The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

Since then, her thirty-five acres of brome along the creek had just grown up and laid down every year. A neighbor brush hogged it once in a while to keep the cedars from taking over.

I drove up on a Sunday afternoon after church and sat on her porch and asked her if she would let us put up her brome that summer.

“For what?” she said. “I haven’t had a cow on this place in six years.”

“For the horse people,” I said. “I’ll pay you a share of every bale we sell, right off the top.”

She looked at me a long while. Then she laughed, a small, happy laugh. “Ansel’s baler,” she said. “You got Ansel’s baler running. I heard about it at the post office.”

“The boys did,” I said. “I just bought the parts.”

“Then you cut my hay,” she said. “And don’t you dare pay me. You bring me a few of those little bales for my flower beds, and you come sit on this porch and tell me how it goes.”

I paid her anyway, a share off the top of every load, in an envelope I tucked under her porch swing cushion each Sunday. She never mentioned it, and neither did I.

Cordell had an old sickle bar mower and a side delivery rake in the back of his shed that he hadn’t used in a decade. He brought them both over and spent a whole day with Tucker sharpening sections and fixing bent rake teeth.

We cut the brome the second week of June. It was heading out, a little later than ideal, but thick and green and sweet smelling, the kind of hay that makes a horse woman’s eyes light up.

We let it lay two days in the sun, then raked it into windrows. On the third morning I walked out, grabbed a twist of hay, and wrung it in my hands the way Grandpa taught me when I was ten. It snapped dry. No dampness in the middle.

The day we baled that first field was hot as an oven, a sunny June afternoon with not a cloud anywhere. The heat came up off the stubble in waves you could see.

Cordell drove his green tractor, because he wanted to, and the old red baler thumped along behind it, picking up the windrows and packing them tight and dropping them out the chute onto the ground.

I had borrowed a flat hay wagon from Retta’s shed. We hitched it to our old pickup, and Reed drove it across the field in low gear behind the bales, so proud of himself he could barely sit still in the seat.

I stood up on that wagon in a sleeveless gray T-shirt and my work gloves, with my hair in a braid down my back to keep it off my neck. Tucker walked alongside in his ball cap and threw bales up to me, one after another after another.

I stacked them the way Grandpa did. A row tied side up, a row strings to the side, every layer turned across the one below so the load locked together and wouldn’t slide on the road home.

The sweat ran down Tucker’s neck and soaked his shirt dark. His face went red, then redder. He never complained once, not one time all afternoon.