The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

He said the shed would have been gone in another twenty minutes, and the whole stack with it, and maybe the cattle yard.

“Three hundred and twenty bales,” Lorna said he told them. “A mother and two girls saved three hundred and twenty bales that a telehandler would have saved, and the telehandler was one mile down the road.”

Lorna said nobody at the long table said a word. She said every one of those men knew whose telehandler it was. She said nobody looked at Arlo, and that was worse than if they had.

Arlo was sitting right there in his chair at the head of that table.

Lorna said he set his fork down. She said he sat a minute. Then he put a ten on the table for a seven-dollar breakfast, the way he always does, and got up and put his cap on and walked out to his pickup.

She said he did not come in the next Saturday, or the one after. When he did come back, he took a chair on the side of the table, not the head of it.

I did not do that. I want to be clear. I never said one word about Arlo in town. I never told the story. I let Ivan tell it, because it was his to tell, and he told it true.

But I will tell you what I heard later, from the dairyman and from others. Arlo never quoted a neighbor an hourly rate again. Not for the telehandler, not for anything. When somebody down the road got a hay wagon stuck in the creek bottom that fall, Arlo went down with a chain and pulled it out and would not take a dime.

The telehandler

Three weeks after the fire, on a Tuesday afternoon with the school year just started and me home early from my bus route, I heard that diesel coming down the road.

It was not the pickup. It was the telehandler, rolling slow down the gravel on its big tires, with Arlo up in the cab.

He turned into our lane this time. He drove it right up to the pole shed and shut it off and climbed down.

The stack was still a mess. We had pulled the burned bales away and hauled the worst of them to the far corner of the pasture, but the good bales were in crooked rows, half in the shed and half out under tarps, where we had dragged them to let them cool.

Arlo stood looking at it with his hands in his back pockets.

“Brock called me,” he said. “Said he’d be home in October.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s a long time to leave hay under tarps,” he said. “September rains.”

“It is.”

He was quiet a minute. Then he said, not looking at me, “I can restack it this afternoon. If you’ll have me.”

I looked at him. He was looking at the hay. His ears had gone a little red, and I do not think it was the sun.

There are some people who would have told him to go home. There is a part of me that wanted to. But I thought about his chair at the head of the long table, and I thought about his boy on Highway 23, and I thought about what kind of woman I want my girls to grow up to be.

“I’ll have you,” I said. “I’ll make coffee.”

“I don’t need coffee,” he said. Then, “Well. If you’re making it.”