The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

Counting

That night, after the fire truck was gone, and the dairyman had gone home, and the sun was finally going down red over the South Dakota line, Kenna and I walked the stack with a flashlight and a notebook.

Kenna wrote it all down. Three hundred and eighty bales went into that shed. Sixty of them were lost, burned black in the middle or cooked so brown and dusty I would not feed them to anything.

Three hundred and twenty were saved. Some of those were brown and some smelled smoky, and some would not test as well as they would have. But they were hay, and they were ours, and the cows would winter on them.

Paisley had gone to bed with her face still a little gray around the ears, even after the dish towel and a shower. I went in and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark.

“Hey,” I said. “You asked me something today and I never answered you.”

She opened her eyes.

“The cows can eat them,” I said. “Even the brown ones. The heat makes the hay smell sweet, like caramel, and cows love it. They will eat every one of them. Every single one.”

She smiled at me with her eyes half closed. “Good,” she said. “Because I was going to give them mine anyway.”

“Your what?”

“My share. Of the sandwich money.” She was nearly asleep. “If we had to buy hay.”

I sat there in the dark a long while after she was asleep. Then I went out on the porch and cried, finally, where nobody could see, and then I called Brock again just to hear him breathe.

The cafe

There is a cafe in town where the farmers sit in the mornings. It has a long table by the front window where the same men have sat for thirty years, and Arlo has a chair at the head of it. Everybody knows it is his chair.

I was not there. I would not have gone. I heard about it from Lorna, who waits tables there and has done so since her own kids were small, and who rode my bus route for two years as a girl.

It was the next Saturday morning. Ivan came in for breakfast after the department meeting, and some of the men at the long table asked him about the hay fire out at Okerlunds’.

Lorna said Ivan stood there with his coffee cup in his hand and told it plain, the way a fire chief tells a thing, without any color on it.

He said that when they got there, forty minutes after the page, the stack was already open. He said a mother and two girls, sixteen and thirteen, had pulled thirty-one bales out of a smoking stack with an old Ford loader and a garden hose off a stock tank.

He said they had done it right. Cool bales first. Water on the gap. Hot bales out in the open, away from the building. He said he had grown men on his department who would not have known to do that.