A hayfield serves as the stage for Dial's lament about the changes he observed as a small boy in the '30s working on an Alabama farm. Mechanization (represented here by a hay-baling machine) cut deeply into the rural work force, and farm laborers (mostly African Americans, including Dial) throughout the South had to migrate to the cities and frequently to dangerous occupations. Not only the human farm population was affected: Dial also acknowledges other victims that history has overlooked: the beasts of burden, now dispensable, their reasons for existence suddenly eliminated.
