Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

  ##

  It had been a good day to make hay. Humidity was down. By ten o’clock the morning dew was all but burned off the hay, which needed raking. He took it ten acres at a time, raking the drying grass into windrows. After about an hour, he stopped and felt the newly exposed surface of the hay for moisture and knew that it would be ready for the baler by the time that he could bring it up. That’s how it all began.

  Down at the barn, he hooked up the New Holland 273 baler to the Oliver 550 tractor. It had been a one-man operation for years. The technology for making hay had mostly passed him by. He brought the baler alongside and then ahead of the wagon with the metal JD bale cage on it, painted green. Then he backed the baler up to the wagon tongue, kicked the engine into neutral, set the brake, and climbed down to hook up. He still worked with a thrower rack and a small square baler, gear that others took to the sales in favor of self-propelled mower conditioners and large square balers.

  But everything still worked. The bales—mostly turned out at sixty pounds—could be handled by one guy. Propelled by the kicker, they would arc back into the bale cage, falling this way and that, until a full load was made. Then he would unhook the rack, bring over the pickup or the old Farmall M, and take the full rack down to the barn.

  It was about the third load when all of the day’s events came together. Ernie, the neighbor boy he had hired for the day to help stack the bales, was somewhere inside the hay mow. Robert had unhooked and moved the M over to the elevator where he connected and engaged the power take-off to the elevator. The elevator had clanked in response and then started its inexorable, inevitable churning. Slowly the chain and the little rims of angle iron to hold the bales started moving towards the open maw of the hay loft, the door down, the air already humid, waiting.

  Robert climbed back on the wagon, worked his way through the open door of the steel frame of the rack, and started pulling bales. They were like they always were—jumbled this way and that. Sometimes they were leaning, sometimes just touching. Sometimes they held the weight of several: you never knew.

  Robert started pulling. He pulled one, three, five bales out and down—setting them on the frame of the elevator to his right and just down below him. They began the formal procession, riding up the chain assembly, now slightly swaying. He reached for more. Seven, nine. Why was it that he had this habit of counting? Always counting. Counting paces in the field. Counting bales. Numbering the cows and counting them each day as they came in for grain. And counting pennies, that’s for sure, these last few years.

  He was at eleven or thirteen, always on an odd number, when he hooked onto a stubborn one. The bale did not seem to be lodged, but it would not come loose. Robert remembered sinking the hay hook into it deep and pulling finally, at the end of its resistance, with two hands. It came free, then, with surprising speed. Came right at him, the weight of sixty pounds and more suddenly released. He took it mostly in the middle of his body, like a linebacker might take a block, accepting it and looking for the running back, accepting it and looking for a way out, a way to roll up and be free. But there was none. He came down with the bale mostly on him and remembered this sharp pain in his calf.

  That’s when it all began.

  Had the wagon shifted when those bales came loose? Maybe other bales had fallen and the wagon had rolled some with the shifting of the weight. He had not thought to block the wheels on the flat ground in front of the barn.

  One thing he knew: the weight of his body with a bale or two on the track of the elevator made for some adjustment. He remembered the growl of the M’s engine, adjusting to the load. He remembered also trying to lift his head, to get up. He tried and then there was nothing: nothing to remember until the very end. Just at the end, he felt his leg go over. He felt his leg and knew that this was it: his body and the bales together were about to be flipped into the open, humid space of the barn. Just then he remembered seeing the cat. Persian orange it was. Right at the top of the new stack of bales and by the door, he could see it looking at him. Maybe it was the screaming.

  Maybe the continuing thud of the bales. The incessant clatter of the elevator track. Whatever, it was there, in the open, with its wide, dilated pupils. Looking.