The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

The feed store

He kept his word on Saturday morning.

I did not think he would do it with us there. But Brynlee needed a new pair of gloves, because hers had worn clear through at the palms, so we went to the feed store at about nine.

It was full, the way it always is on a Saturday in August. Farmers at the counter waiting on their tickets. Two men by the seed corn. The same smell of molasses feed and dust.

Gaylon was already there. I think he had been waiting for us.

He did not make a speech. He is not a speech man. He just turned around from the counter when Brynlee walked in, and he said it loud enough for everybody.

“Back in June I stood right here and said girls can’t throw bales,” he said. “I was wrong. These four girls put up nine thousand bales this summer, and they put up my north field in the rain when nobody else could. I’m sorry I said it, Brynlee. I’m sorry I said it in front of these men.”

Nobody laughed this time. One of the men who had laughed in June looked down at his boots and did not look up for a while.

Brynlee said, “Thank you, Uncle Gaylon.”

That was all. She did not say anything else, and neither did I. We did not need to.

She went over to the rack by the register and took down a new pair of leather gloves, and she paid for them with her own money, out of the summer’s pay.

The end of the summer

They finished the season with a few more than nine thousand bales. Brynlee wrote the last number on the calendar on the twenty-fourth of August, the day before school started back.

After gas and a new set of tires for Odell’s trailer, which the girls insisted on buying him, it came to a little over a thousand dollars for each of them.

Lark bought a used saddle. The sisters put most of theirs toward a heifer to show next year. Brynlee put hers in the bank at the branch in town, all but twenty dollars, which she spent on a box of chocolates for Odell’s wife.

My husband came home that Friday and walked out to look at the trailer, the way he had every Friday. Then he came back in and stood behind Brynlee’s chair at supper and put his hand on top of her head for a minute. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

Gaylon

Gaylon has been different since then. Not all at once. He is sixty-one, and men his age do not change all at once.

But he came by the house in September with a box of my daddy’s old things that he had kept in his machine shed all these years. There was a pair of hay hooks in it, worn shiny on the handles, and a roll of athletic tape so old the glue had gone dry.

He set the hay hooks on the kitchen table in front of Brynlee.

“Those were your granddaddy’s,” he said. “He’d want you to have them.”

She picked one up and turned it over in her taped hand. Then she got up and hugged him, and he stood there with his arms out for a second like he did not know what to do, and then he hugged her back.

That spring, the first Saturday in May, we were in the feed store again. The farmers were at the counter. The smell was the same. Gaylon was there, with his cap pushed back and his hands in his back pockets, the way he has always stood.

He saw Brynlee and walked over to her, right there in front of all of them.

“My boys are all going to be at football again come August,” he said, and then, so every man at that counter could hear him, he asked if her girls could bail him out again this summer.