Tucker drove Cordell’s green John Deere with the baler hitched behind it, wearing his Royals ball cap backward and a pair of safety glasses Gene Hollis had made me promise he’d wear. The old New Holland thumped along behind, picking up the windrow. The pickup teeth swept the hay up into the chamber, and the plunger packed it with a deep, steady thump-thump-thump, like a heartbeat.
Bales came out the chute one after another and slid up onto the wagon behind.
I stood on the hay wagon in leather work gloves, catching each bale as it came off the chute and stacking it, five high, in a crisscross pattern so the load wouldn’t shift. Reed stacked beside me, his small arms straining.
The sun beat down. Sweat ran into my eyes. The air smelled of fresh-cut brome, sweet and green and dusty.
And somewhere around the fourth load, without thinking about it, I started humming.
“Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing…”
Reed looked over at me. Then he started humming too.
Tucker couldn’t hear us over the tractor. But when he looked back over his shoulder at the wagon, he was grinning.
We put up four hundred and twelve bales that first day.
By the end of June, we’d baled the whole thirty-five acres. One thousand nine hundred and forty bales of first-cutting brome, stacked to the rafters in our pole barn and in the empty hay loft of Retta’s old barn.
Then I pinned one notice on the corkboard at the Marshall County Farmers Co-op feed store, on a three-by-five index card in black marker.
SMALL SQUARE BALES. Brome, first cutting, no rain, barn stored. $9/bale. You haul. Call Jana.
And my phone number.
I paid a dollar for the thumbtack. I didn’t write that in the ledger.
My husband Curt drives a grain truck for the co-op four days a week, ten hours a day. On his three days home, he became the delivery service.
People who didn’t have their own trucks called and asked whether we could deliver. Curt charged a dollar a bale for delivery within ten miles and loaded our old Chevy flatbed with eighty bales at a time. He drove all over Marshall County from breakfast to supper.
The first call came the day after I pinned the card. It was a woman from Blue Rapids with three Quarter Horses, who bought forty bales. The second was a 4-H girl in Frankfort with a show pony, who bought twenty. The third was a man in Axtell who raised Boer goats.
By the Fourth of July, my phone didn’t stop ringing.
I’d come home from the clinic at six and there’d be eleven voicemails. Retired couples with two horses and a donkey. A riding stable outside Seneca that needed two hundred bales. A woman who raised rabbits. A family with a Shetland pony named Butterscotch who’d been feeding him lawn clippings and moldy rounds and was in tears on the phone because she’d finally found someone who sold small squares.
I kept track of everything in the HAYLINER ledger. Every bale sold, every name, every check, every cash payment. Every month, I wrote Retta a check for her twenty-five percent and hand-delivered it with a receipt.
The first check, for July, was $2,340.
Retta looked at it for a long time at her kitchen table.
“Walt never got this much for that field,” she said. “Not once.”
“Horse people pay for quality,” I said. “And you can’t get small squares anywhere else in the county.”
She folded the check and put it in her cardigan pocket.
“Banjo’s arthritis shots,” she said, a little gruffly. “And the property taxes. Walt always worried about the property taxes.”
Then, sometime in mid-July, the calls changed.
It started with a woman from Waterville. She said, “Oh, thank goodness. I called Brock Lindeman first. He’s got all that hay ground. And he said he only does rounds, but there’s a woman in Marysville who does small squares, and he gave me your number.”
Then it happened again. And again.
Horse people were calling Brock. The biggest hay producer in the county, with two round balers, three hired men, and two thousand acres. Everybody who needed hay called Brock first.
And Brock had to tell every one of them, “I don’t do small squares. Call my cousin Jana.”
Every single time.
By August, my friend Linda at the feed store told me that Brock had started telling people my number before they even finished asking.
“He’s got it memorized,” Linda said, grinning. “He doesn’t even look it up anymore.”
We cut a second time in late July.
Second-cutting brome is finer and leafier than the first, and horse people love it. We put up another nine hundred bales. Combined with what was left of the first cutting, that was enough to keep selling through August.
The boys worked every day it didn’t rain. Tucker drove the tractor. Reed stacked. On the days I was at the clinic, Cordell rode along in the tractor cab with Tucker, just to keep an eye on things. Mostly, I think, he did it for the company.
I paid the boys. Twelve dollars an hour for Tucker, ten for Reed. I wrote it all in the ledger and paid them by check every Friday, the same way the clinic paid me. By the end of the summer, Tucker had earned $2,640 and Reed had earned $1,910.
Curt and I sat them down at the kitchen table one night in August.
“Here’s the deal,” Curt said. “You keep half of what you earned to spend however you want. The other half goes into a Roth IRA.”
“A what?” Reed asked.
