Coop

by Michael Perry

  “Tell Mr. Guinea to enjoy this,” I said as I handed the bag to Amy. “That’ll be the last bag.” She looked at me quizzically. Because the guinea pig is serving as training wheels for a future alleged horse, I thought it might be helpful to explain my reasoning through parallels drawn from the equine world. “The finest horse hay in the land costs 175 bucks a ton.” I was in full royal declarative mode. “The stuff we’re feeding that guinea pig costs $18,560 a ton!”

  Seven years old, and she hesitated perhaps two nanoseconds to read the seams on the ball before smacking it straight back at the pitcher.

  “So we should get a horse.”

  Occasionally one is provided glimpses of the road ahead. I am hoping there are rest stops.

  Still, for now I am in charge, so when I noticed patches of volunteer timothy sprouting in our overgrown lawn and out on the ridge, I did rejoice and sent forth my daughter to gather stalks together. Before handing off the clippers, I placed a hand on her shoulder and patiently explained the dynamics driving this decision. Before the monologue concluded, I had invoked principles of self-sufficiency, economies of scale, the comparative nutritive value of native grasses, footnotes from a nice little chart available through the county extension office, and—for zip—the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.

  Amy found this unconvincing. So then I tried explaining it impatiently, and now there are tears on the lawn. Certainly I am economically justified in sending my seven-year-old out to harvest grass; one can additionally argue the case along the lines of physical exercise and personal responsibility and further defend it as a proactive move to ensure she gets her vitamin D. It is also possible that the poor girl is suffering the projections of my own fond memories.

  I loved making hay.

  Of course you don’t make hay, and in fact the only time we ever used the phrase was in the metaphorical sense: Gotta make hay while the sun shines! When my dad picked up the phone to call his friend and neighbor Jerry, he’d always say, “You gonna bale today?” And if the answer was yes, you also knew “You” meant “We,” and you went to looking for your haying gloves.

  In the early days Dad cut hay with a simple sickle bar mower—basically a seven-foot rolled steel plank fitted with rapidly reciprocating blades. You can get the idea by placing the palm of one hand over the back of the other, fanning your fingers, and shuffling the top hand back and forth.

  Dad ran the mower off the back of his small Ford Ferguson, where it could be raised and lowered by a set of arms extending from the tractor. The power was supplied by a splined shaft (called a power takeoff, or PTO) that protruded from the back of the tractor and spun a flywheel attached to a pitman bar. I was always captivated by the pitman linkage because it reminded me of the linkage I had seen on steam locomotives in the cowboy shows we watched at Grandma’s house. One end of the pitman bar was attached to the outer edge of the flywheel and therefore followed the circular path described by the flywheel. This caused the other end of the bar, which was flexibly attached to the sickle, to plunge back and forth, making the sickle bar do the same. When the tractor was operating at full throttle, the flywheel end of the pitman bar whirled to a transparent blur while the sickle end pistoned so furiously you expected it would yank the sickle in two. There was something magical about the way it converted rotary energy into linear energy—or, from a child’s point of view, a circle into a straight line.

  Before he set out to cut hay, Dad would park the tractor in the yard, shift it to neutral, set the throttle to idle, engage the power takeoff, and then dismount the tractor to lubricate the sickle. Working with great care (leaving any tractor while the PTO is engaged is a supreme no-no, something Dad drummed into our heads from earliest childhood), he held a pour tin at arm’s length and drizzled used motor oil over the pentagonal sickle sections. At first the sections rasped and grated as they shifted with slow serpentine malevolence in and out of their rock guards; as the oil distributed itself, the rasp softened. When he had oiled the entire length of the sickle, Dad climbed back on the tractor and opened the throttle. Now the rasp of the dry sections disappeared altogether, changing phase to a deadly-sounding snickety-snick. The sunlight caught the sheened sickle sections and froze them, strobelike.

  When conditions were right, the mower moved through the hayfields beautifully. The tall grass shuddered and danced on its stems for a split second after the sickle sheared it, then toppled backward in a continuous cascade to lie flat in the wake of the machine.

