Coop_ A Year Of Poultry, Pigs, And Parenting Part 8

CHAPTER 7.

My daughter is weeping in the timothy. She is a sad sight with a spa.r.s.e handful of stems dangling from one hand, gra.s.s clippers dangling from the other, head tipped back as she beseeches the sky. From my perspective-framed by the window over the kitchen sink-what we have here is a scene composed by Andrew Wyeth and retouched by Edvard Munch. the timothy. She is a sad sight with a spa.r.s.e handful of stems dangling from one hand, gra.s.s clippers dangling from the other, head tipped back as she beseeches the sky. From my perspective-framed by the window over the kitchen sink-what we have here is a scene composed by Andrew Wyeth and retouched by Edvard Munch.

The girl is weeping in part because I am a cheapskate.

Among the trove of supplies and accessories provided by Aunt Barbara when we took possession of the guinea pig back in January was a neatly sealed plastic bag of prime timothy hay. Every day when Amy replenished his tiny hay rack, the creature tore into it eagerly, sometimes whistling with delight at the first sound of crinkling plastic. When the original bag was nearly depleted, I stopped by a local pet food store for another. Wanting to maintain the standards of quality established by Aunt Barbara, I searched the racks until I found the exact same brand of timothy and grabbed a 12-ounce packet. I've cut and stacked a lot of timothy in my day, and while carrying the bag to the checkout I was admiring the quality of the product-a weedless sheaf of fat-leaved stalks all dried to a uniform pale green. Really top-shelf stuff. Then the woman at the register swiped it across the bar code reader. When the price popped up, I suddenly understood what was making that guinea pig whistle. I made a very similar noise, although it quickly tapered off to a wheeze.

Numerals are not my thing, but sometimes one must quantify astonishment: Beginning with a generous interpretation of current Midwestern market prices as provided by the county extension agent's Web site, the finest prime grade hay will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $175 bucks a ton. That twelve-ounce packet of guinea pig hay rang up at $6.98. Rounding down down, that's 58 cents an ounce. Tappety-tap, there are 32,000 ounces in a ton. Times point-five-eight, equals: the stuff I was carrying across the parking lot to the van costs $18,560 per ton. Next time I rent an armored hay wagon, I remember thinking as I scanned the lot for gra.s.s bandits. I briefly considered selling the guinea pig and all his toys, renting a safe deposit box with the proceeds, and stuffing it with hay that I would then roll over into an individual retirement account. Instead I crawled into the van, locked the doors, took my cell phone in trembling hands, and called my father. Having recently heard him apologetically report that he was selling organic horse hay for upward of $120 per ton, I wanted to tell him these horse people are pikers, and guinea pig hay is where it's at. Sell everything, I told him when he answered, and get yourself a miniature baler. Before I drove home I secreted the timothy beneath the spare tire and conspicuously placed my open wallet on the dashboard so that should I encounter highwaymen they would go for the wallet first.

"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 gra.s.ses, footnotes from a nice little chart available through the county extension office, and-for zip-the fable of the gra.s.shopper and the ant.

Amy found this unconvincing. So then I tried explaining it im impatiently, and now there are tears on the lawn. Certainly I am economically justified in sending my seven-year-old out to harvest gra.s.s; 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 make hay, and in fact the only time we ever used the phrase was in the metaphorical sense: hay, and in fact the only time we ever used the phrase was in the metaphorical sense: Gotta make hay while the sun s.h.i.+nes! Gotta make hay while the sun s.h.i.+nes! When my dad picked up the phone to call his friend and neighbor Jerry, he'd always say, "You gonna When my dad picked up the phone to call his friend and neighbor Jerry, he'd always say, "You gonna bale bale today?" And if the answer was yes, you also knew "You" meant "We," and you went to looking for your haying gloves. 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, s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 a.s.sign 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 pa.s.s 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 subst.i.tutes for seafaring like nosing a Ma.s.sey-Ferguson 132 tractor into an unmown hayfield on a sunny summer morning. The gra.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 gra.s.ses.

The first round was always the best. For better or worse, cutting hay appeals to the innate human need for control and order at the expense of natural things. The haybine goes gnas.h.i.+ng 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 smas.h.i.+ng the standing hay, I reversed course and cut the outside round. We called this outermost pa.s.s "the backswath." Because it was up tight to the fencerows and woodlots, the backswath was often b.o.o.by-trapped with fallen trees and dropped branches. Since the tractor was pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage of a solid object, but because of the speed at which they were operating, pa.s.sage pa.s.sage isn't really the apt word-even the smallest solid object would cause them to slam open and shut with a isn't really the apt word-even the smallest solid object would cause them to slam open and shut with a bang! bang! that cut through all the engine and machine noise and invariably bounced me half a foot off the tractor seat. 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 Ma.s.sey: 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 gra.s.s 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 c.o.c.k 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 gra.s.shoppers 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 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 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! 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 antic.i.p.ating my wide eyes. 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 steering 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 Towns.h.i.+p, I was navigating the Mississippi in a Mark Twain paddle wheeler.

