The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

The rest of the afternoon

The volunteers worked with us for most of two more hours. Somebody called a neighbor, the dairyman who milks two miles west of us, and he came over with his skid steer and spears and helped pull the last of the warm bales out from the back rows.

Ivan had them probe the rest of the stack with a long rod and a thermometer of their own. The back of the stack, the bales from the first part of the field that had dried better, were fine. Warm, but fine.

The middle was what we had already pulled. Some of the bales around it were brown and smoky and would be poor feed, but they would not burn.

The dairyman’s wife came over around four with a cooler of iced tea and a big plastic bag of ham sandwiches, the way women out here always seem to know to do.

She did not ask me anything. She just handed Paisley a sandwich and wet a dish towel in the stock tank and handed it to her for her face.

I called Brock at five. He picked up on the first ring this time.

“It’s open,” I said. “It’s out. Ivan’s here. The shed is fine. Not one board.”

He did not say anything for a while. I heard him breathe out. I heard the wind in the phone.

“Put the girls on,” he said.

I handed the phone to Kenna, and she walked off a little way into the field to talk to her dad.

Then she handed it to Paisley, and Paisley talked for a long time, waving one hand around, and I knew she was telling him about the glow and the big young fireman and his big hose.

Arlo

It was close to six, the sun still hot and high over the hayfield, when I saw Arlo’s pickup at the end of our lane.

I knew it by the sound before I saw it. He drives a three-quarter-ton diesel, and you can hear it a mile off.

He had come down the road slow, and when he got to our lane, he slowed down more, and then he stopped.

He did not turn in. He sat there with the engine running.

The fire truck was still in the yard. The tanker was there. The dairyman’s skid steer was there. Half the volunteers in the department were standing around in their turnout pants, drinking his wife’s iced tea. Arlo could see every bit of it.

He could see the shed, with the hole in the middle of the stack. He could see the row of split, blackened bales out in the stubble, a long crooked row of them, still steaming a little. He could see my girls.

I walked down the lane. I did not hurry. I had hay in my hair and soot on my arms, and my shirt was still wet through, and I did not fix any of it.

His window came down when I got close.

Arlo is sixty-six. He has a good face, I will say that. Weathered and square, with Brock’s dad’s eyes. He has been farming that 2,000 acres since before I was born. He has buried a wife and raised three boys and lost one of them to a car wreck on Highway 23. I know there is hurt in him.

He looked past me at the shed. Then he looked at me.

“Could’ve lost the whole shed,” he said.

“We didn’t,” I said.

He was quiet. His jaw moved like he was chewing on something.

“You should have called me back,” he said.

I thought about that for a second. I thought about all the things I could say. I thought about my grandmother, too, and about Sunday, and about who I wanted to be in front of my daughters.

“You told me to call when I had the cash, Arlo,” I said. “I didn’t have the cash. I had my girls.”

He looked at me a long time. I did not look away, and I did not say one more word. Behind me I could hear Paisley laughing at something the young fireman said.

Then Arlo looked past me at Kenna, who was standing by the blue Ford with her braid down her back and her hands on her hips, watching us.

“Who ran the loader?” he asked.

“Kenna ran the cool pulls,” I said. “I ran the hot ones. Paisley held the water on it for forty minutes.”

He nodded once. He did not say anything else. He put the window up and drove on toward town, slow, and I stood in our lane and watched his dust settle on the ditch grass.