The Hayride I Gave Our Whole Road

The Ride Around The Section

Dale eased the clutch out and the wagon rolled, and twenty-one children on a bed of straw made a sound I will not forget, this rising oooooh, half fright and half joy, the sound of the whole thing being real now.

We went out the driveway and turned west on the gravel, into what was left of the light. The sky down the road was the color of a cut peach, orange going to gray, and the harvested fields ran out flat on both sides to the tree lines, and the first stars were coming.

It was cold enough to see your breath. The kids were down in the straw under blankets with the lanterns swinging over them, and the Ford went put-put-put at a walking pace, and Dale drove with one arm across the back of the seat looking behind him at the load the way his grandpa must have a hundred times.

I walked alongside. I had my barn coat on and my muck boots and I walked in the ditch grass beside the wagon the whole way, close, where I could reach up and touch the rail. A mother walks beside the wagon. That is the oldest job there is.

About a quarter mile out, one of the Hendrickson kids started singing. It was not a hymn, it was a bus song, the one about the wheels going round, and then it was a hymn, because out here the children learn both in the same seat, and twenty-one kids on a hay wagon sang Jesus Loves Me into the cold while a 1953 tractor kept the time.

We came up on the Ahos’ place and the young father walked out to the road and took a picture of his own four-year-old on the hay, and the boy had his arms straight up over his head like he had won something.

We passed Mr. Dittmer’s corner and he had turned his yard light on bright for us and he lifted his cane off the ground when we went by, a kind of salute, and the kids yelled hi Mr. Dittmer, hi Mr. Dittmer, and the old man laughed so hard he had to sit back down.

We went the whole section. Four miles, all four sides, at four miles an hour, an hour of dark and cold and lantern light and children singing, and I walked every step of it in the ditch grass beside the wagon and I was not tired until later.

Who Climbed On

We were on the last side, the home stretch, coming back east toward our own yard light, when I saw the car pulled over on the shoulder up ahead, lights off.

I knew the car. It was Roberta’s.

My stomach dropped. I thought, she came to count heads, she came to find a child without a seatbelt and have her say. I kept walking because there was nothing else to do.

But the car was empty. The doors were open. And standing at the edge of the gravel in the lantern light were Roberta’s two, Mason who is eight and little Grace who is five, standing there in their coats looking at the wagon the way the Aho boy had looked at the tractor.

Roberta was standing behind them with her hands in her coat pockets. She did not say a word. She did not look at me. She looked at her own two kids looking at that wagon full of every child on our road singing in the straw.