  It didn’t always work so smoothly. Sometimes wadded hay, sticks, or old cow pies blocked the cutter bar. Sometimes you hit a gopher mound or a small stone slipped through the rock guards and snapped a brittle sickle section. A good operator kept an eye continuously cast back for the telltale strip of unmown grass springing up like a cowlick through the fallen swath; the key was to notice it quickly, back up, and clear the blockage. If you left a green strip that went on for more than forty feet, you were in for some razzing.

  By far the most maddening problem with the old sickle mower was the tendency of the whirling power takeoff shaft to snag the mown hay and in a split second spin up a bundle of hay so tight it cut the power to the mower and had to be hacked away with a jackknife. To counter this, Dad rigged a shield by suspending a plank on chains beneath the power takeoff. It worked pretty well. I have never in all my life heard my father curse, but years later when I was down beneath a serially malfunctioning hay-cutting machine in Wyoming, spittle-cussing and hacking away at the thirty-seventh impromptu round bale of the day, I wondered if just once in the gentle meadows of yesteryear that mower ever caused Dad to lose his religion.

  By the time I was old enough to cut hay, the sickle mower had been relegated to pasture-clipping duty and Dad had purchased a New Holland haybine. The heart of the haybine was built around a sickle mechanism nearly identical to our old mower, but there the similarities ended. Mounted to the fore of the sickle was a seven-foot wide revolving reel fitted with spring-mounted steel teeth. The reel spun forward in the same direction as the wheels on the tractor but rotated at a rate exceeding ground speed so that the teeth could draw the hay toward the sickle, then—once it was cut—sweep it into a pair of rotating rollers functioning like a voracious wringer washer. Made of heavy rubber cast in mirror-image chevron patterns, the rollers spun at blurring speed. As the hay zipped through, the chevrons crimped the stems and bruised the leaves. This dramatically decreased the amount of time required to dry the hay, thus increasing our chances of beating the rain. As the hay shot from the rollers, adjustable fenders shaped the flow so it dropped in a clean-edged swath—much better than the old sickle mower. The entire machine was mounted on a wheeled frame raised and lowered by a hydraulic ram controlled from the tractor seat.

  Whenever Dad sent me out to cut hay, he would assign a set number of “rounds.” Because our haybine was the sort that would cut only in the wake of the right-hand side of the tractor, it was necessary to circle the field in a clockwise pattern, the perimeter of each “round” contracting by fourteen feet with every pass completed. I don’t know that Dad had any formula for calculating the number of rounds, just that he was trying to strike a balance between having too much or too little hay on the ground at one time.

  For a landlocked boy in northern Wisconsin, nothing substitutes for seafaring like nosing a Massey-Ferguson 132 tractor into an unmown hayfield on a sunny summer morning. The grasses part around the grille, rising as high as the engine shroud and sprinkling leafhoppers on your jeans. Rolling lobes of wind press across the meadow, made visible in shifting shades of silver as the seed heads dip and sway. Just inside the gate you pause for a moment like Columbus set to sail, discovery and depredation your call. And then you engage the power takeoff, roll the throttle back so the tach pegs around 1500 rpm, lower the haybine’s clattering maw, ease out the clutch, and launch roaring into the uncharted grasses.

  The first round was always the best. For better or worse, cutting hay appeals to the in
nate human need for control and order at the expense of natural things. The haybine goes gnashing into the organic tangle, and out the back comes a continuous straight-edged thatch that drapes the contour of the land like a woven green scarf, each round separated by a pale sun-starved strip of shorn stubble.

  After the first couple of rounds gave me room to maneuver without smashing the standing hay, I reversed course and cut the outside round. We called this outermost pass “the backswath.” Because it was up tight to the fencerows and woodlots, the backswath was often booby-trapped with fallen trees and dropped branches. Since the tractor was passing over this area during the first clockwise run, you had a chance to spot remove most obstacles, but invariably you missed a big branch that jammed the reel, or slipped through and into the rollers. The rollers were spring-loaded and designed to part and allow passage of a solid object, but because of the speed at which they were operating, passage isn’t really the apt word—even the smallest solid object would cause them to slam open and shut with a bang! that cut through all the engine and machine noise and invariably bounced me half a foot off the tractor seat.

