“Cordell told me. He came to visit too.” Grandpa grinned. “Everybody in this county came to visit me this summer except the two of you. You were too busy making hay.”
“Sorry, Grandpa,” Reed said.
“Don’t be sorry. That’s the best reason there is.”
Brock was staring at the boys, then at the baler, then at Grandpa. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“Jana,” he said hoarsely. “I want to buy it back.”
“No.”
“I’ll pay whatever you want. A thousand. Two thousand.”
“It’s not for sale, Brock.”
“Jana, please. It was my dad’s…”
“I know,” I said gently. “And now it’s Tucker’s and Reed’s.” I looked at him. “But I have a better idea.”
He wiped his eyes. “What?”
“You get a hundred phone calls a year from horse people who want small squares,” I said. “You told me so yourself. You give them my number every time. Linda at the feed store says you’ve got it memorized.”
He flushed red.
“So next summer,” I said, “instead of giving them my number, let’s go into it together. You’ve got hay ground. Two hundred acres of brome and alfalfa you put up in rounds that you sell for sixty dollars a bale to cattlemen. You could set aside forty acres of it for small squares. We bale it with this baler. The boys and I do the work. You get a share of every bale, same as Retta.”
Brock looked at me for a long time.
“How much did you make this summer?” he finally asked.
“Seven thousand four hundred and thirty-two dollars net,” I said. “On thirty-five acres of somebody else’s brome. With a three-hundred-dollar baler.”
Brock let out a long breath. He looked out across Retta’s field at the old pink baler.
“I make about a hundred and fifty dollars an acre on my round bales,” he said slowly. “After costs.”
“I made two hundred and twelve an acre,” I said. “Net. On a field nobody had cut in six years.”
He was quiet a long time.
Then he laughed. It was short and wet and surprised.
“Nobody bales small squares anymore,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “You told me.”
We put up the rest of Retta’s third cutting that afternoon, about three hundred bales. Grandpa watched every one of them from the passenger seat of my Buick with the window down, humming “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
Brock didn’t leave. He stood at the end of the field with his hands in his pockets for a while, watching. Then, without saying anything, he climbed up onto the hay wagon beside Reed and started stacking.
My cousin, who farms two thousand acres and has three hired men, stood on a hay wagon in his good jeans and his John Deere cap and stacked small square bales by hand in the August sun.
I watched Reed show him the crisscross pattern. I watched Brock get it wrong, then get it right. I watched him stop, halfway through the load, and stand very still with a bale in his arms, looking at nothing.
Later he told me what he’d been thinking. He’d been trying to remember sitting on top of a load of hay as a little boy, falling asleep on the way home.
“I still can’t remember it,” he said. “But I can feel it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
When we finished, I drove Grandpa back to Prairie View. It was almost six. The aides helped him back into his wheelchair, and I pushed him down the long hallway toward his room.
At his door, he stopped me.
“Jana.”
“Yes, Grandpa?”
“Thank you.” His voice was rough. “For buying it. For not telling me. For letting me hear it one more time.”
“It’s not one more time,” I said. “It’s every summer, Grandpa. I’ll come get you every summer. As long as you want.”
He looked up at me with his watery blue eyes.
“Then I’d better live a while longer,” he said.
I kissed his forehead and left him there by his window, looking out at the parking lot, still humming.
That winter, Brock and I sat down at Mrs. Ochsner’s office in Marysville and signed a hay partnership agreement.
It was simple, two pages. Brock would set aside forty acres of his best brome and alfalfa ground for small square bales. I’d do the baling with the 268, with the boys. Brock would provide the tractor, fuel, and twine. I’d handle sales and deliveries. We’d split the gross proceeds sixty-forty, sixty to me, forty to him. Each of us would carry our own liability insurance.
“Sixty-forty?” Brock said, reading it. “You’re taking the bigger share?”
“I’m doing the work,” I said. “You’re providing the ground and the iron. That’s how it goes with shares.”
“Grandpa would say you’re right,” he grumbled. But he signed.
Mrs. Ochsner charged us $225 to draw it up, and we split it.
Brock also did something I didn’t expect. In December, he called me.
“I want to give you something,” he said. “Come out to Grandpa’s machine shed.”
When I got there, he’d rolled open both big doors. In the middle of the shed sat Grandpa’s old hay wagon, the one my boys had ridden on when they were little, and Grandpa’s old side-delivery rake.
“I’m signing these over to you,” Brock said. “The wagon and the rake. They go with the baler. They always did.”
He’d written out a bill of sale on the back of a feed store receipt: One hay wagon and one New Holland side-delivery rake, given to Jana Lindeman, for one dollar and love.
“One dollar and love?” I said.
