Learning to throw
They got better faster than I thought they would.
Odell came out to the field the second week and stood by the truck with his arms crossed, watching. After about twenty minutes he walked over to Brynlee.
“You’re throwing it with your arms,” he said. “Your arms are the weakest thing on you. Throw it with your knee.”
He picked up a bale by the strings, eighty-one years old, and set it against his leg. Then he bumped it up with his knee and pushed it with his whole body, and it sailed up onto the trailer like it weighed nothing.
The girls stared at him.
“Your granddaddy taught me that,” he told Brynlee. “Course I was already forty, so I was slow to learn it.”
By the end of that week they were putting up four hundred bales a day. By the end of June, six hundred on a good day. Lark, who was the smallest, turned out to be the best stacker of the four.
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She learned to lay the bottom row on edge and crisscross each row on top of the last, the way you lay brick. Odell told her once that a stack laid right will ride a washboard road and never shift.
“Your stack stays where you put it,” he said to her. “That’s all a man can ask for.”
The wives
I want to tell you about the farmers’ wives, because they are the part of this story I think about most.
The first one was Odell’s wife. She came out to the field on the second day of his cutting carrying a gallon jar of sweet tea with lemon slices floating in it and a stack of paper cups.
She stood at the edge of the field in her housedress and her garden shoes and watched those girls for a long time. Then she called Brynlee over.
“I baled hay in 1961,” she told her. “My daddy had five daughters and no sons, so we did it all. Nobody ever told us we couldn’t, because nobody else was going to do it.”
She poured Brynlee a cup of tea. Brynlee drank it in one swallow and asked for another.
After that, it was almost every field. A wife would come out at about two in the afternoon with tea, or lemonade, or once a whole sheet cake with the frosting going soft in the heat. One of them brought ice pops in a cooler.
They did not make speeches. Mostly they just stood at the end of the trailer and watched. Some of them had done this work as girls. Some of them had married men who did it. All of them knew exactly what it cost.
One woman, maybe seventy-five, put her hand on Lark’s sunburned shoulder and said, “Good girl.” That was all she said. Lark talked about it for a week.