  Once the backswath was flat, I returned to cutting clockwise. As with all fieldwork, you settle quickly into a groove. I can still summon my exact position on the Massey: left hand on the wheel, underbelly of my right forearm resting on the red fender, left knee against the gray-painted crankcase, right hand resting on the hydraulic control valve, upper body rotated slightly back and leaning right, head on a swivel. The position was a matter of function—you glanced forward now and then to correct your course and watch for corners coming up, but in the main your attention was directed to the machine behind you. You were watching to see that everything was spinning the way it ought to, that there were no strips of uncut grass popping up behind, and that the machine was taking as big a mouthful as possible—in fact, you steered mostly while looking backward at the position of the innermost sickle section, tweaking the wheel left and right to run as tight to the uncut hay as possible. Your left foot was always ready to cock and stuff the clutch if something went wrong, and you kept your right hand near the hydraulics control in case you needed to pop the header into the air to scale above a foxhole mound.

  A morning spent cutting hay was a morning of being left to your own thoughts, with occasional nature breaks when the sandhill cranes came in, or a deer—bright rusty red against all the verdure—bounced across one corner of the field. But there were also plenty of reminders that you were running a monstrous machine through the habitat of hundreds of creatures: the constant rolling flicker of grasshoppers springing out ahead of the voracious reel; a skunk wobbling across the open swaths, headed for the cover of brush; a gutted gopher; a smashed mouse. Once when Dad had just purchased the haybine and was cutting the field behind the house, I rode my bike out only to see him stop the tractor, dismount, walk around behind the machine, and lift something up, up, and up until his arm was outstretched and the object was still nearly touching the ground. Squinting, I could see bits of furry color, and then I realized: chevron rubber rollers plus one barn cat equals one very skinny kitty carpet runner.

  When the last round was mowed, I disengaged the power takeoff, pulled the trip cord releasing the pin that held the haybine in cutting position, and backed up at an angle so the hitch would fold back into road position. This placed the haybine more directly behind the tractor, making it easier to navigate gates and pass down the road without running two lanes wide. Once the spring-loaded slide pin popped into locked position, I raised the header until the hydraulics squealed, dismounted and went back to set the block designed to catch the header if the hydraulics failed. Then, back aboard, I pointed the tractor home. In the field behind me half the hay was lying flat in neat concentric squares, the first rounds already limp compared to the last, and in the center, the remaining hay stood sharp as a cut of sheet cake.

  Back here in Fall Creek, out there in the beating sun, Amy is trudging through the grass as if she is being press-ganged into the Volga boatmen. Perhaps this is not the time to tell her haybine stories. I grab a second set of clippers and join her. We snip away together until her little red wagon is full with timothy, which we take to the asphalt in front of the garage and lay out to cure.

  This is the time of year when the countryside truly thumbs its nose at the subzero purge of winter. The greenery is full-blown, the dew-drenched mornings reverberate with a tropical chirp and twitter, and everywhere there are babies: tiny rabbits beneath the apple tree, speckle-chested robins begging worms from mama, a spotted fawn by the mailbox down the driveway, and now and then a glimpse of the pheasant hen leading her loyal brood. From my desk I can hear the squeak of the swing as Amy bobs above the valley and the horizon beyond, and my heart is so light to hear this all through the open screens that I start singing along with the music I am playing, and so it is that Anneliese stops outside my office window and lets me finish a full chorus of Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit” before she politely knocks and enters, tickled to have caught me so unguarded and also I suppose to find me with an unknotted brow. “Oh, don’t stop!” Anneliese says as I kick the volume down, and while the blush is still leaving my face she sits on my lap and with my arms around her, we talk like we haven’t in a while. There is no question that I have bitten off more than I can chew this year, but there is no turning back now, and as we talk about how it’s going, we have a chance in this five minutes to look each other in the eye and end by saying we love each other. Then the baby is crying on the monitor I keep out here on the bookshelf, but the thing that feels good as I watch my wife leave is that we are in this together. That night when I walk to the house after dark the entire valley right up to the yard is pulsing with fireflies.

