by Bob Thompson
He was nearly beside me now. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a knife. I almost reached down and grabbed the rope, but then realized that two men are no more match for a tractor than one. Before I could think of anything else he was off the roof and clinging onto the fly rafter, the one nailed between the ends of the other rafters. He was stretched out as tight as a bowstring and his fingers were turning white. I had given him up for a goner when suddenly the rope slipped off his waist and he slammed up against the barn, still managing to keep his grip. I should have immediately reached down and grabbed him, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t move. When the rope slipped down off his waist it had taken his pants with it and his boxer shorts were draped across his clodhoppers. Finally, I got control of myself enough to grab him and pull him back up on the roof. We watched as John pulled his daddy’s pants all the way to the house and back.
Marvin sold that motorcycle.
Balerman
It was already eighty-five degrees by the time the sun and the dog star rose above the horizon, but I could stay in bed for another three hours. One of the few benefits of hauling hay was that until the Earth’s two brightest stars burned the dew off, work couldn’t begin. Once the moisture was gone, the hay could be raked into windrows, scooped up in the New Holland baler, and deposited back on the ground in the form of row after row of sixty- to seventy-pound rectangular bales.
There weren’t any bales left on the ground from yesterday’s work. We’d worked till twilight last night, so that we wouldn’t need to show up next door on Granny’s store porch till 9 or so. I got up at 9, pulled on my jeans, T-shirt, socks, and boots, stuck my leather gloves in a rear pocket, and headed out the door in four minutes or less.
This morning, as usual, I cut across Granny’s front yard and onto the back porch of the country grocery. Coming through the screen door, I said, “Morning” to Granny, grabbed a Hostess cupcake on my way up the aisle, and stopped at the drink box at the front door to fish out a cold chocolate milk. Pushing through the double Bunny Bread screen doors, I joined the rest of the crew already arrayed on the wooden bench, the Fairbanks-Morris platform scale, and the low concrete base of the Gulftane pump.
Smitty was already expressing his dissatisfaction on a festering issue. Warming up, he raged, “I say we tell Balerman that we ain’t hauling no damn bean hay for a penny a bale. If it’s such great stuff it ought to be worth more than that to get it in the barn. I swear, God never intended bean hay to be baled anyway. You new fellows will find out. The stems are as big around as a sixteen-penny nail and the cut end is just as sharp. It’ll tear the knees out of a pair of jeans in one day. Hell, it’ll cut you all over, anywhere it touches you. You’ll need a transfusion at the hospital in Paducah when you haul this stuff, and dusty, my God, it’s twice as dusty as clover or even alfalfa. It took some smart-ass college professor to come up with the lame-brained idea to bale it ’cause it’s got so many nutrients and such. Ain’t nobody else around here fool enough to mess with it except Balerman, and why shouldn’t he, when he can get a bunch of fools like you and me to put it in the barn for him for a penny a bale! I say we get a penny and a half or we let his precious bean hay rot in the field. What do you say, Robert?”
“You’re right,” I said, “but we go through this with Balerman every year, and you know you can’t win an argument with him. It just pisses him off and he gets mean. I just wanna get it over with, so we can go to the dance down at the Legion Hall in La Center tonight.”
Moose, a little older than the rest of us and Balerman’s fulltime crew chief, had been listening to all the grumbling without comment. Now he said, “Amen” as he got up from his gas-pump perch and started across the gravel lot to the banged-up red 1956 flatbed hay truck. “Let’s make hay while the sun shines, boys.”
“Alright,” shrugged Smitty, “but I ain’t taking no crap from Balerman today.”
Crockett got in the cab as the rest of us crawled up on the oak bed of the well-worn and shade-tree-modified two-ton Chevy truck as Moose fired up the big V8 and we headed toward the field. Standing up, holding to the wooden headboard with open shirts flying and eyes squinting into the wind coming over the cab, we felt like we were driving through a blast furnace. We hadn’t gone a mile before the distant column of dust rising from the field came into view.
