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.
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