The Name I Cut in the Hayfield

Fourteen Hundred Dollars

Megan wanted two tents. A big frame tent for the tables and the dancing. A smaller one for the caterer to work under.

She was worried about a June thunderstorm. In Michigan that is a fair worry.

I called the rental place in town. Two tents, delivered and set up and taken down, came to fourteen hundred dollars even.

The man was giving me the country rate. In a city it would have been triple.

I told Megan the number over the phone. I was careful how I said it.

“The land is yours, honey, that part is just mine to give. But the tents are a real bill from a real company.”

Then I asked her, “Can you and Scott cover the fourteen hundred, or split it?”

There was a little silence on the line.

“I just figured,” she said, “since it is at your place, that would be your part.”

I was holding a dish towel. I folded it into a square while I thought.

I had already given her a hayfield worth more in one lost cutting than the tents cost. I had given three months of my evenings.

I had a right to say the tents were not mine. But I did not want a fight before her wedding.

So I just said, “I have put a lot into getting the ground ready, Meg. The tents are the one thing I think should be yours. Think about it.”

“Fine,” she said, in the voice that means it is not fine. She hung up.

I told Jeff I thought it was handled. I was wrong.

It was not handled. It had only moved rooms.

Charging Family For Dirt

My mother called me two days later. I could tell from her first word that Megan had gotten to her.

Mama is Faye. She is seventy-one, she loves us both to pieces, and she will believe whichever daughter talked to her last.

That is just how she is. Megan had talked to her last.

“Gwen,” Mama said, “I have to ask you something and I want you to be honest with me. Are you charging your sister to have her wedding on the farm?”

“No,” I said. “I am not charging her a thing for the farm. I asked her to pay the tent rental.”

“Fourteen hundred dollars,” I said, “to a rental company. Not to me.”

“Because she called me crying,” Mama went on, like she had not heard me. “She said you are making her pay to stand on family land.”

“She said you told her it would cost her,” Mama said. “She said, Gwen, and these are her words, that you are charging family for dirt.”

Charging family for dirt.

I sat down on the kitchen step. I had the phone against my ear and the line of Grandpa’s trees way out past the field.

I said it back out loud to make sure I had heard it. “She said I am charging family for dirt.”

“That is what she said.”

I did not yell. My grandfather never yelled and neither do I.

“Mama, that dirt is the dirt Grandpa Earl cut hay out of for fifty-one years. That dirt put food on the table when Dad quit us.”

“I am giving her every blade of it for free and asking her to pay a rental company for two tents. That is all.”

And my mother, who loved that man as much as I did, said the thing that turned the key in me.

“Well. It is just a field, honey.” She paused. “Maybe it would not hurt you to be the bigger person, since you are the one who got it.”

Since I am the one who got it.

I said I had to go. I hung up gentle.

I sat on that step a long time. The dirt, as she called it, went gold in the evening light.