The Birthday in Grandpa’s Hayloft

Saturday morning

Ken and our neighbor Ray Odom set out the bales at nine, forty of them in rows for seating, stacked two high at the back where the bigger kids would climb. A square bale of second cutting weighs about forty-five pounds. They carried every one of them by the strings and did not complain once.

I drove to the Kroger on the bypass and picked up the sheet cake I had ordered back in September, a plain half sheet of yellow cake, no icing, because Maisie will not eat frosting, thirty-eight dollars. It would feed fifty, and I carried it out to the car like a baby.

On the way back I stopped at the Dollar General for paper plates, napkins, two jugs of sweet tea and a tub of lemonade. A cashier I have known my whole life asked me what the occasion was.

“My girl’s birthday.”

“Well, where are you having it?”

“My grandfather’s barn.” She smiled with her whole face. “Honey, that is the best idea I have heard all week.”

Grandpa had hitched the hay wagon to his tractor and parked it at the mailbox to haul kids up the lane. He had hosed it down. He had set four bales on it for seats. He had put on his good overalls, the ones he wears to church fish fries.

“You look like you’re going to a wedding,” I told him.

“It’s a birthday,” he said. “It’s more important.”

The sky that morning was the cleanest blue I have ever seen in October, with not a cloud in it and a cool, bright edge to the air. Sixty-two degrees, a good jacket day. Ken swung the big loft door all the way open, and the whole pasture came through it like a painting somebody had hung on the side of the barn.

Maisie came out of the house in her pink sweatshirt, her curls going in a hundred directions despite the brushing I had given them at seven o’clock. She had been quiet since Wednesday. She had not cried. That was the part that worried me.

She stood at the barn door and looked at the bales, the rope, the hay pile, the tractor. “Pop Pop,” she said. “Is all this for me?”

“All of it,” he said. She walked up and put her arms around his middle. He put his big hand on top of her head and left it there.