The Girls Who Stacked Nine Thousand Bales

Her answer

Brynlee looked at him a long while. The other three girls had come down off the trailer and were standing behind her in a little row, the way they used to stand behind each other in the church Christmas program.

“Fifty cents a bale,” she said. “Same as everybody. We can come tomorrow at six in the morning.”

“I’ll pay you seventy-five,” he said.

“Fifty,” she said. “That’s the price. I don’t want anything extra.”

Then she said the next thing so quietly that I almost did not hear it.

“But I want you to say it at the feed store,” she said. “Not to me. To them. The same men.”

Gaylon did not answer right away. Odell, in his lawn chair under the walnut tree, did not move at all. You could hear the grasshoppers.

“That’s fair,” Gaylon said finally. “That’s fair, Brynlee.”

He put out his hand. She shook it, firm, the way Odell had taught her.

Three thousand bales

We were at the north place at six the next morning. The sun was barely over the trees. The sky to the south already had that heavy, yellow look it gets before a storm.

Gaylon had his three boys there, and the bale wagon, and one of his own trailers. With our trailer and his, and the girls and the boys working the same field, we had two loads going at once.

Nobody said much. There was no time to say much.

The boys watched the girls for about the first half hour, I think to see if it was true. Then one of them, a tall redheaded boy, started working beside Lark on the stack, and after that they were just a crew.

At ten o’clock a pickup I did not recognize pulled into the field. It was the farmer with the gray beard, the one who paid the extra twenty dollars. He got out, pulled on a pair of gloves, and started throwing bales up onto Gaylon’s trailer without a word to anybody.

At eleven, the cattle man from the river bottom came. At noon, two more men from church.

Odell’s wife came at one o’clock with two gallon jars of tea and a dishpan full of ham sandwiches. Three other wives were right behind her in a car.

By the middle of the afternoon there were nine grown men in that field, and the four girls, and the three boys, and Gaylon. Nobody had called any of them. They had just heard.

The rain came in at about half past six that evening, with the daylight still gray behind the clouds. The last load went into Gaylon’s barn at a quarter after six. The first drops hit the tin roof while the girls were climbing down out of the loft.

Gaylon stood in the barn door and watched it rain on his empty field. Then he turned around and counted out the money, fifty cents a bale for every bale the girls had put up, onto the hood of my truck.

He did not try to pay them a penny more. He had listened.