So I explained it the way my accountant, Marv Pettit, had explained it to me in June when I called to ask how to handle the hay money on our taxes. When you’re young and you’ve earned real wages from a real job, you can put that money into a special retirement account. It grows for fifty years, and when you take it out at retirement, you don’t pay taxes on it.
“Fifty years?” Tucker said. “I’ll be sixty-six.”
“And that thirteen hundred dollars,” I said, “if it grows like the stock market usually does, could be worth more than forty thousand dollars by then.”
Tucker stared at me. “From baling hay?”
“From baling hay.”
We opened two custodial Roth IRAs at the bank in Marysville the next Saturday, one for each boy. Tucker put in $1,320. Reed put in $955.
Reed asked the banker, a young woman named Ms. Tran, if he could see where his money was. She showed him the account on her computer screen. He looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
“Grandpa’s baler made that,” he finally said.
“You made that,” Ms. Tran said. “The baler helped.”
On the second Saturday in August, Curt delivered the last load of the summer to a riding stable near Seneca.
Eighty bales. When he unloaded the last one into the stable’s barn, the owner, a woman named Patrice, wrote him a check.
When Curt got home, he set the check on the kitchen table in front of me and said, “That’s it. Last one.”
I opened the HAYLINER ledger and counted, the way I count everything.
Two thousand bales sold. Not one left in the pole barn.
Two thousand bales at $9 each: $18,000. Plus $1,460 in delivery fees Curt had collected.
Then I added up the expenses, line by line, on a fresh page.
Retta’s twenty-five percent of the hay sales came to $4,500. Parts for the baler, $640, plus the twine knife, $34. Fourteen bales of baler twine at $38 each, $532. Diesel fuel for Cordell’s tractor, $980. Oil and filters for Cordell’s tractor, $86. A new sickle section for Brock’s mower after I hit a rock, $45. The hay lease from Mrs. Ochsner, $175. The insurance endorsement, $186. The boys’ wages, $4,550. The baler itself, $300.
Total expenses: $12,028.
Total income: $19,460.
Net: $7,432.
Marv Pettit said I’d report it on a Schedule F on our tax return, as farm income, and that I’d owe self-employment tax on the profit. “Set aside about twenty-five percent for taxes, Jana,” he said. “And keep that ledger forever. If the IRS ever asks, that notebook will make you look like a genius.”
I set aside $1,900 in a separate savings account for taxes.
That left $5,532 and one pink baler that worked.
I sat at the kitchen table that night after everyone went to bed and looked at the last page of the ledger.
Then I picked up my phone and called Prairie View.
“This is Jana Lindeman, Arvid’s granddaughter,” I said to the night nurse. “I’d like to sign him out on Saturday afternoon. For a few hours.”
“Of course. Is it a special occasion?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
That Saturday, I drove into Marysville at one o’clock and signed Grandpa out at the front desk of Prairie View.
He was waiting in his room in a wheelchair, in his good blue shirt and suspenders, his white hair combed. Since the hip, he could walk only a few steps with a walker. But his eyes were sharp, and he smiled when he saw me.
“Jana. Where are we going?”
“For a drive.”
“A drive where?”
“It’s a surprise, Grandpa.”
He studied my face for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, the way he did when he decided to trust somebody.
I got him into the passenger seat of my Buick and folded his wheelchair into the trunk. Then we drove north out of town, past the grain elevator and the Lutheran church where he’d been baptized, married, and where he’d buried his son. We took the gravel roads up Spring Creek toward Retta’s place.
He didn’t say anything. He just looked out the window at the fields going by. Brock’s soybeans, green and knee-high. A neighbor’s milo just starting to head out. Cattle standing in the creek shade.
I turned into Retta’s field and parked at the gate.
Retta’s thirty-five acres of brome lay in front of us in long, straight windrows. It was the third cutting, cut on Wednesday and raked that morning, sweet and green and dry, curving across the field in golden-green lines.
At the far end of the field sat Cordell’s green tractor, idling. Hitched behind it was a dusty pink New Holland 268 Hayliner.
Tucker was in the tractor seat in his backward ball cap. Reed stood on the hay wagon behind the baler in his work gloves. Curt and Cordell leaned against the hay wagon. Retta sat on the tailgate of her old pickup at the edge of the field with Banjo beside her.
Grandpa went completely still.
“That’s my baler,” he said.
“Yes, Grandpa.”
He leaned forward in the seat, his big, spotted hands gripping the dashboard. “That’s my 268.”
“The boys fixed it,” I said. “With Cordell. They put up two thousand bales this summer, Grandpa. We sold every one.”
He didn’t answer. He was staring at the baler.
I rolled down his window. It was a hot, still afternoon, and the air smelled of fresh-cut brome.
