“Wednesday’s my day off,” I told her. “Cody and I will be there at six in the morning. If we don’t finish Wednesday, we’ll come back Thursday after my route.” She was quiet for a second.
Then she said, “Bless you,” and I could hear that she meant it.
That night at supper I told Cody. I did not make a speech about it. I just said Mrs. Rademacher needed her hay in before the rain, that she’d pay fifteen cents a bale, and that I was going to help him if he wanted the job. He looked at me across the table for a while.
“Fifteen cents?” he asked. “Same as Uncle Vance said?” I said yes, same as Uncle Vance said. He pushed his potatoes around his plate.
Then he said, “I’ll set my alarm for five,” and went to find his good gloves, the leather ones Gil had bought him at the farm store in May.
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Gil looked at me over his glass of iced tea after Cody went down the hall. “You’re going to stack with him?” he asked.
“Three thousand bales in two days, you and a fifteen-year-old?” I said my dad had me stacking his loft at eleven, and I figured I still remembered how. Gil smiled for the first time in five days.
“I’d come,” he said, “but I’ve got the sprayer out at the rented ground south of town Wednesday, and I can’t move it.” He had fungicide to put on two hundred acres of corn before the same rain, and if he missed the window it cost us real money. I told him we’d manage. We always had.
We pulled into Elsie’s yard at five minutes to six Wednesday morning. The sun was already up over the hill to the east, and the air had that wet, heavy feel that tells you it is going to be over ninety by noon.
Elsie was standing on her porch in a housecoat with a coffee cup, waiting for us.
Her barn is an old dairy barn, built in 1919 according to the stone over the door, with a hay loft that runs the whole length and a big door up high at the gable end.
Her husband had put in a bale elevator years ago, a long chain conveyor that carries the bales from the wagon up into the loft door.
Cody started the elevator, and I climbed the ladder into the loft. It was already hot up there and dim, with dust floating in the strips of light that came through the gaps in the boards.
I could smell old hay from years past and pigeon and the dry wood of the rafters.
We worked it the way my dad taught me. Cody stayed on the wagon and put the bales on the elevator one after another, steady, not too fast.
I stood at the top and pulled them off as they came through the door and stacked them, carrying them back to the far end first and building toward the door.
At about the second wagon I looked up and watched my son stack. He was good.
He had learned a lot in that week at his uncle’s, and he stacked tight and square, crossing the tiers without being told. He did not drop a single bale. I watched for it. Not one.