Brock was still laughing as he counted the bills.
“Nobody bales small squares anymore, Jana,” he said, folding my three hundred dollars into his shirt pocket. “You’ll see.”
We were standing in Grandpa’s machine shed the first week of June, with both big doors rolled open and the morning sun pouring in across the dirt floor. Swallows darted in and out of the rafters. The shed smelled like old grease, mouse nests, and seventy years of hay dust.
In the middle of it, under a gray tarp, sat Grandpa’s baler.
It was a New Holland 268 Hayliner. Grandpa bought it new in 1962 from the implement dealer in Marysville for $1,840. The paint had faded from red to a dusty pink, and the yellow trim was flaking like old fingernail polish. Two of the tires were flat. One of the pickup teeth was bent sideways like a broken finger.
“It’s a boat anchor,” Brock said. “The scrap man was coming Thursday. You just saved him a trip.”
My cousin Brock is thirty-eight, broad-shouldered and sunburned, with a John Deere cap and a phone that never stops buzzing. He farms two thousand acres of corn, beans, and wheat in Marshall County, Kansas, and puts up hay with a pair of big round balers that each cost more than my house. To Brock, old iron is just clutter between him and the next thing.
“You’re going to sink more money into this thing than it’s worth,” he said. “Parts alone. And then what? You’ll bale for a week, it’ll break, and it’ll sit in your yard until somebody else hauls it to scrap.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Who’s even going to buy small squares? Everybody went to rounds twenty years ago.”
I didn’t argue. I just pulled out my phone and took a picture of the serial number plate on the side of the baler, so I’d have it for my records.
My name is Jana Lindeman. I’m forty-one. I work the front desk at the veterinary clinic in Marysville, and I’ve done it for eleven years.
Half our clients have horses.
And every single one of them complains, sometimes while I’m running their credit card for a Coggins test, that nobody sells small square bales anymore. Round bales weigh eight or nine hundred pounds. You need a tractor with a bale spear to move one. If you’re a sixty-year-old woman with two old geldings in a pasture behind your house, a round bale is useless. It sits out in the rain and molds, and half of it goes to waste.
Small squares weigh fifty pounds. One woman can lift one. You can stack them in a pickup bed and toss one flake at a time over a fence.
There are a lot of sixty-year-old women with two old geldings in Marshall County.
I didn’t say any of that to Brock. He was family, and he’d already decided I was being sentimental. I let him think so.
“I’ll write you a bill of sale,” I said. “So it’s official.”
He rolled his eyes. “For three hundred bucks?”
“For three hundred bucks.”
I tore a page out of the little notebook I keep in my purse and wrote it out on the hood of his pickup: For $300 received, I sell one New Holland 268 Hayliner baler, serial number 10614, as is, to Jana Lindeman. I dated it, and he signed it, still shaking his head.
“You’re as stubborn as Grandpa,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
To understand why I paid three hundred dollars for a pink boat anchor, you need to know about my grandfather.
Arvid Lindeman is eighty-eight years old. He farmed a hundred and sixty acres south of Marysville for sixty-one years: wheat, milo, a few cows, and hay. He’s a tall, stooped, quiet Swedish Lutheran with enormous hands and a soft voice. He didn’t say much, but when he did, people leaned in to hear it.
He had two children. My mother, Karin, and her younger brother, Lars, who was Brock’s father.
Uncle Lars died in 1988, when Brock was five and I was eight. A tractor rolled on him on a creek bank in October. I don’t remember much about the funeral except my grandfather sitting in the front pew, not moving, with his big hands flat on his knees.
After that, Grandpa farmed with Brock. Brock grew up in Grandpa’s shadow, riding in the tractor cab, learning everything from him. When Brock was old enough, he took over the land, then rented more, then bought more. Now he farms two thousand acres and has three hired men.
My mother married a schoolteacher and moved to Topeka. I married Curt, a truck driver for the farmers’ co-op, and stayed in Marysville. We have two boys, Tucker, sixteen, and Reed, thirteen.
When my boys were little, I worked summers, and Grandpa watched them. He took them out to the hayfield. They rode the hay wagon behind that New Holland baler while Grandpa drove the tractor, and the bales came up the chute one after another, thump, thump, thump. Grandpa hummed “Bringing in the Sheaves” the whole time, off-key, the same three lines over and over.
Tucker was seven the first summer. Reed was four and had to wear a little life jacket on the wagon so Grandpa could grab him by the straps if he wobbled.
They were the happiest summers of their lives. Mine too.
Grandpa quit baling small squares when he was eighty-one. His shoulders gave out. He sold his cows and leased the hayground to Brock, who baled it in rounds. The New Holland went into the machine shed under a tarp.