I picked up the little handheld radio Cordell had given me.
“Okay, Tucker,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Down at the end of the field, Tucker reached back and engaged the power takeoff.
The old baler shuddered. The flywheel began to turn. The pickup reel started spinning. Then the plunger caught, and the sound came drifting across the field to us, deep and steady.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Like a heartbeat.
Tucker eased the tractor forward. The pickup teeth swept up the first windrow. A minute later, the first bale slid out the back of the chute and up onto the wagon, and Reed caught it and stacked it.
Grandpa closed his eyes.
His hand came off the dashboard, found my arm, and held on.
We sat there for a long time without talking. The tractor and baler worked their way slowly up the field toward us, thump, thump, thump, the bales sliding up onto the wagon one after another. Reed stacked them in a perfect crisscross pattern, five high.
Grandpa kept his eyes closed. His lips were moving a little.
I leaned closer.
He was humming. Off-key, the same three lines over and over.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves…
I had to look away out the driver’s side window for a minute.
When I looked back, I saw a figure walking across the stubble toward us from the north end of the field.
It was Brock.
He’d parked his big white Ram pickup on the road by Retta’s mailbox and was walking slowly across the cut field toward my car, his hands in his pockets, his John Deere cap pulled low. I learned later that Linda at the feed store had told him what we were doing that afternoon. I’d mentioned it when I bought the twine.
He reached the car and stopped on Grandpa’s side, beside the open window.
He didn’t say a word.
Grandpa opened his eyes and turned his head slowly. He looked at Brock for a long time. His grandson. The boy he’d raised in a tractor cab after Lars died. The farmer he’d signed over all his machinery to.
Brock took off his cap.
Then Grandpa started to speak.
“Brock,” he said. His voice was soft and rough. “Do you know who the last person was to run that baler before your cousin’s boys?”
Brock swallowed. “You were, Grandpa. In 2017.”
“No.” Grandpa shook his head slowly. “I mean the last person besides me.”
Brock didn’t answer.
“Your father,” Grandpa said. “Lars. August of 1988. The summer before the accident. He baled this same field. Walt Kopp’s field. Walt hired us to put up his brome that year because his baler broke.” He looked out across the field at the old pink baler thumping along. “You rode on the wagon that summer, Brock. You were five years old. Your father stacked and you sat in the middle of the load like a little king. You fell asleep on the bales on the way home every night.”
Brock’s face went white.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“I know you don’t,” Grandpa said. “You were five.”
Down in the field, the baler thumped. A bale slid up onto the wagon. Reed caught it.
“When your father died,” Grandpa said, “I almost sold that baler. I couldn’t look at it. Every time I hitched it up, I saw him on the wagon. But your grandmother said, ‘Arvid, that baler is the last thing Lars touched that still works. Don’t you dare sell it.’ So I kept it.” He paused. “And I kept baling with it. Every summer. For thirty years. For him.”
Brock put his hand over his eyes.
“When I signed the machinery over to you last winter,” Grandpa said, “I didn’t tell you about the baler. I thought you’d know. I thought you’d remember.” His voice cracked. “I should have told you. That’s on me, not you.”
“Grandpa,” Brock said. His voice broke. “I sold it to scrap. For three hundred dollars.”
“I know,” Grandpa said. “Retta told me. She came to visit me at Prairie View in July.”
I turned and stared at him.
“You knew?”
“I’ve known since July,” Grandpa said, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “Retta Kopp can’t keep a secret to save her life. She told me the Lindeman baler was running in Walt’s field again. She said, ‘Arvid, your granddaughter’s boys are making hay.’” He looked at me. “I’ve been lying in that bed for six weeks waiting for you to come get me.”
I laughed and cried at the same time.
Brock was crying too, standing in the stubble beside my car with his cap crushed in his hand. My big, sunburned, phone-addicted cousin, who farms two thousand acres and never cries.
“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” he said. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know about Dad.”
“I know you didn’t.” Grandpa reached out the open window with his big, spotted hand and laid it on Brock’s arm. “You were busy being a farmer. You’re a good one. Better than I ever was. But you think everything old is in your way.” He squeezed Brock’s arm. “Some old things are holding you up.”
Brock nodded, unable to speak.
The tractor reached our end of the field. Tucker throttled down and disengaged the PTO, and the baler slowed and went quiet. In the sudden silence, I could hear meadowlarks in the grass along the fence line.
Tucker climbed down from the tractor. Reed jumped off the hay wagon. They came walking across the stubble toward the car, sweaty and dusty, hay in their hair.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Reed said shyly.
“Reed.” Grandpa’s face lit up. “You found the twine knife.”
Reed stopped, stunned. “How did you know that?”
