The Maze I Cut Across the Road

The Home Place

Our family’s maze sat on the home place where Grandpa Vern still lived. Eight acres of corn cut into a pattern you could read from the county plane when the crop duster boys flew over.

My dad started it. He was gone four years now. A heart that quit him in the cab of the combine on a warm night in September, which is as close to a mercy as that hard, good man ever got.

He loved the fall. He loved watching strangers walk out of his corn laughing with cockleburs on their socks.

The first year he cut the maze I was in high school. He did it with a push mower and a tape measure and a drawing on the back of a feed sack. It was a crooked, homely thing, that first maze, and people loved it anyway.

I remember him standing at the end of a row that October, dirt to his elbows, watching a line of cars come down the gravel. He had the strangest look on his face. Like he could not believe they had come.

“Dana,” he said to me, “would you look at that. They drove clear out here. For corn.”

When he passed, the maze did not pass to anyone in particular. There was no paper. There never had been.

It was a family thing on family ground, the way the garden was a family thing. The way Sunday dinner was. Nobody ever wrote down who owned Sunday dinner.

Sharla and I just slid into our parts without talking about it much. She was good with money and bad with mud. I was the other way around.

So she took the cash box and I took the tractor. For six autumns that is how it ran, and it ran smooth.

I liked my part. I will not pretend otherwise.

I liked standing at the mouth of a maze I had drawn and watching a family walk in. I liked the FFA kids who came out every fall to work the gate and run the hayrack. Good farm kids who called me Miss Dana and meant it.

My husband Jeff ran the big tractor on cutting day and pulled the hayrack on weekends. He never once asked for his name on anything.

“A man who needs his name on a corn maze,” Jeff said, “has got something missing in him.”

We charged ten dollars for grown folks and six for the kids. A couple dollars more got you a pumpkin off the wagon.

It was not a fortune. Some years, after seed and fuel and the port-a-johns and the insurance, it was barely a wage. But it was ours. I had always said ours.

I drove home from the shed that noon with the radio off. Sharla’s voice went on in my head the whole way down the gravel.

I designed it. I run it. My whole September.

She had said my September like it was hers to spend.