Last fall, Grandpa fell in his kitchen and broke his hip. After surgery at the hospital in Manhattan, the doctor said he couldn’t live alone anymore. In January, he moved into Prairie View, the assisted living home in Marysville, in a small room with a window that looks out on the parking lot.
It costs $5,900 a month. Grandpa’s Social Security and his small pension from the grain elevator where he worked winters cover about $2,300. His savings cover the rest, for now.
Before he moved, he sat at his kitchen table with his attorney, Mr. Haugen, and signed a few papers.
He leased his hundred and sixty acres to Brock for five years at $95 an acre in cash rent. That’s $15,200 a year, paid in two installments, and it goes straight to Prairie View.
And he signed all his farm machinery over to Brock by bill of sale. Two old tractors, a disc, a grain drill, a hay rake, a hay wagon, and the baler.
“Brock’s the farmer,” Grandpa told me. “It ought to go to the farmer.”
So it was legally Brock’s to sell. I wasn’t going to fight family over it.
I just bought it.
Nobody had told Grandpa that Brock was scrapping it. I knew why. Brock didn’t want to explain, and I didn’t want to be the one to break Grandpa’s heart.
That night at supper I told the boys.
Tucker set down his fork. “You bought Grandpa’s baler?”
“For three hundred dollars.”
“Does it work?”
“Not even a little.”
Reed was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “Can we fix it?”
Curt looked at me across the table. He’s a big, quiet man who doesn’t waste words.
“You’ve got a plan,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’ve got a plan,” I said.
We hauled the baler home on a borrowed flatbed trailer on Saturday and parked it in our pole barn.
Then we stood around it, the four of us, and looked at it.
The baler was a mess. Mice had nested in the twine box. The bale chamber was full of seven-year-old hay so packed and moldy that Tucker had to chip it out with a crowbar. The tires were rotten. The pickup reel was missing three teeth. The plunger was rusted to the walls.
And the knotters wouldn’t tie.
The knotters are the heart of a square baler. They’re the little mechanical hands on top of the bale chamber that wrap two strands of twine around each bale and tie a knot in each one, automatically, every time a bale comes through. If the knotters don’t work, you don’t get bales. You get a pile of loose hay on the ground.
Reed tried cranking the flywheel by hand while Tucker fed a strand of twine through. The knotter spun, the twine went around, and nothing tied. The twine just fell off in a loose loop.
“Well,” Curt said, “that’s the whole problem right there.”
I called Cordell Mattson.
Cordell is seventy-four and lives a mile down the gravel road from us. He was the head mechanic at the New Holland dealership in Marysville for thirty-four years before it closed in 2009. He’s small and wiry, with forearms covered in old burn scars and a laugh like a rusty gate. He’d fixed Grandpa’s baler more than once back in the eighties.
He came over the next morning with a red toolbox the size of a coffin.
He walked around the baler once, slowly, running his hand along the side the way you’d touch an old horse.
“Arvid’s 268,” he said. “I’d know it anywhere. He bent that pickup tooth on a fence post in ’79. I told him to replace it. He never did.”
“Can you fix it?”
Cordell laughed his rusty-gate laugh.
“I can’t fix it,” he said. “But I can show these two boys how to fix it. Which is better.”
For three Saturdays in a row, Cordell came over at eight in the morning with his toolbox and a thermos of black coffee and taught my sons how a knotter works.
He showed them the billhook, the curved steel finger that grabs the twine and turns it into a loop. He showed them the twine disc that holds the strand in place, and the tucker fingers that push the twine into position. He showed them the knife that cuts the twine after each knot. He had them take every piece apart, clean it in a coffee can full of diesel fuel, check it for wear, and put it back together.
“You can’t rush a knotter,” Cordell said. “It’s like a pocket watch. Everything has to happen in the right order, at the right instant, or it doesn’t happen at all.”
The boys skinned their knuckles. They got grease in their hair, on their shirts, and somehow on the ceiling of the pole barn. Reed cut his thumb on the twine knife and needed a butterfly bandage from my clinic first aid kit.
I ordered parts online from a company in Iowa that specializes in old New Holland balers: a new set of pickup teeth, two new tires, a twine disc, bearings, and a rebuild kit for the plunger. It came to $640, plus shipping. I paid for it from the household checking account and wrote it in a little ledger I started keeping in a spiral notebook on the kitchen counter. On the cover I wrote: HAYLINER.
On the third Saturday, Reed found the real problem.
He was lying on his back on the hay wagon with a flashlight, looking up into the knotter assembly, while Tucker slowly turned the flywheel by hand.
“There,” Reed said suddenly. “Stop. Look at the knife.”
Cordell climbed up beside him and peered in. Then he whistled through his teeth.
