It is hot as hades in this hay loft. This seems to be indicated by the thermometer near the loft opening and confirmed by the wet, dirty tee shirts clinking to the boy’s sweaty chests. Sweat drips down their brows and also seeps downward into their leather gloves. The chaff and the hay dust cover their arms as one or two wear a bandana around their faces to hinder the breathing in of the hot environment. Thankfully, many a farmer has already move on to the use of pole barns, making this a slightly rarer experience in the nineteen-seventies.
Spring heavy rains bring early thick cuttings Additional consistent summer rains brings a solid second cutting. A third is a rarity, and is probably the only blessing of a fracture growing season for the other crops.
The crew of three to four guys, work the fields from Vicksburg. Midland , Lattas Cheek, Lewis, Howesville to Worthington. Seldom working behind a hay baler, normally following behind it to lift the square bales or round bales from the ground to hay wagons, trailers, flatbed trucks or pickups. Each a competent stacker, taking turns riding and stacking or walking and lifting. Leather gloves, short and long hay hooks the tools of the trade. Technique more valuable than strength; a skill that comes with experience. Doing a task that many would avoid as the plague.
“From the fields there comes the breath of new mown hay” wrote Paul Dresser, many decades ago. The crew by not only looks, but smell, can tell what kind of bales are being formed. Wet or dry, green or dusty, heavy or light. Morning, afternoon or at night by the lights of the tractors and pickups, hay is baled and stacked, tied off to travel just through the field to the barn, or to travel many miles across the gravel backroads to their final designation.
Riding on the wagon, tractor or truck is a Coleman or Igloo water cooler. The break for lunch or dinner is either brought from home or more often provided by the farmer’s wife, sweet ice tea and/or ice-cold lemonade.
The farmer’s daughter is the talk of the lads as she drives the tractor that pulls the hay wagon. Skilled and a looker, she’ll have none of it from the boys, and yet…at lunch with her parents… all have a great time visiting and cutting up, even the old, overalls cladded farmer has a smile on his face. The old International, driverless pickup in granny low slowly pulls the trailer along a straight line between two roles of hay bales. One will run to catch up to it, to turn it back around to the opposite direction as it approaches the end of the field. The sun is setting low, the bales will soon be offloaded. And boys will be paid the three to four cents per bale they were promised, and after a hose off, and a game or two of Euchre , they’ll rest overnight to begin again the next morning.
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