The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

“Okay,” she said. Her voice shook. Her hands did not.

Kenna climbed up on the tractor. It is an old blue Ford, older than she is, with a loader on the front and pallet forks we bolted on years ago. It will not lift a big square bale high in the air, not safely.

But it will spear one at the bottom and drag it out, and with care it will carry one low.

I stood at the corner of the stack and called the pulls. The top bale on the end first.

Kenna ran the forks up under it, tilted them back and backed away slow, and the bale slid off the stack and dropped to the floor with a thump I felt in my boots.

She speared it again low, backed it out of the shed, and dragged it across the yard to the edge of the hayfield. Then she came back for the next one.

The first four or five were cool. Then the next ones were warm. Then I put my hand on one and pulled it back like I had touched a stove.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Kenna, come down. I’ll take the hot ones.”

She did not want to. I could see it. She wanted to be the one.

But she climbed down and pulled her gloves tight, and she went and stood out past the shed in the stubble where she could see me and see the bales and see her sister.

The hot bales

I want to tell you what it is like, because I had never done it before and I hope to God I never do again.

When you pull a hot bale out of the middle of a stack, the smell hits first. Burnt sugar and something underneath it, sharp, like a stove left on too long. Then the heat on your face, like opening an oven door.

The first hot bale came out trailing a ribbon of gray smoke behind it. I could see the smoke pour out of the gap where it had been, all at once, like the stack had been holding its breath.

“Water,” I said, and Paisley was already there, putting the hose right into the gap. The smoke went white with steam and hissed.

I backed the bale out into the sun with the forks low and the smoke curling off it, and I twisted around in the seat to watch where I was going, and Kenna was out in the field with her braid swinging, waving me back, back, back, a little left, stop.

I set it down a good hundred feet from the shed. Kenna went at it with her pocketknife and cut the twine.

The bale sagged and split open, and the inside of it was brown, not green, and in the very center there was a fist of black.

Paisley dragged the hose out with her, all that length of it, and put the water right into the split. Steam rolled up off it in the hard August sun.

Then I went back in for the next one.

My gray T-shirt was soaked through in ten minutes. My cap was pasted to my head.

Sweat ran into my eyes and stung, and I wiped it with the back of my glove and the glove was full of hay dust and that stung worse.

I prayed the whole time. Not a big prayer. The same short one, over and over, the one my grandmother used to say when a storm came up. Lord, be in this. Lord, be in this.