Forty Octobers
To understand why my hands started shaking, you have to know who Ada is. You have to know what that wagon is.
My people have farmed the same ground south of Hastings since before I was born. In the fall we open the back forty as a pumpkin patch.
The only way out to the pumpkins is a quarter mile hayride. The lane runs down between the windbreak and the standing corn.
Harlan Vos drives the team. He is seventy-four. He has two Belgian draft horses, Dutch and Ed, big blond geldings with feet like dinner plates.
Harlan has driven that wagon down that lane every October Saturday for as long as my sister and I have been alive.
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Before Harlan it was Ada’s husband. Walt Lindqvist drove this family’s team back when the horses were a different pair with the same job. Walt has been gone nineteen years.
Ada rode the first hayride of every season beside whoever was driving. Nobody wrote that down as a rule. It was just true.
It was true the way it is true that you lift two fingers off the wheel at a truck on a gravel road.
She rode it the fall Walt died. She wore her black coat and nobody said a word. They just held the seat for her and let her ride.
She rode it the fall my dad was in the hospital. She held my mother’s hand the whole quarter mile.
“Clement is too stubborn to die in October,” she told my mother on that ride. She was right. He made it to March.
She brought a cake to this farm every one of those forty falls. A dense spice cake in a dented pan, carried out on her lap on that first ride, set on the stand for whoever was hungry.
She knew every one of us. She knew which of the Kruger boys got the scar on his lip and how, and which year the barn roof blew, and the name of my mother’s first dog.
When my dad’s shoulder went, the year I was twelve, it was Ada who drove our church-meal signup for a month. She never once asked us to thank her and she never once let us forget we were loved.
That is the woman. Not a guest. Not a cost. A root the whole place grew up around without anybody noticing it was holding the soil.
Forty years. I had done the quick arithmetic in my head more than once, standing at the gate taking wristbands.
Forty first rides. And my sister wanted the bench for in-laws who had driven in the night before and would be gone by Sunday.