Moose pulled through the gate into the field, shifted the two-speed axle into bulldog low, and steered the truck up between two rows of bales. With my teeth, I pulled the straps tight on the back of my leather gloves and hopped off to take the outside windrow. Smitty did the same on the right side of the truck. Bending over the first bale, right hand under the top wire, left on the bottom one, I flexed my knees, lifted, and leaned back to counterbalance the load.
“Not too bad,” I thought, “not more than fifty pounds. Maybe Balerman is trying to toss us a bone; he knows we don’t like this damn bean hay.” Keeping the bale against my right thigh, I could feel the stabs of the sharp stems through my veteran and patched Wrangler’s as I shuffled over to the creeping truck. Using my knee for extra lift, I boosted it up onto the bed to Crockett, who took my bale and started the stack up against the headboard, while Gary did the same with Smitty’s bale.
“Not too bad, huh?” I yelled to Smitty.
“We’ll see if they stay this way all day,” he shot back, not smiling.
The first load was going well, it was early, we were feeling frisky, and the bales were lighter than expected. When Balerman was out of sight, instead of just boosting the bales onto the bed for the stackers to handle, we’d show off, throwing them two or three rows up on top of the already stacked bales. When his tractor came within sight we would strain and grimace, barely getting the bales up to the truck bed. I got a particularly light one and said, “Watch this.” Standing with my back to the truck, I boosted the bale up over my head, throwing it completely over the truck to land near Smitty on the other side. It was bad timing. Just as I let it go, I saw the tractor come in sight over the hill. “Crap!”
Immediately, Balerman stopped the tractor and hopped to the ground.
“Nice going, asshole!” the crew yelled in unison.
Balerman walked to the back of the baler, cranking the handles three full turns on both sides of the output chute, tightening the bales and making them heavier. At least the first load was already done.
When we got to the nearby barn it was already set up. Whatever his other faults, Balerman knew machinery; he had his old green two-cylinder Poppin John backed up to the elevator, a sort of metal escalator for hay and grain, to lift bales to the barn loft. The vintage John Deere’s motor supplied the power to the elevator by way of a square steel shaft that ran from the power takeoff (PTO) sticking out the back of the rear axle on the tractor to the input shaft on the elevator. From there, a series of chains, gears, and pulleys drove the squeaking and squealing metal belt up to the barn loft.
We pulled the truck up beside the elevator, and all except the designated unloader climbed up in the barn to take bales off the top of elevator and haul them to the back side of the barn for stacking. Things were going well: the bales weren’t heavy, the barn floor didn’t have too many holes, and the loft doors at each end of the barn were open, allowing a cooling breeze to blow through.
Just as the last bale was off the elevator and stacked at the back of the loft, I heard Balerman yelling, “I’ll be damned!”
I turned around to see him standing red-faced in the loft door. “Ya’ll know bean hay’s got a lot of moisture and has to be stacked on its edge to keep it from rotting. What was ya’ll thinking about? Ya’ll knew but ya wasn’t thinking! I don’t know what they’re teaching you boys in school these days but it ain’t to think! Maybe it’ll help you to remember if you take this whole pile down and restack it. And hurry up—we ain’t got all day.”
Tension was at a breaking point as I stepped between the clinch-fisted Smitty and Balerman as the latter turned and exited the barn loft.
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br /> It took us till past lunch to get that pile torn down and restacked. Then we went back to the store for baloney and cheese sandwiches, trying to figure out how to make up time and money that afternoon. We had made only 75 cents that morning.
When we pulled back into the field we had decided to add another bale down the center of the truck, widening the load a little but allowing us to get nearly a hundred bales on each load. We got the load on the bed and our mood improved until we got to the barn and encountered a narrower-than-anybody-remembered barn-lot gate. Moose was not what you would call a precise, patient, or delicate driver—you could look at the busted mirrors and the mashed fenders of the hay truck and tell that—but to his credit, he almost made it through. But not quite. He broke the gate post off and dragged most of the load off onto the ground.
