The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

Forty minutes

I think we pulled thirty-one bales in those forty minutes. Kenna counted. She is that kind of girl.

Eighteen of them were cool or just warm, off the face and the ends, so we could get at the middle. Thirteen were hot.

Of those, nine smoked when they came out, and two had black in the center, and one had the glow.

By the time I heard the siren coming down the county road, the middle of the stack was open. There was a hole in the face of it you could have parked a pickup in.

The hot core was out in the hayfield, split open and soaked and steaming in a long crooked row.

Paisley had kept the hose on the gap the whole time. She had never once backed off unless I told her to.

The fire truck turned into our lane with a tanker behind it, and then a couple of pickups behind that, volunteers who had come straight from wherever they were. One of them still had his seed company jacket on.

The chief climbed down from the truck first. His name is Ivan.

He has been on the department longer than I have been married, and he farms north of town, and I have known him to nod to at church for fifteen years.

He walked up to the shed with his helmet in his hand. He looked at the hole in the stack.

He looked out at the field, at the row of split bales still steaming in the sun, at my girls standing by the hose.

He did not say anything for a second.

Then he turned to his crew. “Get a line on that gap,” he said. “And get another one out to those bales. Let’s finish what she started.”

They pulled a real hose off the truck, and two of the volunteers ran it out to the bales in the field, right next to Paisley’s garden hose.

One of them, a big young man with a farmer’s tan, said, “You mind if I help you, miss?” and Paisley said, “No sir,” and they stood there side by side, his big hose and her little one.

Ivan came over to me where I was still sitting on the tractor.

“You open this up by yourself?” he asked.

“Me and my girls,” I said. “Kenna pulled the cool ones. I pulled the hot ones. Paisley kept the water on it.”

“Where’s Brock?”

“Montana. Cutting wheat.”

He nodded slowly. Then he asked the question I knew he would ask, because everybody in this end of the county knows who has what equipment.

“Arlo couldn’t come down?”

“Arlo wanted two-fifty an hour,” I said. “Cash, before he’d start the machine.”

Ivan looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked down the road toward Arlo’s place, where you could see the tops of his grain bins shining in the sun.

He did not say anything at all. He just put his helmet back on.