It was a great year for lespedeza and there was a lot of hay baled after school started in the fall. Cornbread's brother had an old 3/4 ton Chevy truck with a flat bed, so Cornbread rented it for 2 cents per bale and we went into the hay hauling business after school, charging 12 cents per bale. We did several jobs, hauling 300 to 400 bales per night, and thought we had found a sure way to wealth.

One morning before school, Cornbread told me that he had lined up an 800 bale job. Neither of us know the man we were going to haul for, but that didn't really matter; we thought hay was hay.

We arrived at the farm after school and the elderly owner informed us that he would have to lead us to the field, because we couldn't find it by ourselves. He got on an old tractor and headed across a pasture, threading his way between cedar trees and thorn sprouts.

I had thought I was raised in the hills, but I'd never seen hills like these. We went straight down the first one, because it was too steep to drive on crossways. At the bottom of the hill we made a very rough creek crossing, drove across a small bottom, crossed a deep ditch and came to the field. By this time we were beginning to have our doubts about ever getting back with a load of hay, but we were willing to try anything, at least once.

Like I said, we thought hay was hay, and I guess it was, but we'd never seen that much hay squeezed into one bale before. The light ones weighed at least 90 pounds, and they ran rapidly upwards from there. We finally got loaded, tied the load down and headed back towards civilization.

We made it across the ditch and almost made it across the creek. After wading about six inches of water to reload a half dozen very wet and very heavy bales, we retied the load and started up the hill. About half way up our old rotten rope broke and several bales rolled off the truck. Oh well, no big deal: reload, splice the rope, retie and go again. The only problem was, the hill was so steep that when Cornbread let the clutch out, the front of the truck came off the ground. He clutched, then tried it again. This time the front end stayed down because the rope broke again and about half the load tumbled off the back. There wasn't enough rope left to splice again so we turned around, reloaded, and tried to back up the hill.

By this time it was dark, so Cornbread was hanging out the door with a flashlight watching for cedar trees, and I was holding the gearshift since the old truck had an annoying habit of jumping out of reverse. Even with me holding the gearshift it jumped out about every twenty feet. Before Cornbread could hit the brakes we would roll back down the hill about ten feet. We finally gave up and walked to the house to see if we could borrow a tractor to pull the truck up the hill.

The old gentleman told us that wouldn't be necessary because there was an old shed on the other side of the creek. We got in his old pickup with him and headed back down the hill. We decided to leave our truck where it was and get it on the way back. We crossed the creek, the ditch and the hayfield, drove about 200 yards on a path cut through a patch of woods, then came out of the woods into a field of horseweeds at least ten feet tall, and headed towards the shed. Or so we thought!

It was a real dark night and all we could see in the headlights were horseweeds. After a little while the old gentleman stopped, looked around, mumbled "Humph" and started driving again. He soon turned around, moved over a little ways and headed back. After a couple more tries he stopped, looked around again and said "Boys, I know the blamed thing is still here because I saw it last spring. It don't matter; it's too blamed late to start hauling hay anyway." He told us to unload what we had right where the truck was setting, and said "It's not going to rain, I'll find the blamed thing when it gets daylight and you can haul the hay tomorrow evening."

We returned the next day after school, with a new rope and two extra bodies, and spent most of the night getting over 800 extremely heavy bales of hay safely stashed away in a raggedy old shed.

We did several more small jobs before hay season was over, but after that experience we checked them out a lot closer before we committed ourselves.

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