The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

The girls

I found Kenna in the kitchen making a sandwich and Paisley on the porch steps with a kitten in her lap.

“Put the kitten in the house,” I said. “Both of you, boots and gloves. The hay is heating in the shed and it’s started to smoke.”

Paisley’s face went white under the freckles. Kenna put the knife down and did not ask one question. She was already pulling on her boots.

“Is the fire department coming?” Paisley asked.

“They’re coming. They’re 22 miles away,” I said. “Uncle Arlo isn’t coming.”

Kenna looked up at me then. She had heard me on the phone. I could see her working it out, and I could see her deciding not to say anything about it, and I loved her for that.

I called Brock while we walked to the shed. He picked up on the second ring, and I could hear the combine engine behind him and the wind in the phone.

“Hay’s heating,” I said. “Middle of the stack. There’s smoke. Fire department’s paged, 22 miles out. I called your uncle. He wants two-fifty an hour, cash, before he’ll come.”

There was a long quiet on the line. Not the kind where a man does not know what to say. The kind where a man is swallowing something.

“All right,” Brock said. “Listen to me. Start on the cool end. Pull the cool bales off the face first so you’ve got room to get at the hot ones. Get the hot ones clear out in the open, away from the shed, a good hundred feet.”

“I know.”

“Water on the gap before you open anything. Keep the hose on it the whole time. And keep the girls out of the smoke, Shel. If it flares, you back out and let the shed go. The shed is just a shed.”

“I know, honey.”

“I’m calling Arlo,” he said. Then his voice changed. “I’m sorry I’m not there.”

“You’re where we need you,” I said, and I meant it. “Call him. Then go back to work. I’ll call you when it’s out.”

He did call Arlo. I found out later. Arlo did not pick up.

Opening the stack

Our pole shed is sixty by eighty, open on the long south side, with a steel roof and treated posts set in concrete. Brock and his dad built it the summer Kenna was born. Every board in it, they put there.

The big squares were stacked three high, nine feet, in rows running back from the open side. Three hundred and eighty bales, three by four by eight feet, and every one of them somewhere between 900 and 1,100 pounds.

The smoke was coming from about two rows back from the open face, in the middle of the stack. So to get to it, we had to take off the front bales first. That was the cool work. That was Kenna’s.

Paisley’s job came first. We have a frost-free hydrant down by the stock tank, maybe sixty yards from the shed, and two long garden hoses we use for the calf pens.

She screwed them together and ran them up to the shed and opened the hydrant all the way.

It was not a fire hose. It was a garden hose with a cheap brass nozzle. But it was water, and it was there, and it was ours.

“Wet the front of the stack,” I told her. “All of it, right where the smoke is. Then stand off to the side, by that post, and when I say, you put water on whatever I pull out.”