“Mrs. Ochsner said you have to put something for it to be legal,” Brock said, red in the face. “So I put a dollar. And the other part was just true.”
I gave him a dollar bill from my purse. He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket, the same pocket where he’d put my three hundred dollars in June.
Then he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a folded check. It was for $300, made out to me.
“What’s this?”
“The money you paid me for the baler,” he said. “I can’t keep it. It was never mine to sell. Not really.”
I looked at the check for a long time. Then I folded it back up and handed it to him.
“Put it toward Grandpa’s Prairie View bill,” I said. “That’s where his money ought to go.”
Brock looked at me. Then he nodded slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
That was two years ago.
Grandpa is ninety now. He’s still at Prairie View, still in the room by the window, still humming “Bringing in the Sheaves” off-key. He’s slower than he was. Last winter he had pneumonia, and for a week we weren’t sure. But he pulled through, and when the nurse asked him how, he said, “I’ve got hay to watch in June.”
Every summer, on the first day of baling, I sign him out and drive him to the field. Some years it’s Retta’s. Some years it’s one of Brock’s forty-acre fields along the Big Blue River. I park at the gate and roll down his window, and he watches the old pink baler thump across the field with his eyes closed and his hand on my arm.
Last summer, between our partnership with Brock and Retta’s thirty-five acres, we put up four thousand two hundred bales. We sold every one before Labor Day, at ten dollars a bale now. There’s a waiting list of thirty-one names in the back of the HAYLINER ledger.
Tucker is eighteen. He started at Kansas State this fall, studying agricultural mechanics. Cordell says Tucker can rebuild a knotter faster than anyone he’s ever trained. Tucker’s Roth IRA has a little over $5,000 in it now. He says he’s not touching it until he’s sixty-six, like Grandpa told him to.
Reed is fifteen. He drives the tractor now that he’s old enough, and he’s the one who keeps the knotters tuned. He says he wants to be a veterinarian, like the doctors I work for. He spends his hay money on textbooks.
Retta Kopp still gets her twenty-five percent check every month in summer. She told me last fall she’d paid off the property taxes on her farm for the next three years, all at once, for the first time since Walt died.
“He’d be tickled,” she said. “Walt always said that brome was the best on Spring Creek.”
Cordell rides in the tractor cab on baling days with a thermos of black coffee. He says he’s supervising. Mostly he naps.
And Brock comes every first day of baling. He leaves his hired men running the round balers on his own land, drives over in his white Ram, and climbs up onto the hay wagon in his good jeans to stack small squares by hand.
Last June, on the first day of baling, I was standing at the gate beside Grandpa’s open car window when Brock climbed down off the wagon and walked over.
“Grandpa,” he said. “I remembered something.”
Grandpa opened his eyes.
“Last night,” Brock said slowly. “I was dreaming. And I was little, sitting on top of a load of hay. It was getting dark. There was a man stacking bales below me, and he was singing. Off-key.” Brock’s voice cracked. “He was singing ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’”
Grandpa’s face crumpled.
“That was your father,” he whispered. “Lars always sang that. He got it from me.”
Brock stood there in the field with his cap in his hand and tears running down his sunburned face.
“I know,” he said. “I know it was.”
Then the old baler thumped behind us, and a bale slid up onto the wagon, and Reed caught it.
And my grandfather closed his eyes, took my arm, and started to hum.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Like a heartbeat.
Nobody bales small squares anymore.
Except us.
The Harvest of 2027
The heat in late June 2027 hit the Big Blue River valley like a draw from an open furnace. The brome had gone from deep emerald to that pale, heavy gold almost overnight, thick enough at the roots that walking through it felt like wading through wet wool.
Tucker had come home from his freshman year at Kansas State on a Friday night, his boots caked in the gray dust of Manhattan’s experimental farm fields, his hands clean in a way that looked wrong on him. He didn’t unpack. He threw his duffel bag onto the back porch, walked straight out to the machine shed, and stood in front of the pink New Holland 268.
“She needs new needles,” Tucker said before he even said hello to me. He was standing with a wrench in his back pocket, wiping grease off the knotter frame with an old flannel rag. “The left needle’s got a micro-fracture along the bolt flange. Cordell tried to braze it back in May, but it won’t hold under fifty-pound tension.”
“He told me it was fine,” I said, leaning against the shed doorframe.
“Cordell’s eyes aren’t what they were in eighty-eight,” Tucker muttered, though there was no heat in it. He picked up a brand-new, unpainted cast-iron needle from the workbench—part number 134-802, sourced from an old dealer down in Belleville who had three of them sitting on a forgotten shelf since the Carter administration. “Got this for sixty dollars. Dealer thought it was scrap.”
