Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [95]
I wander down there several times a day, often under the pretense of checking their feed, or to toss them a handful of dandelion leaves—on these they have never wavered, they fight over them—but mainly I just want to watch them. For all my talk about chickens being better than TV, the pigs hold their own. Already their personalities are emerging, and I find that Amy isn’t the only one who will have to be reminded that they are not pets. But perhaps my concerns are ill-founded: some of our city cousins come to visit, and they all run down to look at the pigs. I follow them down and arrive to find Amy standing on the fourth rung of the panels, pointing first at one pig and then the other as she explains, “That one’s Wilbur, and that one’s Cocklebur…but in October, that one’s ham, and that one’s bacon!”
“Let’s go check and see if the hay is dry,” Dad would say after he kissed Mom and thanked her for lunch. Put your hay up too wet and it will overheat and you will wake up in the morning to find a giant smoldering briquette where your barn used to be. Reaching beneath the windrow down close to the earth where the hay was most likely to be moist, Dad would grab a shock of stems and twist it in his hands. If he felt the right lightness and crackle, the hay was cured and safe to bale.
We started on the hay wagons young. I remember standing beside the oldest Baalrud boy when I was still too small to do anything more than drag the bales from the chute to the back of the wagon. I watched how he stood sideways at the mouth of the chute, one hand hanging and the other resting on the emerging bale, and when it was my turn I stood just the same. Thus we accumulate the stances of manhood. I learned to ride the pitch and lurch of the wagon, knees slightly flexed to absorb the topography. I learned to wait until just before the bale reached the tipping point on the chute before hooking my fingers beneath the twin strands of twine, and how to walk with the bale to one side until I reached the stack and swung it round to boost it with my thigh. When I grew older and stronger I used a motion similar to a weight lifter’s clean and jerk to get the hay bale above my head, where I would balance it on my forearms for a moment before bending at the knees and tossing it free-throw style atop the stack. My brothers and I marked our development as men by how high we could pile bales on a wagon. The day I pitched one nine high, I felt my shoulders broaden. Sometimes you’d rear back to pitch one and the twine would snap. The bale exploded in midair and dropped chaff on your head and down the neck of your shirt.
The hay wagon was towed behind a baler operating on a combination of forces ranging from the deft touch of the rake-like teeth that skimmed the hay from the stubble, the brute force of the knife-edged plunger chopping and stuffing the hay into the bale chamber, and the Rube Goldberg complexity of the knotter. In short, you fed a loose windrow in one end, and neatly bound bales came out the other. The speed of their delivery varied with the thickness of the hay—in thin cuttings the plunger had little to work with, and the bales moved in nearly invisible increments; if the windrow was the diameter of a grizzly bear, the bales lurched outward several inches at a time. A large flywheel kept the rhythm steady for the most part, but now and then—and especially on the backswath, where much of the hay lay in shade—you’d hear the baler bog on a chunk of wet clover, and then you’d keep an eye on the chute for the bright green slug packed between the paler dry hay. If there were two of you on the wagon it was fun to try to time out the bales so the other guy got the wet one, which would lift like a bag of bricks compared to the rest. After