The Name I Cut in the Hayfield

The Last Letter

The sun was not up yet when I lined the mower on the last letter. I knew there would be no taking it back once I cut it.

The hay stood almost to my knee. June timothy, gone gold at the tips, heavy with dew that soaked my jeans to the thigh before I had gone twenty feet.

I had been out there since four in the morning. My hands were numb on the wheel and my back was a plank.

The whole field smelled like green sap and diesel and the river down past the tree line. It smelled like every summer I ever had.

Behind me the ground opened into the clearing we had cut flat back in May. The white arbor stood waiting in the gray light.

Two hundred white folding chairs sat in rows on the trimmed grass, beaded with dew. The two rental tents rose at the edge of the field like boat sails.

By two o’clock that afternoon my sister Megan would be married under that arbor. In front of every person she knew.

And behind the arbor, running clear back toward the woods in letters forty feet tall, would be our grandfather’s name.

I had the E done. The A and the R. Now the L.

I lowered the deck one more notch, said a word to nobody, and let the clutch out. The blades caught the standing hay and the engine dropped half its voice.

A plume of wet green shot out the side chute. I crawled it forward at a walking pace, both hands tight.

I watched the stake line I had set the night before with baling twine and tent pins, so the letter would come out straight from the air. Down the long stroke. Stop. Back up. Over to the second stroke.

My name is Gwen. I am forty-four years old.

Until that morning I had never done a single thing I could not explain to my own mother. This one I was not sure I could.

But my grandfather worked this ground for fifty-one years. And my sister had stood in our mother’s kitchen and called it dirt.

Some things a person has to answer. Even if the only language left is a lawn mower and a field.