The Hayride I Gave Our Whole Road

The Missed Workday

Here is the reason we missed the fall workday, and I want it set down plain, because for about a week I let myself feel guilty, as if Roberta had a point.

The fall workday at Zion is the last Saturday in September. You rake the cemetery, you wash the windows, you put the storm windows on the parsonage, you clean the kitchen. It is a good tradition and I have gone to nine of them.

This year, the last Saturday in September, my mother was in the hospital in Rochester with her second heart thing.

Dale drove me down Friday night and we sat in those chairs by her bed through Saturday and most of Sunday, and I called Roberta myself from the hospital hallway to say we would not make the workday.

I remember the call. I remember standing by the vending machines with my mother’s purse in my lap because they would not let her keep it in the room. I told Roberta where we were. She said, “Oh, no, you tell your mom we are praying.” She said it kind. She meant it, I think. Roberta is not a monster. That is the part that is hard to explain to people.

But kind on the phone in September and the pen squared to the table in October are two different Robertas, and I have given up trying to make them the same woman.

Dale was quiet on the drive home from church that Sunday. Dale is quiet most of the time. He farms about three hundred acres with his dad’s old equipment and he keeps books at the elevator two days a week in the winter, and he is the steadiest man I ever met. His sister being hard on his wife put him in a spot, and I knew it, and I did not pile on.

“She’s wrong,” he said finally, out by the turn onto our road. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You talking to her makes it a Boyd family thing. Then your mother gets in it, and your aunt Pam, and by Thanksgiving it is the only thing anybody talks about over the turkey.”

“So we do nothing,” he said.

I looked out the window at the fields. The beans were off already and the corn was coming off, and the land out our way in October goes the color of a brown paper bag, miles of it, with the sky sitting down low and orange in the evening.

“I didn’t say nothing,” I said. I did not know yet what I meant. But I knew it was not nothing.

Grandpa Lon’s Flatbed

The idea came to me Tuesday, in the machine shed, looking at Grandpa Lon’s flatbed.

Grandpa Lon was Dale’s grandfather. He passed four years ago at ninety-one, and he left us the home place and most of what was in the sheds, which is a lot, because Lon never threw away a thing that might be useful in 1962 or any year since.

In the back of the machine shed, under a blue tarp, is his hay wagon. It is a flatbed on an old running gear, wood deck, steel-rimmed wheels he had rubber-tired at some point, side rails he built himself out of oak.

Lon used it for loose hay back before everybody baled, and then he used it for the Fourth of July, because for about thirty years Lon Boyd pulled the hay wagon in the town parade with his grandkids on it.

I pulled the tarp off and stood there in the cold shed and I could smell it, that smell old barn wood keeps, hay and dust and linseed oil. And I thought, there is nothing wrong with this wagon. There is nothing wrong with the Ford either.