The Baler My Cousin Wanted to Scrap

I saw his lips moving and I leaned close. He was humming “Bringing in the Sheaves,” the way he used to hum it the whole length of the field when I was a little girl riding the wagon.

I had promised myself all morning that I wasn’t going to cry, and I did not keep that promise.

I didn’t see Brock coming until he was halfway across the stubble.

He must have heard from someone at the feed store, or from Retta, or maybe from one of the boys. He was walking, not driving, with his hands at his sides. His pickup was parked out on the road behind my car.

He stopped beside Grandpa’s open window and didn’t say a word.

Grandpa opened his eyes and looked at him.

He looked at him for a long time. Long enough that Brock’s face went red, and he looked down at the ground and then back up again, because Grandpa was not looking away.

“Brock,” Grandpa said.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Brock said. His voice cracked a little on it.

“I’ve been sitting here working it out,” Grandpa said. “Jana has my baler. That means somebody sold it to her.”

Brock swallowed hard. “Yes, sir. I did.”

“For how much?”

There was a long pause, with the baler thumping in the field behind us. Then Brock said, “Three hundred dollars, Grandpa.”

Grandpa nodded slowly. He turned and looked back at the field, at Tucker on the tractor and the bales dropping out of the chute, one after another, every single one of them tied.

“Your grandmother drove the tractor the first summer I had it,” he said. “1962. She was carrying Jana’s daddy. I’d stack and she’d drive, and she’d holler back at me when a bale came out crooked.”

Brock didn’t say anything. He just stood there by the window and listened, the way the rest of us were listening.

“That baler made the payment on this family’s ground three years running,” Grandpa said. “Every bale that came out of it, I sold to somebody who needed it. Dairy people, back then. Horse people now, sounds like.”

He turned his head and looked back at Brock.

“You were going to sell that sound for three hundred dollars,” he said. “And you didn’t ask me.”

It was not loud. Grandpa never raised his voice a day in his life. But I watched my cousin take it the way a man takes a blow he knows he has earned, standing straight, not looking away.

“I didn’t think you’d care,” Brock said. His voice was rough. “I thought it was just old iron in the way.”

“You didn’t ask,” Grandpa said again, just as quiet as the first time.

“No, sir,” Brock said. “I didn’t. I should have.”

Grandpa held his eyes a moment longer. Then he reached out through the open window and put his hand on Brock’s arm, the same way he had held on to mine.

“Well,” he said. “Now you know.”

Brock stood there with his grandfather’s hand on his arm. He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to say anything more, and I didn’t blame him one bit for it.

Grandpa wanted to stay until the field was done, so we stayed.

Brock stood by the car most of the time. Once, he walked over and threw bales up to Reed on the wagon for twenty minutes, in his good boots, without anybody asking him to.