The Maze I Cut Across the Road

Opening Saturday

Saturday came in bright and clear and cold, the way the best October mornings come.

I was at the mouth of my maze before seven. The pumpkins stacked, the hay bales set, Grandpa Vern already in his lawn chair at the gate with the cash box on his knees and a coffee thermos between his boots.

I stood out by the road in my flannel and my cap and looked across the way at the home place.

Sharla had her gate open too. Her maze stood tall and dark and finished behind her. Eight acres of eight-foot corn. A real maze. A better maze than mine by every measure but one.

The first car came down Four Hundred Twelfth about half past eight. I knew that car. It was the preschool teacher with her own grandkids riding along.

She slowed at the home place. She looked at Sharla’s gate.

Then she looked across the road at mine. At Grandpa Vern in his lawn chair. At the short gold walls, and at me out by the sign waving her in.

She put on her blinker and turned into my lane.

Then another car came. Then the FFA kids in their trucks, all ten of them, mud tires and corduroy jackets, pulling into my lot to work.

Then a minivan with the side door already sliding open. Then the pumpkin man’s wife with a load of her church ladies. Then cars I did not know. Strangers. Families. Kids already running flat out for the corn before their mothers had the doors shut.

They turned into my lane. One after another they slowed at the home place, and then they came across the road to me.

I stood out by my sign and waved them in. Car after car after car.

Grandpa Vern made change at the gate and told every single one of them that this was the ground their maze was first cut on. Forty-four years back. By a man with a push mower and a notion.

Around ten a little boy came out of the center of the maze ahead of his mother, red faced and proud, waving a crushed fistful of cornstalk like a flag.

“I found the middle first,” he hollered at the whole parking lot. “I beat my dad to the middle.”

His dad came out behind him grinning, hands up, surrendering. I had built that center to be hard to reach, and the boy had reached it, and the look on him was the look my father had worn at the end of a row forty years back.

That was when I quit worrying over the short walls. A short wall still makes a middle a child can be proud of finding.

I counted cars. I am my father’s daughter and I cannot help it.

By noon I had turned a hundred and sixty cars into my lane. By the time the sun dropped I had run near four hundred through ten acres of short, honest, hand-cut corn.

Across the road, the home place maze stood tall and dark and mostly quiet.