The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

He worked four hours. He restacked every one of those 320 bales in the shed, straight and tight, with air spaces between the rows the way Ivan had told us, and he did not say one word about money, and I did not offer any.

When the girls got off the afternoon bus, Kenna dropped her backpack on the porch and went straight to the shed and stood there watching him work. After a while, Arlo stopped the telehandler and opened the door.

“You ran the loader on those cool pulls?” he asked her.

“Yes sir.”

“Get up here,” he said. “I’ll show you how this one works.”

So she climbed up, and he showed her, and she pulled the last six bales herself with him beside her, and she was grinning the whole time.

Paisley stood by me at the door of the shed. She had the kitten again. She leaned her shoulder against my arm.

“Is he still mean?” she whispered.

“He was wrong,” I said. “There’s a difference. Now hush.”

Before he left, Arlo stood by the telehandler and looked at the shed, the clean straight stack in it, and at the girls.

“Your girls did good,” he said to me. “Brock’s girls.”

“My girls,” I said, and I smiled when I said it, and he almost smiled back.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yours.”

Then he climbed up and drove that big machine back down our lane and down the gravel, slow, toward his place.

Winter

Brock came home the second week of October, burned brown and thin, and the first thing he did was walk out to the pole shed and put his hand on the stack and stand there a long time.

He did not say much. He walked the shed, post by post, and looked at the roof and the purlins and the treated poles his dad had set. Then he came back to the house and held me in the kitchen and did not let go for a while.

We got through that winter fine. The brown bales went first, in December, and Paisley was right there at the bale feeder every morning before the bus, watching the cows bury their noses in them and pull out big mouthfuls.

“Mom,” she said, one cold morning with the steam coming off the cows’ backs. “You were right. They love the burnt ones.”

“Every one,” I said.

We paid the baler man to put a preservative applicator on his machine the next spring. We bought a new hay probe, a real one, with a long stem and a dial. I check the stack every day now in August. I do not skip Sundays.

Kenna is talking about going to school for agriculture. Paisley says she is going to be a firefighter, and then a veterinarian, and then a firefighter again. Arlo gave Kenna a ball cap with his farm name on it for her birthday, and she wears it.

Arlo still asks about our hay ground sometimes, but now he asks how it is doing, not what we want for it.

People in town still bring it up once in a while, at church or at the grain elevator. They ask how many bales we pulled and how hot it was and what the girls did. I tell them the same thing every time, because it is the only part that matters to me.

We lost 60 bales and not one board of the shed.