The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

We took water breaks under the cottonwoods by the creek. Retta drove out in her old car with a cooler of lemonade and sat in a lawn chair in the shade and watched us like it was a ball game.

At one point she said, “That’s the prettiest sound I’ve heard in six years.” She meant the baler. I knew she was thinking about her husband, and I didn’t say anything back.

By suppertime, with the sun still up, we had five hundred and twelve bales stacked in Cordell’s barn and mine, clear to the rafters. My arms shook so bad I could hardly hold my fork.

The next morning, I pinned one notice on the corkboard at the feed store in town, between a lost dog and a used saddle somebody wanted two hundred dollars for.

Small square brome hay. Clean, no rain on it. $9 a bale. You haul. Then my phone number in big numbers at the bottom.

By that Sunday afternoon, I had eleven calls. I had to start writing names on the back of a feed sack because I ran out of room on the kitchen notepad.

By the next Saturday, the first ones started pulling in. A woman from the next county with a two horse trailer, who wanted sixty bales and asked if she could take a hundred. A retired couple with a pickup who took thirty and came back the next week for thirty more.

A girl in 4-H, maybe fourteen, came with her mother for twenty bales for her barrel horse. She asked Reed how the baler tied its own knots, and he spent fifteen minutes explaining billhooks to her while her mother and I loaded.

The grandmothers were the ones who touched me most. Women my mother’s age, with gray braids and work boots, who had kept horses for forty years and did not want to quit just because the hay had gotten too big for them.

“I can’t lift a round bale,” one of them told me, almost apologizing. “And my husband’s gone now. These little ones are the only way I can keep my mare.”

She bought fifty and I threw in five more. She stood in my yard holding one of those bales against her chest like it was a casserole somebody had brought after a funeral.

We put up that whole first cutting in eleven days, working around my shifts at the clinic and the two days it rained. Thirteen hundred and forty bales off Retta’s thirty-five acres.

Some days Tucker drove the tractor, once Cordell trusted him on it. On his days home, my husband threw bales and hauled loads from breakfast to supper, and I drove. Reed rode the wagon and learned to stack, and by the end his loads were straighter than mine.

And every load that went out of my yard was money in the coffee can on top of the refrigerator. I set aside Retta’s share first, then the twine, the diesel for Cordell’s tractor, and the parts.

The rest was split three ways, between me and my two sons. I wanted them to know what their own work was worth, in their own hands, in their own bank accounts.

I hadn’t heard a word from Brock since the day I towed the baler home.

Then, right around the Fourth of July, the calls started to change.

The first one was a horse woman from up by the river. She said, “I got your number from your cousin. I hope that’s all right.”