Back there at that gate, with the John Deere going pop...pop...pop 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, 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 driving tractor. The gate was plenty wide, but I felt like I was piloting the Queen Mary Queen Mary through a checkout lane at the IGA. When I pa.s.sed through-head swiveling left, right, left to make sure I hadn't snapped the fence posts-I through a checkout lane at the IGA. When I pa.s.sed through-head swiveling left, right, left to make sure I hadn't snapped the fence posts-I pinged 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. 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 a.s.signment. 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.

By the time I was old enough to saddle up, Dad had replaced our original rake (a rusty monster with oversize steel carriage wheels and a fixed hitch in front and wobbly trailing wheels to the rear) with a New Holland Model 256 fresh off the lot. Just like the old rake, it was a ground-driven side-delivery edition, but it ran on small rubber tires and was painted deep red and bright yellow. After pulling the rake into the field, I would stand on the hitch that joined the tractor to the rake and spin the plastic-handled cranks that raised and lowered either end of the reel-the key was to run the teeth low enough so that they combed up all the hay but not so low that they were gouging dirt, in which case you were alerted by little clots of sod smacking the back of your head.

When you got everything set right and got to rolling, the rake reel was a marvelous thing to watch as it spun counter to the direction of travel, the polished steel tine tips dancing in staccato flashes along the stubble line before swooping up and away around their oval orbit. Just ahead of the flickering blur the flat swath of dried hay rose and curled into itself like a wave angling for the beach, rolled over several times, then tumbled out to lie still in a fat unbroken rope. Sometimes a gust of wind would unroll the windrow and lay it flat again. Mostly you just went round and round and round. Jerry had mounted a suicide k.n.o.b on the steering wheel, so when you got to a tight corner you could cramp that front end around right tight, then just turn loose and pull your chin back clear of the k.n.o.b while the wheel spun back to straightaway. When I raked the back swath (we'd often wait an extra day or two as it was shaded and dried more slowly) I had to keep an eye out for tree limbs overhead because the John Deere rode so much higher than the Ma.s.sey and the exhaust pipe stuck straight up in the air. (When the tractor wasn't in use, we capped the exhaust with a tin can-if the engine fired just right on start-up, the can would pop ten feet high.) When the raking was done, it was home for lunch, and then the baling.

Still no chickens, but we've had the pigs for about a month. The pa.s.sage of time has been marked by the daily evolution of the stunning subcutaneous rainbow chewed into my gluteus maximus by the frenzied c.o.o.n dog. Lately the colors have moderated so it appears a thundercloud has parked on my b.u.t.t. Like a remarkable version of Tom Sawyer's toe, this b.u.t.t-bite is the sort of thing you just itch to show someone. I maintain my propriety, but have held the photographs in reserve and will make them available at auction should archivists of the proper caliber express interest and promise to keep everything high-tone.

Morning now breaks with the lids of the pig feeder banging. The racket reminds me the farm is alive, if only in that little corner. And it's nice to know they're down there fattening themselves up. Still, with each bang I realize it's a meter ticking on the feed bill, so we've been throwing everything we can at them food-wise. All of our table sc.r.a.ps, of course, but also green apples, dandelions, venison tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and cleaned fish.

There is a profusion of wild grapes on our little farm. The vines wrap themselves around anything that stands still. The pigs are currently penned at the far end of an old overgrown paddock and concrete bunk feeder remaining from the days when this place was a going concern of a dairy farm. I'd like to expand the pigpen boundaries into the paddock later in the year, so I've been cutting back the grapevines a little each day. Having seen how they went for the nettles, I thought it worth a try to sling some of the vines in with the pigs. They went nuts, stripping the leaves off and chomping them down. So now every day I throw big armfuls in their pen and they snuffle right in there, ripping the leaves free and chomping happily, stopping only to fight with each other. The little female pig is forever nipping the boy pig on the ear and running him off from the best leaves and slop. I'd feel sorry for him except he's bigger than she is.

The only thing the pigs like better than grape leaves is pigweed (I grew up calling it lamb's quarters). It grows big and is easy to pull if the ground is moist, so it doesn't take long to collect a good bundle. They devour the stuff. We throw all our garden weeds in the pigpen. They snuffle through the quack and ignore the foxtail, but pouting their lower lips delicately, they worry out every last leaf of pigweed.

