The Maze I Cut Across the Road

The Phone Started Ringing

I did not advertise against my sister. I want that clear too.

I never once said a word against her maze. Not to the FFA advisor, not to the church, not to a soul.

I just called Kurt, the FFA advisor, a good man who had sent me kids for six years. I told him I was opening a maze on my own ground across the road, and I could use hands if any kids wanted the work.

He was quiet a second on the line.

“Dana,” he said, “those kids have been asking me all week what happened. They heard that radio too.”

“I’m not asking them to take sides, Kurt.”

“I know you’re not. That’s half of why they think the world of you.” He let out a breath. “I’ll have ten out there Saturday if you want ten.”

I called the lady who ran the church preschool. She brought her little ones on a field trip every October, and I told her plain where I would be this year.

I called the man who ran the pumpkin patch two miles south. He had sent folks our way for years, and I told him too.

“I’m not trying to take anything from anybody,” I told him. “You send them to the home place same as always, if that’s right by you. I just want you to know there’s a second maze now.”

“Dana,” he said, “I been sending them to the maze. The maze is whoever cuts the maze. I’ll send them where you are.”

That was the first time I understood what I actually had in my hands.

I had always thought the regulars came for an address. A spot on Four Hundred Twelfth they knew to find.

They did not come for an address. They came for the thing itself. The design, the cut, the walk, the center you had to earn. I was the one who made that thing. I always had been.

Word went around the way word goes around in a county like ours. Over coffee. Across the pews. At the elevator while the grain dumped and the men waited on the scale.

I did not have to say one thing against Sharla. I just had to be open, on my own ground, the same Saturday she was.

Grandpa Vern heard it last of anybody. Grandpa Vern does not use a telephone if he can get out of it.

He drove over in his old pickup the Friday before I opened. He found me out at the mouth of the maze, hanging my sign.