  If conditions were right, hay cut one day could be baled the next, but first it had to be raked. Rolling the hay with the rake flipped it off the moist ground where it had lain all night and fluffed it up so it might catch the breeze more easily; it also left the hay in a narrower strand that better fit the baler. We usually began raking by mid-morning, after the dew had come off. And we all loved to rake, because when you raked you got to drive the Johnny-Popper.

  The equivalency is not absolute, but I’ll pretty much guarantee you most farm kids remember their first moment at the wheel of a tractor with the approximate clarity of their first kiss. Me? Lisa Kettering, beneath a white pine in the moonlight on the road to Axehandle Lake, and Jerry Coubal’s John Deere B through the gate beside the Norway pine with the pigtail twist. Nicknamed Johnny-Popper because of the distinctive two-cylinder pop-pop-pop of the exhaust, the tractor was a gangly-looking machine with tall rear wheels and a slim front end supported by two small wheels cambered to a narrow vee. The steering wheel was mounted in the near perpendicular and stood flat before your face like a clock on the wall. The square padded seat sat level with the top of the towering rear wheels, so you rode high, with a clear field of vision. Rather than a foot pedal, the B model had a hand clutch consisting of a slender steel rod capped with a round ball—rather like a solid iron walking stick. To engage the clutch you fed the walking stick forward; when you wanted to stop you pulled it backward, and the works disengaged with a steel-drum ping! Dad and his neighbor Jerry shared the Johnny-Popper back and forth during haying season. One morning when I was nine years old I went out back to watch Dad rake hay. When he was done, he unhitched the rake and let me ride back with him. On the return trip, we came to the gate beside the twisted Norway pine. Dad got down from the tractor to open the gate as he always did, only this time after he swung it open he looked up at me and said, “Why don’t you take ’er through?” I still remember the offhand way he uttered the words, and how the adrenaline surged through me when I heard them. I realize now that he was probably anticipating my wide eyes.

  The John Deere was a good starter tractor, because you didn’t have to reach any pedals. The tall hand clutch, the position of the steering wheel, and a broad steel deck between the seat and the s
teering column made it possible to operate from a standing position—in fact when I was older I often drove standing up, if only because I could fantasize that rather than some hayfield in Sampson Township, I was navigating the Mississippi in a Mark Twain paddle wheeler.

  Back there at that gate, with the John Deere going pop…pop…pop at low idle, I addressed the wheel with knees trembling. Reaching down to the gear selector, I ran it through its cast iron maze and into first. Then, with one hand on the steering wheel and heart tripping, I pushed that hand clutch slowly, slowly ahead until sure enough the green machine was inching forward, and there I was, driving tractor. The gate was plenty wide, but I felt like I was piloting the Queen Mary through a checkout lane at the IGA. When I passed through—head swiveling left, right, left to make sure I hadn’t snapped the fence posts—I pinged the clutch out of gear with a combination of exhilaration and relief. Dad took the wheel back for the journey home, and I rode happily on his lap, still his small boy but much taller in my heart.

  If you’re going to train your youngster in tractor driving, hay raking is a pretty good first assignment. The rake is a relatively simple machine for a relatively simple task. Because it is ground driven, there is no power takeoff in which to become entangled, and when the the tractor stops, the moving parts stop. Also there is the advantage of turning the novice loose in a wide open field. Plenty of room for error, and if the kid gets drifty, odds are the worst you’re gonna have is a windrow that wanders off course—as opposed, say, to a plow hooking forty feet of fence line, a cultivator ripping up half a row of corn, or a haybine trying to digest a pine tree. And because hayfields are dry by their nature, there is little risk of the kid freelancing and getting bogged in a mud hole. In short, it is tough to mis-rake hay. So for the nascent farm-hand, a Johnny-Popper hooked to a hay rake is the equivalent of training wheels.