The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

The extra twenty dollars

There was a farmer on the blacktop past the Baptist church who hired us three times that summer. He was a big man with a gray beard, and he did not say a whole lot.

The first time, he paid us exactly fifty cents a bale for three hundred and twenty bales, a hundred and sixty dollars, cash, counted out on the tailgate.

The second time, he paid us fifty cents a bale plus an extra twenty dollars a load. Brynlee tried to give it back. She told him that was not the price.

“I know what the price is,” he said. “Keep it.”

She did not know what to do. She looked at me and I just shook my head, meaning let it be.

The third time, he did it again, and when she asked him why, he just looked over at the feed store road, which you could see from his field, and he said, “I was there.”

He had been one of the men at the counter that Saturday. Not one of the ones who laughed. One of the ones who stood there and did not say anything at all.

I think twenty dollars a load was what it cost him to make that right. I think he knew it, too.

Church on Sunday

Gaylon goes to our church. He sits on the left side, about four rows up, where he has sat since before I was born.

Every Sunday that summer, he sat four rows up, and we sat where we always sit, and nobody said a word about any of it.

He knew. Everybody knew. It is a small county and a smaller church.

One Sunday in late June the song leader picked “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and I saw Brynlee’s mouth twitch, and I had to look down at my hymnal so I would not laugh out loud in church.

Gaylon sang it all the way through, every verse. He did not turn around. But after the service he stood in the parking lot by his truck a long time, longer than usual, before he got in.

The two farmers

In the middle of July, two of Gaylon’s own farmers called me.

The first was a man who ran cattle on the bottom ground by the river. He had used Gaylon for hauling for twelve years. He baled his own, but he had always paid Gaylon’s boys to put it up.

“I hear your girls do a clean job,” he said on the phone. “I’ve got about eight hundred bales down and I’d rather they not get rained on.”

The second was a dairy family with a big loft barn on the state highway. They called two days later and said nearly the same thing.

I did not say a word about the feed store, to either one of them. I just said, “Thursday works,” and “Saturday works,” and I wrote it down on the calendar by the refrigerator.

When I hung up the second time, Brynlee was standing in the kitchen doorway. She had heard all of it.

“Is that going to make Uncle Gaylon mad?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“I don’t want him mad,” she said. “I just want him to know he was wrong.”

That is my girl. I have never been prouder of her than I was at that minute, standing barefoot in the kitchen with her taped hands hanging at her sides.