8,000 Saints Baling Hay

Making hay takes two hayracks, a baler, a tractor, a hay elevator, and as many willing people
as possible to help: the wrestling coach who doubles as a livestock auctioneer, the butcher, Miss

Mapleton, people from the bowling league, and the Eagle Hi-Fliers 4-H club. The track coach
is here, the postal carrier, the John Deere implement dealer, and the instructor from the vo-tech

who can’t stop whistling except to explain that alfalfa came from Iran via Spain through South
America to California before finally landing in the Midwest. Two nuns, Sister Amada Rosa

and Sister Ephigenia are here with some troubled kids from the parish. They are given warnings
about not what the machinery does to hay and snakes, but what it will do to the unlucky kid who

falls down in front of it, which is cut you off at the ankles, pluck your arms out of your sockets,
then turn you through the steel tines and spit out your repackaged guts, leaving your bones

in the field to bleach in peace. This warning is not hyperbole. It is bedrock. To make sure
the kids know we’re serious, my brother holds up his hand with its two-and-a-half missing—

or remaining—fingers, depending on how you look at it. All day, the baler gathers up the cut
alfalfa and makes hay bales with a steady ka-chunk, ka chunk, ka-chunk, a mechanical heart

sound in a world of happy dogs, twine string, leather gloves, hydraulic lines, power take-offs,
and a sky lightly loaded with birds, while in the hayloft where we stack the hay, the postal

carrier plies us with old country rock songs including “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” insisting it’s
the greatest hairy rock band song ever. The comradery and joking we do gives making hay,

like early fire-tending ancestors, a reliable warmth. From the time light swells above the calf-
pens to the time we surrender to sleep, we live in a series of exalting and terrifying fragments.

I often try to capture the reverence of it all, like the feel of cold water going down past
the Adam’s apple, or the clover-scented hope that the rain will have the decency to hold off

for a while, which it does. But no one gets a halo. There is no get-out-of- Hell-free card, only
foolish joy, and the vo-tech instructor’s whistling that’s never louder than divine.

Author of the article

Jeanne Lutz grew up on a small dairy farm in southern Minnesota, attended the National University of Ireland Galway, and spent two years in Japan. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Best-of-the-Net nominee, and Loft Mentor Series fellow for poetry, she is the author of the chapbook Hearts and Harrows and her poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, NonBinary Review, Conduit, and elsewhere. She divides her time between the family farm and working at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.