The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

I said, “From Brock?”

She said, “I called him asking if he had any small squares. He said no, he only makes rounds, but his cousin has squares. He sounded a little sore about it, honey.”

I thanked her and wrote her down for forty bales on the back of the feed sack.

Then it happened again two days later. And again the next week. And again, and again, until I stopped being surprised by it.

It turns out that when people want small square bales in our part of Kansas, they call the biggest hay operation they can think of. And that was Brock. He had his name painted on the doors of his semi.

Now he had to tell them, call my cousin Jana. Every time somebody asked him for a square bale, he had to say my name out loud and give out my number.

And every one of those people knew whose baler I was using, because I told them all while I helped them load.

“It was my Grandpa Ansel’s,” I would say. “He bought it new in 1962. My cousin was going to scrap it for three hundred dollars, so I bought it instead.”

I never said it mean. I only told it the way it happened. But this is a small county, and people talk at the elevator and the co-op and on the church steps, and the story got around on its own legs.

One Saturday in late July, Brock pulled into my yard. It was midmorning, bright and already hot, and the boys were in the shed greasing the baler for the second cutting.

He got out of his pickup and stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the stack of bales by the barn.

“You’re doing all right,” he said.

“We are,” I said. “The boys are doing most of it.”

“I’ve had nineteen calls,” he said. “Nineteen. People asking me for squares.” He shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know there were that many horses in this county.”

“There are a lot of horses,” I said. “And a lot of women who can’t lift a round bale, and can’t afford a tractor to feed two old geldings.”

“I’m not here to fight with you,” he said.

“I didn’t think you were, Brock.”

He stood there a while longer, kicking at the gravel with the toe of his boot. Then he said, “Have you told Grandpa?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. I wanted to bring it to him finished.”

He nodded slowly and looked at his boots, and I could see he was thinking about the day he told me Grandpa didn’t need to know. He didn’t say it. He got back in his pickup and drove off without another word.

By August, Retta’s brome came back for a second cutting. We cut it again the second week of August and baled it as fast as it dried.

On a Thursday afternoon in August, we sold bale number 2,000 to a man and his grown daughter who drove down from Nebraska with a gooseneck trailer. They took a hundred and twenty.

When the last bale went on their trailer, Tucker took a carpenter’s pencil out of his pocket and wrote on the end of it: 2,000. He handed it up to the daughter and told her what it was. She shook his hand like he had won something.