The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

The parts came to a little over six hundred dollars. That was twice what I had paid for the whole baler, and I lay awake one night staring at the ceiling and wondering if Brock had been right all along.

The first time we hooked it to Cordell’s tractor and fed it hay, it was a Saturday afternoon in the yard, with a few old bales from his barn broken up and spread out on the grass.

Tucker sat on the tractor. Cordell stood by the power takeoff lever with his hand on it. I stood by the bale chute with my heart in my throat and the dog sitting at my feet.

The baler came alive with a sound I had not heard in fifteen years. Thump. Thump. Thump. The plunger packing the hay. The needles swinging up. A clatter of iron, and the smell of old grease warming up.

And then a bale slid out of the chute with one string tied tight and the other string hanging loose like a shoelace.

The next one came out with no strings at all. It fell apart on the grass like a loaf of bread somebody had dropped on the kitchen floor.

Reed groaned out loud. Tucker shut off the power takeoff and sat there with both hands on the wheel. Cordell just nodded, like he had expected it all along.

“Now we know it’s not the needle timing,” he said. “That’s good news. Now we hunt.”

It was Reed who found it. He had been sitting on an overturned bucket next to the left knotter for an hour, watching it work in slow motion while Cordell turned the flywheel by hand, one stroke at a time.

“The knife’s not cutting,” he said. “Look. It’s chewing the twine instead of cutting it. So the knot gets pulled apart before it’s done.”

Cordell got down on one knee beside him, which is not easy for a man of seventy-six, and he looked. Then he turned and looked at Reed for a long moment.

“Son,” he said, “you just did in one hour what took me three days the first time I ever saw that happen.”

The twine knife on that side was worn round as a butter knife. We had ordered a new one for the right knotter and not the left, because the left one looked fine. It didn’t cut. It tore. I drove to the dealer that same afternoon and bought a new one off the counter.

The next bale Reed watched come out of that chute was tied tight on both strings. He grabbed it with both hands and lifted it over his head like a state championship trophy.

Tucker laughed out loud, which he does not do often. Cordell wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and said it was just the dust. I let him say it.

Now we had a baler that tied. What we didn’t have was any hay to put through it.

Brock had every acre of Grandpa’s ground in corn, soybeans and wheat, and his own hay was all going into round bales for his cows. I didn’t want anything from him anyway, and I didn’t ask.

Retta lives up the creek road about four miles, in a white farmhouse with a porch swing and a flower bed she keeps up herself at eighty. Her husband ran a few cows and put up brome for them until he passed six years ago.