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.
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