Suddenly there was Balerman again, disgustedly slinging his cap to the ground. “Dad-gum it, between all of you, you ain’t got the brains of a jackass! What was ya’ll thinking about? Naw, don’t tell me—I know. Ya’ll wasn’t thinking at all. If you’d just take a minute to think things through, figure ’em out, you’d save yourselves and me a lot of trouble. But no, no, you young fellows ain’t got that kind of sense. Ya’ll just thinking about getting through and going to that dance tonight. Well, I tell you one thing, you better start thinking or there won’t be no dances or girls or nothing for you numbskulls. Now get this hay in the barn and we’ll talk about how much you owe me for this gate post later.”
It took us an hour to get the hay off the ground and into the barn. The rest of the day was miserable. It must have been close to a hundred degrees by now, and the bales were averaging near ninety pounds each. Dirt, chaff, and hayseed were blowing back in our faces and eyes and sticking to our hot, sweaty bodies when we boosted the bales up on the truck. The mess would build about a quarter of an inch thick all over our bare sticky skin and we couldn’t wipe it off or it would itch worse. We just let the sweat wash it down into the tops of our underwear, turning them black so that our moms would never get them clean. Besides the sharp stalks ripping our jeans and turning our wrists into what looked like chopped liver, we encountered the occasional bale with a bee’s nest, snake, or skunk baled up in it.
It was late when we finally got the last bale loaded up and headed for the barn. We figured for sure that Balerman would let us cover it with a tarp and unload it the next day because it would take twice as long to unload since the barn was nearly full now. The level of the hay inside was far above the loft door, so we’d left a shaft of space, just enough room for one person to stand in the opening to take the bales off the elevator and then boost them up over his head to the very peak of the barn. Up there among the collar beams, just beneath that hot tin with the sun beating down on it from the other side, there wasn’t any breeze and it had to be 120 degrees. Surely, Balerman would let us unload in the morning when it wasn’t so hot.
But there wasn’t an ounce of compassion in Balerman that day. “Let’s get it unloaded. Ya’ll get up there in the barn. Moose, stay here and toss the bales to me and I’ll feed the elevator.”
Grumpy and tired, we flipped coins for the spot at the top of the elevator and I won. Smitty and the others, cussing and groaning, crawled up through the scratchy tunnel to a dungeon with no light and dust so thick they had to tie bandanna handkerchiefs over their mouths to breathe. There was not enough room to stand in the baking, choking, suffocating heat, and with their jeans being shredded by the hay below and nails sticking through the lathing strips above, emotions ran high. If the nails didn’t rip into their backs, the wasps would. Those angry red wasps on the several nests had the same attitude as the crew—hot, agitated, and ready to sting.
Balerman started the John Deere, climbed on the truck bed, and began piling bales on the elevator. I watched in horror as he loaded the bales on as fast as he could. “Stop! We can’t take them that fast—space them out!” I yelled as a solid train of five or six end-to-end, tractor-propelled bales came toward me. “Damn it, we can only take them one at a time! Stop!”
I grabbed the first bale and shoved it up over my head, the seed and chaff falling all over my bare head and shoulders, collecting in my eyes and mouth. “Take it quick, Smitty, the asshole is trying to kill us.” I felt Smitty take the weight of the bale just as the next one raked across my side like a wire brush, taking all the skin off. I reached over, not bothering with the wires, bear-hugged it, and shoved it up to Smitty: “Quick, Smitty, here’s another one.” But Smitty was still struggling with the first eighty-pound anchor, trying to wrestle it back to Crockett. I felt the next bale pushing into my back harder and harder, finally causing me to lose my footing. The bale over my head came crashing into my face and everything started going gray as I crumpled to my knees, feeling blood flowing down my face. Bale after bale was packed into the cramped space, burying me as I teetered on the edge of consciousness.
At that moment a nest of wasps launched into action, locating a spot in the middle of my back that evidently wasn’t buried in hay. At least three of them jolted me out of my near faint and into a primordial scream.
