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.
Tucker drove Cordell’s green John Deere with the baler hitched behind it, wearing his Royals ball cap backward and a pair of safety glasses Gene Hollis had made me promise he’d wear. The old New Holland thumped along behind, picking up the windrow. The pickup teeth swept the hay up into the chamber, and the plunger packed it with a deep, steady thump-thump-thump, like a heartbeat.
Bales came out the chute one after another and slid up onto the wagon behind.
I stood on the hay wagon in leather work gloves, catching each bale as it came off the chute and stacking it, five high, in a crisscross pattern so the load wouldn’t shift. Reed stacked beside me, his small arms straining.
The sun beat down. Sweat ran into my eyes. The air smelled of fresh-cut brome, sweet and green and dusty.
And somewhere around the fourth load, without thinking about it, I started humming.
“Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing…”
Reed looked over at me. Then he started humming too.
Tucker couldn’t hear us over the tractor. But when he looked back over his shoulder at the wagon, he was grinning.
We put up four hundred and twelve bales that first day.
By the end of June, we’d baled the whole thirty-five acres. One thousand nine hundred and forty bales of first-cutting brome, stacked to the rafters in our pole barn and in the empty hay loft of Retta’s old barn.
Then I pinned one notice on the corkboard at the Marshall County Farmers Co-op feed store, on a three-by-five index card in black marker.
SMALL SQUARE BALES. Brome, first cutting, no rain, barn stored. $9/bale. You haul. Call Jana.
And my phone number.
I paid a dollar for the thumbtack. I didn’t write that in the ledger.
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