Joe Kehr had a dairy farm with about a thousand cows outside the village I grew up in. My dad worked for him, and in July, when the hay got gold, so did I.
My first hay day happened smack dab in the twilight of my boyhood. My mind was eager to be a man, but my eleven-year-old body was still scrawny, weighing about as much as a single bale. Joe did me a favor by paying me five dollars per wagon load because I got in the way more than I helped.
We drove the tractor around mowed fields slashed by golden stripes of straw. Well, Joe drove—I trailed in the wagon, a giant jiggly jail cell of red bars that jolted violently to and fro over the bumpy field. The baler scooped up lines of dried hay with a trillion tiny teeth. Unseen magic happened within the baler. Then dense gold bricks were launched out of the womb, torpedoing toward me as I scrambled to stack them in the wagon. By the time I’d wrestled a bale into position, two more had been spit out. Joe shouted things at me I assumed were advice, but I couldn’t hear a peep over the roar of the baler snorting up its infinite lines.
When the wagon was full, we bobbed our way back to the barn where the men waited to stack bales in the haymow. It was an assembly line of magnificent strength. Sweat poured over glistening white muscles and spiderwebbed veins popped from forearms. I felt like a useless twig by comparison. I busted my bony butt to keep up with demand from above. I had to lug the bales off the wagon and onto the elevator. Twine dug into shallow crevices underneath my knuckles, and red lines pulsated from my pink palms. Sweat flooded my thin blonde eyebrows and overflowed until my sight stung; I constantly swiped my cotton shirt against my face, but that rubbed chaff into my eyes so that swollen-red goggles of irritated skin bulged across my face. Chaff got trapped inside the waistband of my whitey tightys. It stabbed and poked and scraped my pale skin until a bright red ring throbbed around my torso. My belly button was packed with specks of green-gold dust pasted together by sweat.
Joey Kehr Jr. swigged ice-cold water from a thermos and let streams trickle out his mouth, down his muscular chest. He was sixteen and a fully grown man as far as I was concerned. He chewed tobacco on the school bus, showed me a Playboy magazine stashed in between two mildewy bales on the northeastern wall of the barn, and said words like “shit” and “fuck” a lot when our dads weren’t around. Our dads went into the shop a lot for “adult time.”
As dusk approached, Joe Sr. and I hauled in the last load of the day. With one hand he steered the tractor toward the barn, the other raked black-lined fingernails through a sweaty forest of brown and silver chest hair. I watched from above, perched atop a mighty mountain of gold bricks with a long strand of straw sticking out of my mouth like I’d seen real men do in movies. Skies of pastel pink bled over the barren field; golden spears of light shot down into the dirt where the hay once danced. We both stared toward heaven as we rumbled along. I yelled out to Joe, “This is beautiful!” My proclamation was drowned out by the tractor’s roaring praise. After a moment, I felt shy and stupid and glad he didn’t hear me.
After unloading the last wagon, the men stood in a circle. Nobody spoke much. We mostly exchanged deep sighs and satisfied grunts. My dad used the back of his burly wrist to swipe sweat from his slick brow. He rested his thumbs inside the two front loops of his jeans. I did the same.
Joe Kehr handed me a crisp $50 bill and shook my lacerated hand hard. Joey Jr. told me to come back in the winter so we could ride snowmobiles through the woods, to which I replied, “Hell yes.”
Dad and I climbed into his car. He jammed the stick into first gear, paused, and put it back in neutral. He yanked the e-brake upward with his big paw and jogged into the shop. He returned quickly with two beers. Handing me one, he said, “If you’re gonna work like a man, you can drink like a man.”
The brown bottle felt gigantic in my hand. The icy cold glass cooled my throbbing fingers. My first sip was mostly foam that congregated in the neck of the bottle. I felt a gag reflex sneak up from my tiny gut, but stifled it with every strand of strength I had because I felt him watching me.
We turned onto the road that snaked through fields toward home. I stared out the passenger side window into the pastel pastures. Those same words loitered in my mouth again, asking for permission to be set loose.
I wanted to say to my dad, “This is beautiful.”
Cody Adams is an itinerant writer that moves like a pinball in a cramped machine. Some of his formative years were spent in double-wide trailers around Kentucky. Currently, he teaches high school English in Toronto where he lives with his beloved wife.
**Featured image credit: Léon McGregor, Unsplash