Till the Last Bale

Garrett Lund was standing in his own head ditch at six in the morning with a shovel in his hands and a fresh shave on his jaw, and Hallie Mattern knew before she'd put the truck in park that it wasn't for the hay.

The Bangtails were pink at six, the color of the inside of a shell, and the cottonwoods along Lodgepole Creek stood black against them like somebody had cut them out with scissors.

She took the turn off the county road slow, because the gooseneck behind her one-ton carried a swather with a sixteen-foot header and the Lund cattle guard was older than she was. The header cleared the posts by a hand on either side. In the mirror she watched Tanner bring the second truck through behind her with the camper wagging on its hitch, his elbow out the window and his mouth moving to whatever was in his earbuds, and then the lane straightened out and ran north between two meadows toward a white house a quarter mile up the slope.

She knew the place from the road. Everybody in the county who had ever cut hay knew it from the road: two hundred acres of creek bottom on the Lund side of Lodgepole, flood-irrigated off the same ditches since before there was a county, grass so thick in a good year that it lay down on itself. For six summers she had driven past it to other people's meadows and thought about it the way you think about a horse somebody else owns.

Then in March a man had called the shop line in Clyde Park and said his name was Garrett Lund and he'd sold his own equipment and he'd need first cutting put up in July, and was she taking new ground. She had said she was. She had told him her rate the way she told everybody her rate, and he had said fine without a pause, and that had been the whole of it.

The meadow on her left was dry. She could see it from the cab, the grass standing up silver-green with the light coming across it low, no shine of water in the low spots, and the ditch along the lane empty except for a dark stripe of mud. On her right the middle piece was still wet, the ditches running bank-full, the smell of it coming in the open window cold and green. He had pulled the water off the north piece for her. He'd said on the phone that he would, and here it was done.

At the top of the north piece, where the head ditch came off the creek, Garrett Lund stood at a concrete headgate with his shovel.

She let the truck roll to a stop beside him and put it in park and looked.

He was tall, and long rather than heavy, the kind of build that came from thirty years of throwing things over fences. A straw hat, silverbelly, the brim shaped low at the front. A pearl-snap shirt in a faded blue, the sleeves turned to the elbow and the collar open at the throat three snaps down, so that she could see where the brown of his neck gave way to paler skin and a scatter of dark hair. Wranglers worn white at the thighs, a tooled belt, a buckle gone soft at the edges from wear. Up close, the line of his jaw was clean all the way down to the open shirt.

He leaned the shovel against the headgate and came over to her window, and she watched him walk the whole way. He didn't hurry it. He didn't look at the swather. He looked at her.

"Morning," he said. His voice was lower than it had been on the phone. "You'd be Ray Mattern's girl."

There it was. She'd heard it at every headgate in three counties, and from Dell over his counter, and from bankers and parts men and a brand inspector once, who'd meant it kindly. She took her sunglasses off and folded them and hung them in the neck of her tank top, where they pulled the cotton down an inch. She saw him see it.

"I'm Hallie," she said. "I bought the outfit off Ray six summers ago when his back quit him, and I paid it off two years early. He's in Clyde Park watching baseball. I'm the one cutting your hay, Mr. Lund."

He didn't argue it, and he didn't laugh it off. He stood there with one hand resting on the door of her truck, and something went across his face that she couldn't name yet, and then he nodded once, as if she had told him the weather.

"Hallie," he said. "Garrett."

That was all. He didn't apologize, which she liked, because an apology would have meant he'd keep saying it and be sorry each time. He'd just put it down. She had a feeling, watching him, that he was a man who put a thing down once and never picked it up again.

"North piece is off," he said. "Pulled it the twentieth. It's walking dry."

"I'll walk it."

"Figured you would." He stepped back from the truck. "I'll be at the yard when you want to know where to put the camper. There's shade under the cottonwoods below the shed, and the creek's right there. Power off the shed if you need it."

"I need it."

"Then it's yours."

He went back to his headgate. She sat a moment with her hand on the gearshift, feeling her own pulse in her throat, and then she let the clutch out and took the swather on up the lane.

The hay yard sat at the bottom of the slope below the house: a pole shed with a tin roof gone rusty in long stripes, open on the south side, and a row of old tarped stacks along its east wall where last year's hay was nearly gone. Beyond it, in the cottonwoods by the creek, someone had mowed a square of grass short and level and set a picnic table in it. The grass was cut fresh. She could smell it.

Tanner backed the camper in on the second try, which was good for Tanner. She showed him where to drop the jacks and left him plugging in the cord, and she went down to the north piece on foot.

She liked to walk ground alone the first time. Nobody's opinion in her ear, nobody telling her where the soft spot was before she'd found it herself. She went in at the top corner and walked out into it until the lane was behind her and there was nothing in front of her but grass and the mountains.

It came to her hip. Timothy and brome mostly, some orchardgrass in the wetter swales, a little clover down low where the sun didn't get. The ground under her boots was firm, damp an inch down and no more, and when she stamped a heel the print held its shape without filling. She walked the length of the low side where the water would have stood longest and it held there too. He had pulled it at the right time. She didn't say that out loud to anyone, but she noted it.