At the same time, I heard a loud bang. The tractor-driven elevator, clogged with hay from top to bottom, was still trying to shove bales into a place already full until finally a link in the drive chain popped, mercifully stopping the chaos.
I was cut, stung, and hurt, with a strong inclination to share those things with Balerman. With berserker energy, I began kicking, screaming obscenities, and knocking bales out the door, trying to get at fresh air … and Balerman.
Like a blood-stained Braveheart I stood in the loft door wiping blood from my eyes and searching for my adversary. I saw him as he, not paying attention to me, hopped down from the truck bed on his way to shut the tractor off. As he jumped his eyeglasses came out of his overalls’ bib and landed in the dust on the other side of the still rotating PTO shaft. As he bent over to pick them up, the square shaft caught in the loose folds of his overalls near his waist. He looked down for just a second to see what was happening, but a second was more than he had before he was pulled from his feet and spun around with the shaft. “Whoa!” he yelled as his head went under the bar for the first time, his feet coming around in a much larger arc and with greater velocity, striking the ground and gouging two small ditches in the dirt; then his head came around again as he tightened his body around the shaft to keep his feet from hitting again.
I jumped from the loft and ran over to the tractor, arriving just before Moose. I grabbed the kill button on the tractor … and then I hesitated.
“What’re you waiting for? Shut if off!” screamed Moose.
I said, “Now, Moose, haven’t you been listening to what Balerman has been telling us all day, how we ought to think things through a little bit before we just jump in and do something? Ain’t that right, Balerman?”
“Ahhhhhhhh!” was the response I got from Balerman. I took that as an affirmative.
“Now, let’s think this thing through,” I said. “This tractor doesn’t have a freewheeling PTO, and if we hit this kill switch the tractor motor will stop and that shaft will stop dead in its tracks. As fast as he’s going with all that momentum and that shaft stopping suddenly, why, he’s liable to keep turning. It could really twist something up down there.” Illustrating, I grabbed that area of my jeans and twisted.
Moose winced and conceded the point. “What do we do then?” he asked.
Smitty, who had crawled out from the loft, arrived and offered, “What if we push in on the clutch and then shut it off?”
“There’s an idea,” I said. “Let’s think that through. If we push in on the clutch, yes, that’ll free up the shaft … but that also might allow Balerman to go a little faster before he starts to slow down.”
We looked over at Balerman, who was going so fast now his features were blurred. He looked like an ice-skater going into a spin: slow at first, with an arm and a leg stuck out; then, as they pull themselves in tighter and
tighter, moving faster and faster till they become just a blur. Balerman was going so fast now that things were beginning to fly off of him. His pocket watch had come out of his overall pocket and was on the end of its chain, slapping the ground on every revolution. Pencils and pocket knives came next. Finally, when the upper plates of his false teeth landed in the dust, we figured he had had about as much speed as he could handle.
“What about this?” I put forth. “What if we ease the throttle back a little at a time till we get him slowed down to where it’s safe to push in on the clutch?”
This suggestion was well received, and after some discussion I was appointed to carry out the job. I reached up, grabbed the throttle, and eased the Poppin John back a notch. Balerman did indeed slow down. I let him get acclimated to that speed before backing it down another notch. This whole process didn’t take over two or three minutes. Finally, he was going slowly enough that we thought it safe to push in on the clutch. Balerman stopped at last and we carefully unwrapped him from that shaft, laid him on the ground, and checked him for breaks and cuts. He had none, but he wasn’t feeling too well.
At that moment I realized that what Balerman had been telling us was the truth. If a person will take time to figure things out—to not just react but to think problems through—it will work out a lot better. Things certainly worked out great for us. Balerman didn’t feel like unloading the rest of that hay and we got off in plenty of time to go to the dance.
Not Much Danger
My dad’s only brother, Uncle Fuzz, and I were alone on the front porch bench at Granny’s store. Billy Gene was the name on his Korean War dog tags, but his childhood buddies had dubbed him Fuzzy after the popular cowboy sidekick actor and singer Fuzzy Wright.