The Veterans I Took Out on the Hayrack

The veterans’ ride was not a thing Chet built. It was a thing Pop gave, and it was not Chet’s to sell. You do not put a price on the one afternoon a year a ninety two year old man gets to feel like he is back with his own. You just do not, and I do not care what the note on the outbuilding came to.

Dale said, “So call him. Tell him.”

I had thought about that. “And he says it’s his farm and his gate and he’ll charge what he wants. And he’d be right. It’s his name on the deed and his name on the note. There’s no law says a man has to give a free ride on his own land.”

That was the wall of it. I could not make Chet do anything. The farm was his. The gate was his. The law was all the way on his side.

So I was going to have to go around him.

I Called the Church

The church had a hayrack. I knew that because I had decorated it for the fall festival with my own hands, a long flatbed wagon with sides built up out of weathered oak, big enough to seat fourteen grown people in the hay with room to spare.

I called Pastor Al at eight the next morning.

“Rhonda,” he said. “You’re up early.”

“I need to borrow the hayrack. For the old men at the post. The veterans’ ride isn’t happening this year and I mean to do it anyway.”

There was a little quiet on the line. Pastor Al is not a quick man, but he gets there.

“Chet’s charging now,” he said. It was not a question. Word travels in a county like this faster than any phone.

“Ten a head. Veterans included.”

Pastor Al let out a breath. “The wagon’s yours. Harlan Voss will let you run it along his field road, I’d bet money. His place backs up to the river road and the color out there is as good as Chet’s, maybe better. You won’t need Chet’s lane at all.”

I had not thought of Harlan. The color along the river road was its own kind of famous, maples and oaks all down the bank.

Harlan’s eighty acres of standing corn ran right alongside it, eight feet tall and gone gold. You could make a loop out there as pretty as anything Pop ever drove.

“I’ll call Harlan,” Pastor Al said. “You call Bud at the post. And Rhonda.” He paused. “You’re doing a kind thing. Try to do it kind. Don’t do it at Chet. Do it for them.”

I wrote that down later, because he was right and I needed reminding. Don’t do it at Chet. Do it for them.

Dale pulled the church hayrack home behind his truck that afternoon and we looked at it in the yard. The oak sides were sound. The tires held air. He got down under it with a light and checked the hitch and the wiring and he fixed a brake light that had quit, and he bolted a slow moving vehicle triangle to the back, that orange and red one, because we would be on a county road and he was not going to have his wife and a wagon of old soldiers out there without it.

“You’ll want the cider,” Dale said, standing up and wiping his hands. “And the cookies. The whole thing or none of it.”

“I know.”

“Mom’s recipe’s in the tin in the cupboard.” He did not look at me when he said it. Dale does not talk about his mother much. “Molasses ones.”