“Well, I’ll be. The twine knife’s worn. It’s cutting the twine a hair too early, before the billhook finishes the knot.” He clapped Reed on the shoulder. “Thirteen years old, and you found it before I did. You’ve got the eye.”
Reed turned bright red.
The new twine knife cost $34. Cordell installed it with the boys watching. Then he fed a bale’s worth of old loose hay into the chamber by hand while Tucker turned the flywheel.
The plunger pushed. The hay packed. The needles came up through the bale chamber, carrying twine. The knotters spun.
Click. Click.
A bale slid out the back of the chute and dropped onto the floor of the pole barn. Two strands of orange twine were wrapped tight around it, each one tied in a neat, perfect knot.
Reed jumped down off the wagon, grabbed the bale by both strings, and held it over his head like a trophy.
“It tied!” he yelled. “It tied!”
Tucker whooped. Curt clapped. Cordell laughed so hard he had to sit down on an overturned bucket.
I stood in the doorway of the pole barn and cried a little, where nobody could see me.
Now I needed hay.
Our place is only fifteen acres, and most of it is house, yard, and pole barn. I’d known from the beginning that I’d need somebody else’s field.
I knew exactly whose.
Retta Kopp is seventy-six. She’s a widow who lives in a little white farmhouse up Spring Creek, about three miles north of us. Her husband, Walt, died six years ago. Since then, her thirty-five acres of smooth brome hayfield had sat uncut. Nobody had baled it in six summers. It had gone tall and shaggy, and the county weed inspector had sent her two letters about the thistles along the fence line.
I knew Retta from the clinic. She brought in her old border collie, Banjo, for his arthritis shots every month.
I drove up there on a Sunday afternoon and sat in her kitchen with a cup of weak coffee.
“I’ve got a baler,” I said. “An old one. And two boys. I’d like to put up your brome this summer. For a share.”
Retta squinted at me over her glasses. She has a sharp, wrinkled face and doesn’t suffer fools.
“What kind of share?”
I’d thought about it. The standard deal around here for hay on shares is that the landowner gets a third and the person doing the work gets two-thirds. But I wanted it in dollars, not bales, because Retta didn’t have horses or cattle anymore. What would she do with a third of the hay?
“I sell the bales,” I said. “You get twenty-five percent of whatever I take in. I pay for everything: fuel, twine, repairs, all of it. And I’ll mow the thistles along your fence line so the county stops sending you letters.”
Retta drummed her fingers on the table.
“Walt always said a deal you can’t write down isn’t a deal,” she said.
“Then let’s write it down.”
So we did. That week, I paid a lawyer in Marysville, Mrs. Ochsner, $175 to draw up a simple one-page hay lease. It said I had the right to cut and bale hay on Retta’s thirty-five acres for one year. Retta would get twenty-five percent of gross sales, paid monthly. I’d carry liability insurance, keep the field in good condition, and control the thistles.
I called my insurance agent, Gene Hollis at the Farm Bureau office, about adding liability coverage for haying on someone else’s land.
“You’re running a hay operation now, Jana?” Gene said, sounding amused.
“A small one.”
“With your boys?”
“Tucker’s sixteen. Reed’s thirteen. Reed’s only going to stack on the wagon and in the barn. He won’t be driving anything with a power takeoff.”
Gene was quiet. “Good. Keep it that way. I’ve seen too many kids hurt around balers. You keep those shields on and that PTO shaft covered, and nobody reaches into that pickup while it’s running. Ever.”
“I know, Gene. My uncle died on a tractor.”
“I know he did,” Gene said softly. “That’s why I’m saying it.”
He added a farm liability endorsement to our homeowner’s policy for $186 a year. I wrote it in the HAYLINER ledger.
Then I needed a tractor. Our old lawn tractor wasn’t going to pull a baler.
Cordell solved that too.
“I’ve got a John Deere 4020 sitting in my shed doing nothing,” he said. “Runs fine. Just needs somebody to drive it. You can use it this summer if you pay for the fuel and change the oil when you’re done.”
“Cordell, I can’t…”
“You can,” he said. “Arvid let me use his hay rake for eleven years after I quit farming and never charged me a dime. I figure I owe the Lindemans a summer.”
We cut Retta’s brome on the twelfth of June.
It was hot as an oven. A south wind came off the plains at thirty miles an hour, perfect drying weather. Brock lent me his old sickle-bar mower. He didn’t say much when he dropped it off, just “Try not to break it,” and drove away fast. We laid the brome down in long green swaths across the field.
Two days later, we raked it into windrows with Grandpa’s old side-delivery rake. Brock let me borrow that too. It was technically his now.
On the third day, we baled.
I’ll never forget it.
