holland dealer two counties over, and some of them had to come from as far as Pennsylvania. A new billhook. Two twine discs. A set of tucker fingers. A shear bolt for the flywheel. One new twine knife.