That summer, we expanded to eighty acres. Brock had surrendered another forty of his bottomland along Spring Creek—ground that had been yielding four big round bales to the acre, heavy, dense feed that went to the feedlot in Greenleaf.
“My cattle buyers are complaining,” Brock told me on a humid Tuesday morning while we hitched the rake to his green John Deere 6120M. “They say the round bales are too tight. They’re losing hay in the mud because the cows just tear into them.”
“Tell them to buy small squares,” I said.
Brock grunted, pulling his cap down low over his eyes. “I did. Half of ’em laughed. The other half asked if you deliver to Wamego.”
“We do if they buy fifty at a time,” I said. “And if they pay cash at the gate.”
That afternoon, Grandpa came out in the Buick. He was ninety-one now, his shoulders settled deeper into his collarbone, his breathing shallow when the humidity climbed past seventy percent. But his eyes were clear when he looked out over the windrows.
I parked the car right at the edge of the creek field, where the shade of a massive cottonwood tree kept the interior from turning into an oven. I rolled the passenger window down and turned the ignition off.
“Listen to that,” Grandpa said.
Down in the draw, Reed was driving the tractor. He was sixteen now, tall and lean, with his father’s long arms and the steady, quiet patience of a boy who spent his evenings reading anatomy textbooks while the rest of his class was driving up and down Highway 77. He kept the tractor at a slow, deliberate crawling pace, matching the stroke of the plunger.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Beside the wagon, Brock was working. He didn’t have his phone out. He didn’t have his air-conditioned cab. He was wearing an old grey tank top, his shoulders mapped with fresh sunburn and dark patches of sweat. Every three seconds, a bale tumbled out of the chute. Brock caught it on the fly, hooked his fingers into the twine, swung it with the momentum of the wagon, and dropped it flush into the third tier of the stack.
“He’s got Lars’s rhythm,” Grandpa whispered from the car seat. His hand reached out and rested on the frame of the window, his fingers tapping against the warm steel of the door in sync with the baler’s stroke. “Lars never wasted a move. You waste a foot of movement on a hay wagon, and by three o’clock your lower back is shot.”
“Brock complained about his hips last night,” I said.
Grandpa let out a dry, rasping cackle. “Tell him to stretch his hamstrings before he climbs up. That’s what I told Lars in eighty-five. He didn’t listen either.”
We put up nine hundred bales that day off the lower forty. When the sun started to drop behind the red cedar ridge to the west, painting the stubble in streaks of bronze and indigo, Tucker backed the last loaded wagon up to the barn door.
We sat on the tailgate of my pickup—Brock, Tucker, Reed, and me—drinking cold sweet tea out of Mason jars while the boys’ muscle memory kept their hands twitching slightly in their laps.
Brock looked down at his palms. They were yellow-brown with twine burn and caked in dry leaf shatter.
“I haven’t slept this good since I was twenty,” Brock said softly. He reached out and touched the pink paint on the baler’s side shield, where the metal was still warm from the engine. “My head doesn’t spin at night anymore, Jana. Used to be I’d lie in bed calculating equipment payments and commodity futures until two in the morning. Now I just… fall down.”
“That’s the hay,” Reed said, looking up from his pocket notebook where he’d been tracking moisture content. “It leaves no room for anything else.”
The Dry Year
The drought of 2028 broke farms that had survived the eighties.
By July, the Big Blue River was a trickling vein of muddy brown between wide beds of cracked, white clay. The grass on the hills turned brittle as crisp glass by the middle of May, and the brome never made its second growth. Ranchers three counties over were liquidating herds because pasture ponds had dried up into grey mud holes full of dying carp.
Brock’s round-bale yields dropped by sixty percent. He stood in the driveway in mid-July, watching a dust devil swirl across his bare wheat stubble, his hands jammed deep into his pockets.
“I’ve got twenty-two head of black Angus I need to sell,” he told me, his voice tight. “No grass. Alfalfa’s paying two hundred and eighty dollars a ton if you can even find a truck to bring it up from Oklahoma.”
“We aren’t selling our small squares to the big buyers,” I said.
He looked at me, squinting against the harsh, white glare of the noon sun. “Jana, horse folks are offering fifteen dollars a bale down in Manhattan. We could make a killing.”
“We promised Retta her hay,” I said flatly. “And we promised the small barn owners down on Spring Creek. If we gouge them now because it’s dry, where are we next year when it rains again?”
Brock opened his mouth to argue, the big-farm businessman in him fighting for air, but then he looked toward the window of the house where Grandpa was sitting inside under the window unit. He closed his mouth, breathed out slow through his nose, and nodded once.
“Twelve dollars,” Brock said. “Fixed rate. Local customers only. One ton limit per farm until August.”
