The Name I Cut in the Hayfield

Before The Sun

A riding mower is not made to cut standing hay. I want the honest ones reading this to know I know that.

You cut hay with a sickle bar or a haybine behind a tractor, in windrows, and you let it dry. A lawn tractor will bog in tall timothy and clog its deck solid in one pass.

So I cheated the way Grandpa would have. The afternoon before, while Jeff thought I was tidying the field, I ran the little Ford with the rotary cutter down my twine lines first.

One knock-down pass on each stroke of each letter, set high, so it only laid the hay over and roughed the shape. That took the fight out of it.

Then that morning, in the dark, I came back with the green lawn tractor. I cut the letters clean and sharp and low so the edges would read crisp from the air.

One tool to say it. One tool to say it well. He would have done it the same.

I started at four. I wore his old canvas barn coat because the dew was cold.

I set the first stake line by headlamp and paced it twice. Then I drove.

It is a strange thing to carve a word into the ground you love with your own hands. The mower crawled.

The wet hay packed the chute and I stopped a dozen times to clear it with a stick. My fingers went green to the knuckle.

The sun came up over the tree line around six and lit the whole field sideways. I could see the E finished and the A taking shape.

A pair of sandhill cranes lifted off the creek at the noise and went over me low, calling that rusty hinge sound they make. I took it as his blessing. I take most things as his blessing.

I had to shut the engine off for a minute. I did not trust my eyes, and I did not want Jeff coming out to find me crying on a lawn mower.

Jeff did come out, about then, with a travel mug of coffee for me. He stood at the edge of the cut and looked at the letters a long time.

He did not say was I crazy, or think of the hay, or any of the things another man might have said. He just handed me the coffee and said he would keep Mama up at the house until I was done.

That is the kind of man he is. He married into this family and he has never once made me choose between him and the ground.

By a quarter to eight I was on the L. The last letter. The one I started this story on.

I cut the long down stroke and backed up and cut the foot of it. Then I shut the mower off for good and climbed down.

I walked out into the middle of the word. You cannot read a thing that big from inside it.

From the ground it is just mowed paths in hay. I knew what it said because I had cut it.

I stood in the belly of the R where Grandpa’s name opened up around me. Forty feet of it on every side.

The field smelled like every summer I ever had with him. I said out loud, “There you go, old man. Right where everybody can see you.”

Then I went in and showered and put on my good dress. I got ready to watch my sister get married on it.