My husband Curt drives a grain truck for the co-op four days a week, ten hours a day. On his three days home, he became the delivery service.
People who didn’t have their own trucks called and asked whether we could deliver. Curt charged a dollar a bale for delivery within ten miles and loaded our old Chevy flatbed with eighty bales at a time. He drove all over Marshall County from breakfast to supper.
The first call came the day after I pinned the card. It was a woman from Blue Rapids with three Quarter Horses, who bought forty bales. The second was a 4-H girl in Frankfort with a show pony, who bought twenty. The third was a man in Axtell who raised Boer goats.
By the Fourth of July, my phone didn’t stop ringing.
I’d come home from the clinic at six and there’d be eleven voicemails. Retired couples with two horses and a donkey. A riding stable outside Seneca that needed two hundred bales. A woman who raised rabbits. A family with a Shetland pony named Butterscotch who’d been feeding him lawn clippings and moldy rounds and was in tears on the phone because she’d finally found someone who sold small squares.
I kept track of everything in the HAYLINER ledger. Every bale sold, every name, every check, every cash payment. Every month, I wrote Retta a check for her twenty-five percent and hand-delivered it with a receipt.
The first check, for July, was $2,340.
Retta looked at it for a long time at her kitchen table.
“Walt never got this much for that field,” she said. “Not once.”
“Horse people pay for quality,” I said. “And you can’t get small squares anywhere else in the county.”
She folded the check and put it in her cardigan pocket.
“Banjo’s arthritis shots,” she said, a little gruffly. “And the property taxes. Walt always worried about the property taxes.”
Then, sometime in mid-July, the calls changed.
It started with a woman from Waterville. She said, “Oh, thank goodness. I called Brock Lindeman first. He’s got all that hay ground. And he said he only does rounds, but there’s a woman in Marysville who does small squares, and he gave me your number.”
Then it happened again. And again.
Horse people were calling Brock. The biggest hay producer in the county, with two round balers, three hired men, and two thousand acres. Everybody who needed hay called Brock first.
And Brock had to tell every one of them, “I don’t do small squares. Call my cousin Jana.”
Every single time.
By August, my friend Linda at the feed store told me that Brock had started telling people my number before they even finished asking.
“He’s got it memorized,” Linda said, grinning. “He doesn’t even look it up anymore.”
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