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.
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