The Maze I Cut Across the Road

The Radio Spot

I was standing in the machine shed with a grease gun in my hand when I heard my sister give away six years of my life on the radio.

The little AM station out of town ran a farm report every noon. In October they called the agritourism places to talk up the season, same as they did the apple orchard and the pumpkin patch south of us.

I had the radio going on the shelf by the workbench. It was the old one with the busted antenna held straight by a zip tie, and I was greasing the zerks on the stalk chopper when I heard the host say my sister’s name.

“We’ve got Sharla Hennings on the line,” he said. “She runs the maze out on Four Hundred Twelfth, the big one everybody talks about. Sharla, tell folks what you built out there.”

I stopped with the grease gun half pumped.

“Well, I started it about six years back,” Sharla said, easy as anything. “It was just a notion I had. People want someplace to take the kids in the fall.”

“That they do,” the host said.

“So I thought, why not us,” she went on. “I designed it. I run it. I pour my whole September into that corn.”

I set the grease gun down on the bench very slow. The way you set a thing down when your hands have gone strange on you.

I was the one who cut that maze. Me. Every single year.

Me on the little tractor in June, when the corn was knee high, following the pattern I drew at the kitchen table. I mowed the paths out before the stalks ever got tall enough to hide a child.

Me at four in the morning in the fog, flagging the rows so Jeff could see where to run the big tractor. Me with the design software I taught myself off a library computer two towns over, hunched at a screen while a bored teenager waited to lock the doors.

Sharla kept the books. Sharla ran the cash box and the square reader and the deposit slips. That was her part, and it was a real part, and I never once said it wasn’t.

But she did not design it. She did not cut it. She had never sat on that tractor in her life.

“I designed it,” she had said. “I run it.”

The farm report moved on to soybean basis and the hog market, and the two men went to talking numbers. I stood there in the shed and listened to them, and my face went hot and then cold.

Six Septembers. She had said her whole September.

My September.