The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

“Two hundred and fifty an hour,” Arlo said, “and I’ll want it in cash when I pull in. Call me back when you’ve got it, Shelby.”

Then the line went quiet, and I stood in the yard with the phone against my ear, watching a thin gray thread of smoke climb out of the middle of our hay.

It came up slow and lazy, the way smoke does off a cigarette someone has set down and forgotten. It did not look like much. That was the worst part. It did not look like anything yet.

I had smelled it first, maybe ten minutes before. I was carrying the mail up from the box, and the wind came across the yard from the pole shed, and it smelled like somebody was making caramel in a cast iron pan.

Anybody who has put up hay knows that smell. My dad used to call it the devil’s candy. It means the hay is cooking from the inside, and you do not have long.

So I had gone to the shed and walked the face of the stack, and right in the middle, two bales back and two bales up, there was that curl of smoke coming out between the bales.

I put my palm flat on the nearest bale I could reach. It was warm like a loaf of bread just out of the oven. The one beside it was warm.

The one above it I could not reach, but I could feel the heat coming off it on my face.

I called 911 first. I want that understood. I did not try to be a hero. The dispatcher was calm and kind and asked good questions, and she said the department was paging out now.

“How long?” I asked her.

“They’re coming from town, ma’am,” she said. “That’s about 22 miles for you. They’ll be there as fast as they can get there.”

Twenty-two miles of gravel and county blacktop, after a page goes out to volunteers who are at work, in the field, at the sale barn, wherever they are on an August Tuesday. I did the math. Thirty-five minutes. Forty. Maybe more.

She told me not to open the stack without water ready, because pulling hot hay apart lets the air in and it can flare. She told me to keep my children back. I said yes ma’am to all of it.

Then I called Arlo, because Arlo lives one mile down our road, and Arlo owns the only telehandler between our place and the highway, and a telehandler can pull a big square bale out of a stack the way you pull a book off a shelf.

And Arlo told me two hundred and fifty an hour, in cash, and to call him back when I had it.

I stood there one more second. Then I put the phone in my back pocket and went to find my girls.