We got the idea to graze our pigs from reading Gene Logsdon's excellent All Flesh Is Gra.s.s All Flesh Is Gra.s.s. Gene makes the point that pigs were meant to grub and forage, and we're gonna test him on it. I do not know how he feels about feeding pigs grape leaves. In short, they will eat pretty much anything, but can be capriciously finicky. After weeks of gobbling every nettle I pitched across the fence, they've stopped cold. They give them a snuffle and move on. Perhaps the nettles reached a certain maturity and the taste changed, or they got too dry. It was always a marvel to watch them in the first place, with my legs stinging from wading amongst the nettles, only to see the pigs rummaging through them nose first.

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 c.o.c.klebur...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 acc.u.mulate 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 s.h.i.+rt.

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 every few bales a soft pile of chaff would acc.u.mulate on the wagon below the up-tipped chute lip. I picked up the habit of kicking this pile away, but sometimes I would grab a pinch of the chaff and put it in my mouth like chew, drawing out the toasted sweetness of the dried alfalfa by squeezing it between my cheek and gum.

In between loads we dug the water jug out from where it was stored in the twine box beside the rolls of sisal that smelled of oil and Brazilian sun and unspooled from the center. We'd set the cooler on the edge of the empty wagon, unspin the plastic top and turn it over to catch the water from the miniature spigot, then pa.s.s it around. I remember raising the water to my lips and seeing bits of chaff skating the surface tension of the water. Our neighbor Jerry would always swirl water in the cap after the last drink, then sling the water to the ground before s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap back on. A little ceremony before we went back to work.

As the day wore on and we circled ever tighter toward the middle of the field, mice would dart from windrow to windrow at the sound of the baler. By the time we were down to the last couple of rounds, they would pop out with regularity, and if one of the farm dogs was along we would leap from the wagon and sic the dog on the mouse. If there was no dog sometimes we just launched ourselves feetfirst and squashed the mouse with our boots. Often by the time we were pa.s.sing back in the opposite direction, a hawk or crows were pulling at the carca.s.s.

It was sometimes my duty to shuttle wagons back and forth across the field. If I got back early and the baler was on the far side of the field, I would turn off the tractor and lie beneath the wagon in the shade, and to this day I best remember haying as sounds from a distance-the up-and-down groan of the tractor engine as it lugged against the plunger, the delicate clink-a-chunk clink-a-chunk of the needles threading the knotter, the rumble of the power takeoff knuckles flexing on a tight turn. The days were vast and sunny, the school year was decisively over and the new one still unimaginable weeks off, and here we were in the country, putting up hay. of the needles threading the knotter, the rumble of the power takeoff knuckles flexing on a tight turn. The days were vast and sunny, the school year was decisively over and the new one still unimaginable weeks off, and here we were in the country, putting up hay.

When the last windrow was consumed, we scrambled to the very tip-top of the load and rode home. The hay moved with a ponderous pitch and sway, as you imagined it might be to ride an elephant. It was quiet atop the bales, elevated above the tractor noise, and the ride home was relaxing. You could look out over the country. But the work was not done-the last of the hay still had to be stowed.

Unloading was the easiest job. You simply unpacked the pile and dropped the bales to the elevator, where hooks on the chain caught the bale and slid it up the rails and into the mow. The haymow was hot duty, and especially so if you were stacking in a steel shed. One summer we took a thermometer to the peak of the pole barn and it read 113 degrees. The person on the wagon was at the advantage over the mow crew, who had to carry bales across the uneven face of the stack. You were forever sticking your foot between two bales and going in up to your knee, the hay scratching along your s.h.i.+ns. Every now and then the unloader would start dropping bales on the elevator faster and faster in a good-natured attempt to founder the folks in the mow. It was fun to see how long it took before a face popped out the haymow window and shot a dirty look.

When the last bale was stacked, I'd pull off my haying gloves. Dad bought them in stapled packs at Farm & Fleet. They were yellow and made from material something like felt. They were stiff the first time you drew them on but before long they went soft and balloony from all the sweat and the constant pull of the twine. If you wore a hole in a finger, the tip soon became packed with a solid k.n.o.b of chaff. When you pulled your gloves off after a long day of haying in hot weather-especially if you were working the unventilated mow-your hands were wet and moist, almost dishpanny, and your wrists were matted with bracelets of sodden chaff where the cuffs had clung. It felt good, though, the cool air on your skin.

