Brock had both doors of Grandpa’s machine shed rolled open when I pulled into the yard that first Tuesday in June, and the morning light fell straight across the old red baler like it was on display.
He was standing beside it with a tape measure in one hand and his phone in the other. He didn’t look up until I was close enough to smell the grease and the old hay dust.
“Scrap man’s coming Thursday,” he said. “Three hundred bucks, and he hauls it himself. Best offer I’m going to get on a thing like this.”
I looked at the baler. A New Holland 268 Hayliner, the paint faded to the color of a barn that has seen fifty winters. The pickup teeth were bent in a few places, and the bale chamber still had chaff in it.
“That’s Grandpa’s baler,” I said, and I heard my own voice come out smaller than I meant it to.
“It’s a boat anchor, Jana.” He laughed, not mean exactly, just sure of himself. “Nobody bales small squares anymore. I’ve got two round balers that do in a day what this did in a week.”
I want to be fair to my cousin, because that is how Grandpa raised us. Brock is 46. He farms close to 2,000 acres in northeast Kansas, Grandpa’s ground plus everything he has rented and bought since, and he works harder than almost anyone I know.
To a man running that many acres, a sixty-year-old baler is not a memory. It is a thing in the way. It takes up a stall in the shed where a newer planter could sit out of the weather.
But there was one thing he hadn’t done, and it was the thing that made my face go hot standing there in the shed doorway.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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