The Maze I Cut Across the Road

The Field That Was Already There

Then Jeff said the thing that turned it.

“But you planted the north eighty late this year. Remember. We got rained out all spring and you didn’t get in the ground till the second week of June.”

I did remember. I had cussed that rain from April clean through planting.

“That corn’s a good three weeks behind the home place,” he said. “Maybe more.”

“It’s shorter,” I said. The thought started coming up in me like warmth. “It’s thinner than it ought to be.”

“It’s cuttable,” Jeff said. “Barely. If you did it now. This week. Before it tops out and sets up hard.”

“It’d be a rough maze.”

“Short walls,” he agreed. “You’d see over some of it. It would not be the home place maze.”

“Dad’s first maze,” I said, “you could see over the whole thing. People loved it anyway.”

We drove out to the north eighty that same afternoon and walked it.

The corn came up past my shoulder, green going gold, three weeks shy of where the home place stood tall and dark and finished. In any normal year that would have been a disappointment.

That afternoon it was the only door standing open to me, and I walked straight into it.

I staked the corners by dark. I had the pattern drawn by midnight.

It was a simpler thing than the home place maze. Big open loops a short-walled field could carry, with a center you had to earn. I made the paths wide, so that a body walked the shape of it more than the walls of it.

Jeff was on the tractor before the dew burned off the next morning.

I walked ahead of him with the flags, reading the pattern off the tablet. He mowed exactly where I pointed and no farther. The two of us cut ten acres of standing corn into a maze in four days.

My hands blistered and broke and blistered again over the broke places. I did not care.

Every path we opened was a path with no book attached to it. No ledger. No sister on the radio.

It was mine the way the deed was mine. It was mine the way a thing is yours when you make it with your own two hands on your own ground.

On the fourth evening I climbed up on the flatbed wagon and looked out over it in the low gold sun. There it was.

Rough. Short walled. Honest.

My father would have known it anywhere.