I take great satisfaction from watching the pigs strip nettles and eat grapevines, or churn through the quack in their pen, nibbling out the tender white shoots so that next year the soil has half a shot at growing something more useful. I like to think some of that chlorophyll is somehow working its way into the protein. One begins to understand the cachet of "gra.s.s-fed beef." Beyond the poetics, the stuff really does taste better, and regularly commands a premium price. That said, in the interest of stretching the food dollar, we happily feed the pigs whatever they'll devour, which is pretty much anything. When Anneliese heard that a local bread distributors.h.i.+p made its expired goods available for sale as animal feed, she called and got on the list. Basically you pay ten bucks and take whatever's on the shelves that day. I figured we'd get a few loaves, and that'd be good. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the back room and saw rack on rack. Now I'm pulling into the yard, and the rear of our thousand-dollar mini-van (refusing to utter the m-word aloud, I call it the fambulance fambulance) is full from the floor to the windows. The variety is astounding: white bread, whole wheat, cinnamon raisin bagels, English m.u.f.fins, hamburger buns, frosted cinnamon rolls, and bags of mini-doughnuts. I park the van in front of the garage, where it is visible from the kitchen window, and go into the house, looking for Amy.

I find her at her schoolwork. "Hey, snort-burger, when I went to town I bought some bread. I forgot to bring it in. Would you please do that?"

"Sure!" she says innocently. She is a sweet child, and therefore vulnerable.

"It's in the back of the van," I say. The minute she is out the door I wave Anneliese over to the window. "Watch this!"

The poor kid. Happily she trips up the sidewalk and across the drive. At the rear of the van she pulls the handle, and as the hatch rises to release the smell of yeast and reveal a stack of baked goods the size of a refrigerator, her jaw drops just as I hoped it might. For a full three seconds she just stands there gobsmacked. Then a bag of hot dog buns slithers off the pile and lands at her feet and she turns back toward the house, fists on her hips and a squinchy smile-frown on her face. I rush out to meet her, and by the time I get there she is laughing.

It will take us weeks to feed all of this and we don't want it to mold, so we jam as much of it as we can into our chest freezer, which is about half empty this time of the year. I cram it down (fascinated by store-bought bread after years of Mom's homemade, my brothers dubbed it "Kleenex bread" because you could take a whole loaf and scrunch it into a tiny wad), but even so we have quite a bit that won't fit. Anneliese keeps out several loaves of whole wheat and two bags of cinnamon-raisin bagels. Because they are technically expired, every single bag has been slashed with a razor-here in the land of overregulated plenty, people food becomes pig food at the stroke of midnight-but we trust our noses and are not picky. I make a mental note of which corner I stashed the doughnuts (those, I was careful not to crush) and liberate a tray of the cinnamon rolls.

Amy and I take two bags of bread down to the pigpen. They bite a few slices, then drift back disinterestedly to the wallow. When we come back later, most of the bread has been eaten, but a few slices remain. This is not typical piggishness. The following day we put the bread in a bucket, add water from the garden hose, and stir the whole works into a doughy mush. As soon as it splatters into the feeder they dive into it, smacking and snuffling and blowing bubbles, and in three minutes it is all gone. From then on, we always add the water.

I enjoy making trips to the feed mill in Fall Creek, and I enjoy lugging the bags down to the feeder, and I enjoy the sound of the feed slipping from the bag and the feel of the feed dust on my forearms, and when I replace the feeder cover and walk away I enjoy feeling that I have provided for my animals and that when they stick their snout in there, supper will be waiting. But all this doesn't come close to the feeling I get when I throw in a batch of grape leaves or a pail of sc.r.a.ps or a tray of expired cinnamon buns. Free Free, I think as the pigs gorge. Free or cheap, and circling right back to the table Free or cheap, and circling right back to the table.

There is one limiting factor to the free-for-all buffet: my own queasiness. With the progression of summer, we have found ourselves overrun with cottontail rabbits. To quantify: when I step from the office on a recent warm evening, I count sixteen rabbits in the front yard alone. These are too many rabbits. Anneliese has been asking me to trim the herd for several weeks now, but I have resisted. I was raised never to shoot an animal unless the end result is bound for the table. And although I happily hunt and eat cottontails in winter, I was also raised to believe you should never eat a rabbit killed when the ground isn't frozen. Tularemia, the old-timers said. But when I saw those sixteen rabbits in one spot, I prepared to yield the point. Then a night later I went to fetch something from the pole barn and found a rabbit pulling itself weakly around the corner of the barn. It was obviously ill, all hunched up and blinking at me as I approached. I loaded the .22 and killed the poor miserable thing. When you have that many rabbits and they start showing up sick, it's time to cull. I went back up to the yard and shot the first rabbit I saw.

