The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

Four girls and a borrowed trailer

It took her three days to put the crew together. I did not help with that part. I stayed out of it on purpose.

The first girl she called was Lark, who had been her best friend since they were five years old and stuck in the same church nursery. Lark is small and quick and stubborn as a barn cat, and she said yes before Brynlee finished asking.

The other two were sisters from down our road, fifteen and sixteen. They had shown steers at the county fair every summer since they were nine, so they were not afraid of work, or of dirt, or of a thing that weighs more than they do.

They sat around my kitchen table on a Tuesday morning and worked it out on the back of a church bulletin. Brynlee did the math. She has always been good at math.

Fifty cents a bale, picked up in the field and stacked in the barn. That was a fair rate around here for kids, a little under what Gaylon charged, because they had no baler and could only do the hauling and stacking.

“Who’s going to drive?” Lark asked. Nobody at the table had more than a learner’s permit.

They all looked at me.

I am a school cook. I have cooked lunch for four hundred children every school day for fifteen years. I get my summers off, and I had planned to paint the bathroom and maybe read a book on the porch.

“I’ll drive,” I said. “But I am not throwing a single bale. And nobody rides on top of a load on the road. Not one time.”

They agreed to that faster than I expected.

We had a pickup, a tan 1993 Ford three-quarter-ton with a good hitch. What we did not have was a trailer. You cannot haul square bales in a pickup bed, not enough of them to make it worth the gas.

That was when Brynlee said, “What about the man at the feed store? The one who didn’t laugh?”

Odell

His name was Odell. He was eighty-one that summer, and he farmed a hundred and sixty acres of fescue and orchard grass on the gravel road past the river bridge.

We drove out on a Wednesday morning. He was in his yard, sharpening a hoe on a grinding wheel, and he did not seem surprised to see us at all.

Brynlee did the talking. She told him what they wanted to do, and how much, and that her mama would drive, and that they would be careful.

He listened to all of it. Then he walked us around behind his machine shed to a twenty-foot flatbed trailer sitting in the weeds.

“Tires are good,” he said. “Lights don’t work. You’ll want to fix those before you go on the highway.”

“How much to rent it?” Brynlee asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “You can pay me by putting up my second cutting. I’ve got about eleven hundred bales coming in two weeks, and the boy I had last year moved off to the city.”

Brynlee put out her hand to shake on it. Odell looked at it, and then he shook it, firm, the way a man shakes on a cattle deal.

Then he looked at me. “Your daddy put up hay for me in 1979,” he said. “He was the best stacker I ever saw. Never lost a load.”

I did not know that. I had to look off at the trees for a minute.