Halfway along she stopped and pulled a handful of grass and turned the heads up to the light. The timothy was just out, the heads still tight and green, no bloom on them yet. The brome was a little ahead. She rubbed a head between her palms and smelled her hands, and it smelled sweet and sharp and alive, the way it did a few days before it was perfect. By the time she had it down and laid out to cure, it would be exactly where she wanted it.

She stood with the grass in her fist and looked back up the slope.

He was at the yard fence. He wasn't working on anything. He had a coffee cup in one hand and his forearms on the second wire, and his hat was tipped back a little, and he was watching her the way you'd watch weather come in across a valley, steadily, with your whole attention, because it mattered to you what it did.

He didn't look away when she caught him at it. That was the thing. Most men did, or pretended they'd been looking at the mountains behind her. He just stood there and let her see him looking, and after a long moment he lifted the cup an inch, like a salute or an admission.

Heat went down her spine and settled low in her belly and stayed there.

She turned her back on him, not because she wanted to but because she had work to do, and she walked the rest of the piece. She went all the way to the bottom fence, where the meadow ran out against a strip of willows and the creek bent east, and she looked at how the ground fell. It fell south and a little west, toward the creek. The wind in the afternoons here would come down off the Bridgers out of the west, and she wanted her windrows lying so that wind went across them and through them, not down their length. She'd open it up with two rounds on the outside to give herself room to turn, and then she'd cut it in lands running east and west, starting on the high side by the lane so the first hay down would be the first hay dry.

She decided all of it standing there with the willows at her back, and she didn't need to ask anybody, and nobody came down to tell her.

When she walked back up he'd gone from the fence. She found him in the shed instead, filling a grease gun from a bucket, and he looked up when her shadow came across the doorway.

"I'll open it from the top corner," she said. "Cut in lands east and west. I'll be swathing by ten."

"All right."

"That's all? All right?"

He thumbed the lever of the grease gun and watched the cartridge seat. "You walked it," he said. "I watched you walk it. You know more about cutting hay than I've forgotten, and I've forgotten plenty. What else would I say?"

She stood in the doorway with the sun hot on her back and looked at him in the dim of the shed: the open collar, the forearms, the big hands working the gun without his needing to look at them. He was a good-looking man and he had to know it. He didn't act like it. That was worse.

"You could tell me you made the camp," she said. "The grass under the cottonwoods. You mowed it this morning."

"Last night."

"For the camper."

"For the camper," he agreed, and he looked up from the grease gun and met her eyes, and he didn't add anything, and neither of them believed him.

She had the swather greased, fueled and warmed up by half past nine. She changed her shirt in the camper first. She told herself it was the heat. She put on a fitted white tank that she'd bought because it was the kind that showed exactly how she was built, and over it a pale blue pearl-snap with the sleeves rolled, left open down the front so the tail of it moved when she did. She redid her hair in a low tail under the straw hat and looked at herself in the camper's little mirror for longer than a woman about to sit in a swather cab for nine hours had any reason to.

Tanner was eating a sandwich at the picnic table when she came out. He looked at the shirt and then up the slope at the yard, where a silverbelly hat was moving behind the stacks, and then back at her, and he grinned around the bread.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't say anything, boss."

"You were about to."

"I'm eating," Tanner said, with dignity, and went on eating.

She climbed up into the swather and closed the door and the cab went quiet around her, and she let the engine come up and brought the header down and felt the reel catch. Then she put it into the corner of the north piece and opened it up.

There was nothing in the world like the first round on new ground. The header took the grass with a long sound like breath let out, and it went in standing and came out the back laid flat in a fat green windrow, and the smell came up into the cab through the vents so thick she could have chewed it. Sweet and green and wet, every summer of her life. She took the first round slow, watching the edges, learning where the ditch banks rose and where a rock might be, and the meadow learned her back.

At the top corner she swung wide for the turn, and when the cab came around to face the lane there he was, at the head ditch with his shovel again, setting a dam in the middle piece's water. He straightened when she came past. He didn't wave. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead with his wrist and put it back on, and his shirt had come open another snap in the heat.

Second round. At the bottom corner, turning along the willows, she looked up toward the lane, and his truck was parked at the yard gate with the door open and him beside it on the phone. Facing the field.

She opened her lands on the high side and started cutting east and west, and every time she came to the headland and swung the swather around, she looked. She didn't decide to. It just happened, the way you check a gauge. He was at the shed with the loader. He was walking the head ditch. He was standing at the yard fence with his hands in his back pockets, which pulled the shirt flat over his chest. He was on the four-wheeler crossing the middle piece's dike with a coil of poly pipe over his shoulder, and when he came level with her he slowed down and turned his head.

Every time she turned, he was somewhere she could see him. Not once did he come out into the field, and not once did he get between her and the work. He was just there, at the edge of it, like the mountains.

She thought about him on the phone in March saying fine without a pause. She thought about the mowed grass under the cottonwoods, and the shave, and that look at the headgate when she'd told him her name, as though she'd handed him something and he meant to keep it carefully. She thought about how many years he had on her, because she wasn't a fool. She thought about it honestly, and she found she didn't care, and she found that she'd known she didn't care since about six-oh-five this morning.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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