The Maze I Cut Across the Road

Across The Road

Directly across Four Hundred Twelfth from the home place sat eighty acres that had been mine, and mine alone, since I turned thirty.

My father bought that eighty off a neighbor the year I was born. He put it in my name when I married Jeff, so that I would always have ground of my own.

He was old fashioned that way. He sat me down at the kitchen table with the deed and a pen and he made me read every line of it.

“A woman should own something the law cannot argue about,” he told me. “Corn can fail. A husband can be a good man or a poor one. But ground in your own name is ground in your own name.”

For six years that eighty had been in corn and beans like any other ground. Rented out half the time. Nothing special about it at all.

But it was mine. The deed had my name and no one else’s.

There was no family vagueness about that eighty. It was the one thing in all of this with a paper that said so.

I drove home from the milk house and I did not cry and I did not call anybody. I got out the plat map. I got out my design software. I set three cups of coffee going cold at my elbow, and I started to draw.

I could not fight Sharla for the home place maze. There was nothing to fight with.

No will said it was mine. No deed. No contract. No line in any book she kept.

If I called a lawyer he would ask me what I owned. The honest answer was corn I had mowed on ground that was not in my name.

You cannot sue your way into a family thing. You cannot get a sheriff to come out and rule on whose Sunday dinner it is.

But I did not need to fight her for the maze.

I could cut my own.

Jeff came in from chores and found me at the table with the plat map and the three cold cups. He read it over my shoulder for a long minute.

“That the eighty,” he said.

“That’s the eighty.”

“You thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking a ten-acre maze fits on that north piece. With room for parking and a wagon turnaround.”

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. He studied the drawing the way he studies a sick calf. Slow, and all the way through.

“Corn’s already made for this year,” he said finally. “You can’t cut a maze into standing eight-foot corn, Dana. You’d have been cutting that pattern back in June, when it was knee high. It’s October.”

He was right. My heart dropped straight through the floor, because he was flat right.