I'll answer my own question here. It turns out that using the cascading libraries to read the first line from a single file at a time in a directory is not its best use. I ended up switching to org.apache.hadoop and wrote the following code (this is all inside my main method):
String inputPath = args[0];
Path inputDir = new Path(inputPath);
FileSystem lfs = FileSystem.get(new Congifuration());
FileStatus[] files = lfs.listStatus(inputDir);
for(int x=0; x < files.length; x++){
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(lfs.open(files[x].getPath()));
String line = br.readLine();
}