The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

A July afternoon

There is one picture from that summer I keep in my mind more than any other.

It was a hot sunny afternoon in July, on the cattle man’s bottom ground. The sky was white with heat. The grasshoppers were thick enough that they bounced off the windshield as I drove.

I was sitting in the pickup with the window down and the engine running for the air, creeping along in low gear. And in the side mirror I could see the trailer behind me, stacked with square bales, and Brynlee walking beside it.

She had her brown ponytail pulled through the back of a cap that day, but she’d taken the cap off because of the heat. She was in her gray T-shirt and jeans and those leather gloves, gone dark with sweat by then.

She bent and took a bale by the strings, set it on her knee the way Odell showed her, and threw it. Not up to the first row. All the way to the top of the stack, five high.

Lark and the older sister were up on the stack. They caught it between them without even looking at each other, and set it in its place like brick.

Nobody on that trailer was sitting down. Nobody was handing out water. I watched it in the mirror, and I thought about the feed store, and I said a little prayer of thanks right there in the cab with the radio playing.

Asleep at the table

The bale count went on the calendar every night. Brynlee wrote it in with a ballpoint pen in the little square for each day.

By the Fourth of July they had stacked about three thousand. By the middle of July, five thousand. We had a waiting list by then. I had to start telling people we could not come for a week.

One evening at the end of July, after a seven-hundred-bale day, the four of them came in and sat down at my supper table. The sun was still well up. I had made a big pot of chili and cornbread.

Lark and the sisters ate like field hands. Brynlee ate about half a bowl. Then she put her elbows on the table, and her head on her arms, and she was asleep.

She still had her leather gloves on. She had been too tired to take them off.

The other girls got quiet. The younger sister started to reach over and shake her, and I shook my head.

I did not wake her for a long time. I just sat there and looked at her, at the sunburn on the back of her neck and the hay in her hair and those gloves, which had cost $38 out of her babysitting jar.

Lark leaned over and whispered, “Mrs. Holt, are you crying?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve got pepper in my eye.”

August

Then August came.

In our county, August means two things. It means the second cutting is coming in all at once. And it means football.

Two-a-day practices started the first Monday in August. Three of Gaylon’s boys were starters on the varsity team, and the coach does not let starters miss two-a-days to haul hay.

The same week, the lumberyard in town put a sign out that they were hiring at fourteen dollars an hour, with air conditioning in the loading shed. Two more of Gaylon’s boys went down and applied the next morning.

By Friday, Gaylon’s crew was down from eight boys to three. The three who stayed were not enough for a field that size.

Gaylon had a big field on the north side of the county, close to three thousand bales, already baled and lying. And the weather radio was calling for rain on Thursday, a big front coming up out of Arkansas.

If you have never farmed, three thousand bales of hay getting rained on might not sound like much. It is. Wet bales mold. They heat up. They can catch a barn on fire. That hay was somebody’s winter feed for a hundred head of cattle, and Gaylon had promised it would be in the barn.