The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

The brother who stayed and the brother who left

I should tell you who Gaylon is, so you understand why that laugh landed the way it did.

Gaylon is my daddy’s younger brother. Daddy passed four years ago this October, of his heart, in the front seat of his own pickup at the end of a hayfield. He had just finished the last load of the season.

The two of them put up hay together for twenty years. Then Daddy’s back gave out and he went to work at the elevator in town, and Gaylon kept the crew and built it up into what it is now.

He runs four balers and a bale wagon and, most summers, eight or nine boys. He puts up hay for half the county. If you farm around here and you do not bale your own, you know his number by heart.

He is not a cruel man. I want to say that plainly, because it would be easy to make him one in the telling. He sat with our family at the funeral home until midnight. He carried the casket.

But Gaylon has a story he tells, and he has told it so many times that it has worn a groove in him.

Eleven years ago a boy on his crew fell off the top of a stack on a moving trailer. The trailer hit a washout at the edge of a field. The boy landed wrong and broke his collarbone.

The boy healed fine. He plays softball in the church league now. But the farmer’s insurance man came out to talk to Gaylon afterward, and whatever that man said, it scared my uncle half to death.

After that, Gaylon got careful in a way that turned into something else. He hired only big boys. Football boys. Boys whose daddies he knew. And somewhere along the way, careful turned into a rule, and the rule turned into a joke he told at the feed store.

That was his reason. I understand it. It was still wrong to say what he said, the way he said it, in front of a room full of men who would remember it every time they saw my girl.

Why I did not call him

My husband was home that night. He works on a highway paving crew, and that summer they were on a job two hours north, so he was gone Monday morning to Friday afternoon.

Brynlee told him at supper, with the sun still coming in the kitchen window. He set his fork down and was quiet a long while, which is how he gets when he is truly put out.

“You want me to go talk to him?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want anybody to talk to him.”

People have asked me since why I did not just pick up the phone and set my uncle straight. I thought about it. I had the phone in my hand that night, out on the back porch.

But it was his crew. It was his trailer and his balers and his name on the checks. Nobody can make a man hire you. You can shame him into it, maybe, but then your girl is working for a man who does not want her there.

And I knew Brynlee. If I fixed it for her, she would carry that around too. So I put the phone down and went back inside.

She was sitting at the kitchen table with those new gloves in front of her.

“Mama,” she said, “what if we just did it ourselves?”