We cut a second time in late July.
Second-cutting brome is finer and leafier than the first, and horse people love it. We put up another nine hundred bales. Combined with what was left of the first cutting, that was enough to keep selling through August.
The boys worked every day it didn’t rain. Tucker drove the tractor. Reed stacked. On the days I was at the clinic, Cordell rode along in the tractor cab with Tucker, just to keep an eye on things. Mostly, I think, he did it for the company.
I paid the boys. Twelve dollars an hour for Tucker, ten for Reed. I wrote it all in the ledger and paid them by check every Friday, the same way the clinic paid me. By the end of the summer, Tucker had earned $2,640 and Reed had earned $1,910.
Curt and I sat them down at the kitchen table one night in August.
“Here’s the deal,” Curt said. “You keep half of what you earned to spend however you want. The other half goes into a Roth IRA.”
“A what?” Reed asked.
So I explained it the way my accountant, Marv Pettit, had explained it to me in June when I called to ask how to handle the hay money on our taxes. When you’re young and you’ve earned real wages from a real job, you can put that money into a special retirement account. It grows for fifty years, and when you take it out at retirement, you don’t pay taxes on it.
“Fifty years?” Tucker said. “I’ll be sixty-six.”
“And that thirteen hundred dollars,” I said, “if it grows like the stock market usually does, could be worth more than forty thousand dollars by then.”
Tucker stared at me. “From baling hay?”
“From baling hay.”
We opened two custodial Roth IRAs at the bank in Marysville the next Saturday, one for each boy. Tucker put in $1,320. Reed put in $955.
Reed asked the banker, a young woman named Ms. Tran, if he could see where his money was. She showed him the account on her computer screen. He looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
“Grandpa’s baler made that,” he finally said.
“You made that,” Ms. Tran said. “The baler helped.”
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