When I picked it up by the hind legs and walked to the weedy edge of the yard, I was just about to give it a fling when the old "shoot-it-you-eat-it" pang returned. I looked at it again. It was full-grown and to all appearances very healthy. Still, I couldn't shake the idea that you don't eat warm-weather rabbit. Then from down the ridge, I heard a querulous porcine grunt. Of course...Pigs are omnivorous. Rabbits are free. Waste not, want not. It seemed a little creepy, though. I waffled. Then I hiked on down there and slung that rabbit over the fence.

They snuffled at it a bit, and then the carnage began. They chomped it at opposite ends and ripped it in two. They crunched the bones. They gnawed the ears. They gobbled the guts.

Gentle reader, I am not a fellow quick to fold his tent in the face of grotesquery. But as I watched c.o.c.klebur bounce the last bit of rabbit ear on her lower lip like she was dandling a cigar, the bridge of my nose a.s.sumed the topography of a crinkle-cut fry. I found myself wondering if tularemia could be pa.s.sed on via pork chops, or if I was very possibly contributing to the sp.a.w.n of mad porkrabbit disease.

I shot three more rabbits. I slung each one deep into the valley, where at night I hear the coyotes sing. There is more than one way to keep the circle unbroken.

While the project is on hold until definitive research can be conducted, I presume there is nothing inherently dangerous about converting our excess cottontails to bacon. The real challenge lies in coming up with a marketing program to make the idea as palatable as that of gra.s.s-fed beef. Those "gra.s.s-fed beef" people are working from a point of real advantage, as the term conjures bucolic images of breezy green meadows and trim cuts of pure protein. In days past I paid the rent by writing an advertising slogan or two, and I have applied myself to this current challenge with diligence, but so far have only come up with the undeniably catchy but ultimately unusable "Stick a fork in our rabbit-fed pork."

Like flowing water and snaking flames, the movement of hay-off the sickle, off the rake, into the baler-is hypnotic. And there are the aromatic dimensions-the hay green-sweet or minty at cutting, tealike in the mow. When I drive past a freshly mown hayfield I antic.i.p.ate the fragrant seep and ride it right back to my seat on the Ma.s.sey-Ferguson. When I step into my father's empty mow on a day when sunlight slants through the beams, the soft underbelly of my forearms tingles at the memory of the red dots and scratches left by the stem ends after a full day's baling.

And what better than haying to soothe the obsessive-compulsive beast? How clean the field looks when the last wagon departs. The stubble remains slanted in the direction of the last pa.s.s, and as on a checker-mowed lawn, you can read the bend of the stems and see how the day progressed. On tight corners the haybine always missed little bed-head tufts of hay. They bugged me like a collar sticking up, so sometimes I tried to trim them when I was done, but this plugged the sickle, so I'd have to shudder and drive home. But still: at the end of it all, you had the very green manifestation of summer swept cleanly from the field, pressed into cubes, and stowed in square corners against the winter. Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yogalike calm fills me. It is the same with the hay pile. You look at it, and you think, Well, whatever the winter brings, we've got our hay up.

I spare Amy the bulk of my hayseed memories, but I do teach her to twist the timothy and listen for the crackle, to gauge the dryness against her palm. When it is ready, we pack it tightly into a cardboard box, and store the box on a shelf in the pump house, up off the ground so it doesn't reabsorb any moisture. The first day we fill the box maybe halfway. "There!" says Amy triumphantly. "If we're going to feed Guinea all winter, we're going to need at least three more boxes," I say. Her head and shoulders immediately droop. I call this slumpage slumpage. Slumpage drives me nuts, and as such I recently decreed that all slumpage would henceforth cease. So much for the dictators.h.i.+p.

For all my talk of making hay and rites of pa.s.sage, when my father calls and says he needs a hand getting the hay in this year, it is Anneliese who packs the kids and drives north, leaving me to write. Growing up in the valley across the way, she and her sister used to work on the hay crew for Tom, the old farmer down the road, so she can throw bales. We still visit Tom and his wife now and then, and he's always got plenty of stories. Once early on before Anneliese and I were married but headed that way, Tom pulled me aside and told me Anneliese and her sister had outworked most of the boys he ever hired. "One day they told me they were tired of working with Stevie Wonder," Tom said. "There wasn't anybody on the crew named Steve, so I said, Who are you talking about? They pointed to this young fellow who wasn't doing much." He was grinning now, antic.i.p.ating the punch line. "They told me, 'Every time he puts down a hay bale, we Wonder if he'll ever pick up another one!'"