The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

Friday night and Saturday morning

My husband came home Friday afternoon and walked straight past the house to look at the trailer we had towed home.

He had it up on blocks before I could get him a glass of tea. He rewired the lights, all of them, and put new bearings in the left wheel because he did not like how it sounded.

He checked the hitch and the safety chains twice. Then he made Brynlee hook it up and unhook it three times while he watched.

“You’re the one riding behind your mama,” he told her. “You check it every morning. Every single morning. You don’t ask her if she checked it.”

“Yes sir,” she said, and she meant it a different way than she had said it at the feed store.

I want to say this about him, because people always ask where the girl’s daddy was in all this. He was two hours north pouring asphalt in ninety-five-degree heat, so we could pay for the house we were sitting in. And every Friday that summer he came home and fixed whatever we had broken.

On Saturday morning I did one more thing. I drove to the farmers’ insurance office in town, which kept Saturday hours, and asked to talk to the same man who had scared my uncle eleven years before.

He was retired, as it turned out, but the young woman who had his desk now was kind and plain about it. She told me what she told every family that sent kids out on hay crews.

Keep the loads low and tied on the road. Nobody rides on top of a moving load. Water every hour. Get a signed note from every parent. And make sure every farmer knows who is on his property.

We did every one of those things. Brynlee typed up the note herself and every mother signed it at my kitchen table.

The first day

The first day was a Monday in the middle of June. Odell’s neighbor had a field already baled and lying, and he had heard about us at church and called.

It was eighty-eight degrees by ten in the morning. The bales were small squares, about fifty pounds each, some of them heavier where the grass had been thick.

I drove the pickup down the windrows in low gear, slow as a walk. The girls walked beside the trailer and threw bales up, and one of them stood on the trailer and stacked.

By eleven o’clock Lark had thrown up in the ditch. By noon the younger sister had a blister the size of a quarter on each palm, right through her gloves.

They put up a hundred and forty bales that day. Gaylon’s boys could do that many in an hour.

At supper, in my kitchen, not one of those girls could lift a fork without wincing. The younger sister fell asleep with her head on the table and a dinner roll in her hand.

Nobody said anything about quitting. But I saw Brynlee look at her hands under the table, and I saw her face.

Taping her hands

The next morning I was up at five, the way I am on school days. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table, and Brynlee came down in her gray T-shirt with her hands held out in front of her like they belonged to somebody else.

Her palms were raw. Two of the blisters had broken in the night. She did not complain. She just showed me.

I keep a roll of white athletic tape in the drawer by the stove, from when she played basketball in junior high. I got it out, and I sat her down across from me, and I took her hand.

I taped her palms the way my daddy taped his, the way he showed me once when I was about nine. A strip across the palm, a strip around the base of each finger, then one around the wrist to hold it all.

She watched me do it. Neither of us said anything for a while. The kitchen was quiet except for the coffee maker and a mourning dove out by the clothesline.

“Did Grandpa do this?” she asked.

“Every morning in hay season,” I said. “Your grandma did it for him at this same table. Then when she got sick, I did it.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Mama, I’m going to do this. I don’t care how many it takes.”

I finished the tape on her left hand and held it for a second longer than I needed to. I could not have told you why. She had been my baby so recently. And now here she was, with hands like a working man.

I taped her hands every morning after that, for the whole summer. Some mornings we talked. Most mornings we did not. I think it was the best part of my day.