The Veterans I Took Out on the Hayrack

Pop used to say the ride was not a gift he gave them. He said it was the one afternoon a year he got to be back with his own.

When Pop died, we all stood in the barn where they found him and we told each other the ride would go on. Chet said it standing right there with his hand on the tractor Pop drove. We all heard him.

The first October after, Chet ran it, free, the way it had always been, and I thought that was that.

Then the farm started slipping, the way farms do, and I watched my brother in law go from a man who ran a ride to a man who ran a business, and I did not see until the sign that he had crossed a line he was never going to be able to walk back on his own.

Chet’s Reasons

I am not going to pretend Chet had no reasons, because he did, and Ruth at church would tell me I had to say so, and she would be right.

The pumpkin patch was never much of a living. Pop kept it going on a railroad pension and stubbornness. When Chet took it over he took over the note on the new outbuilding too, and then the tractor Pop drove threw a rod and the replacement cost what a replacement costs now, which is more than a man makes selling pumpkins to town families on the weekends.

Chet had turned the place into an operation. There was a corn maze now, and a thing with pedal carts, and a stand selling kettle corn and apple slushes, and a photo spot with a wooden cutout where kids stuck their faces through. All of it took money and all of it, Chet would have told you, needed to pay for itself.

His wife Diane kept the books. I know from her, later, that the fall receipts were the only thing keeping the lights on at the farm by that October. I know Chet lay awake over it. I am not telling you he was a cartoon of a greedy man, because he was not. He was a tired man in his fifties watching his daddy’s farm come apart in his hands, and he reached for the thing in front of him.

The thing in front of him was the ride.

Here is what I could not forgive, and what I told Dale that night at the table. The corn maze, charge for it. The pedal carts, the kettle corn, the pumpkins stacked like cannonballs, charge for every one of them. Those were things Chet built.