The Maze I Cut Across the Road

Grandpa At The Gate

He sat in the truck a minute with the window rolled down and read my hand-lettered sign. CORN MAZE. An arrow. Ten dollars grown, six for kids.

“That your pattern,” he said.

“That’s my pattern, Grandpa.”

He got out slow, the way he does now, one hand on the door and one on the bed rail. He walked up to where the corn opened into the first path.

He put his hand flat on a short gold wall of it. He stood there a good while, not saying one word.

“Your dad,” he said finally, “cut his first maze right here.”

I thought he had it turned around. “No, Grandpa. The first maze was on the home place. Across the road.”

“The one folks remember was on the home place,” he said. “The first one he ever cut was here.”

“Here.”

“The trial one. The one he did with a push mower to see if the fool idea would even work. He cut that one on this eighty, before we ever moved the show across the road.” He patted the corn. “I helped him stake it out. You were a baby asleep in the house. Right about here is where he started.”

I had to turn away from him and look out across the corn a while. My eyes had gone to water and I did not want him to see it.

“You’ve got his eye,” Grandpa said, behind me. “Now listen. Sharla’s got his head for a dollar, and that is no small thing. Don’t you ever tell her I said it wasn’t.”

“I won’t.”

“But you’ve got his eye. He could stand at the edge of a green field in June and see the whole fall in it. The paths, the dead ends, the crowd. So can you. I watched you do it this week, same as I watched him do it fifty years ago.”

I did not trust my voice, so I did not use it yet.

“Put me on your gate,” Grandpa said. “Saturday. I’ll make change. And I’ll tell every soul who comes through whose ground they are standing on and who first cut it.”

“Grandpa.”

“Put me on the gate, Dana.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “You’re on the gate.”