The first loop he made took out the row closest to the lane, the row Sylvia had watered first every evening since June because it was nearest the hose.
I heard the four-wheeler before I saw it. Warner’s machine had a rattle in the exhaust that you could pick out from half a mile away, and it was coming down Dad’s back lane faster than anybody needed to go.
It was a Tuesday, the last week of September, around five in the afternoon. It had rained most of Monday, and the ground behind Dad’s barn was soft and black, the way Fairfield County clay gets when it has had a drink.
Sylvia and I had driven out after I finished my route. She wanted to check the stems on her biggest ones. The county fair in Lancaster was two weeks away, and she had already picked out the three she meant to enter.
She was standing at the fence with her hand on the top wire when Warner went through the gate.
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He did not slow down. He came off the lane, cut across the corner of the hay field, and drove straight into the patch.
Then he started turning.
Big loops, one after another, the back tires throwing mud and vine and orange chunks in a spray behind him. I could hear the pumpkins go under the tires. It is a sound like somebody stepping on a cardboard box full of water.
He was laughing. I could see his face from the fence. He had his head back and he was laughing from the seat like a boy at the county fair demolition derby.
I yelled his name once. He did not hear it, or he did not care to.
It took about four minutes. I know because I looked at my phone afterward to see what time it was, and I remembered the time I had looked before, when we got out of the car.
Four minutes. That was all it took to undo a whole summer.
When he finally stopped, he was at the far end of the patch with the engine idling. He looked back over the field. For one second I thought I saw something cross his face. Then it was gone.
“It’s hay ground, Patrice,” he called. “Always was.”
Then he gunned it, went back out the gate, and was gone up the lane toward the road.
Sylvia had not made a sound the whole time. Not one sound.
I want to tell you she cried. It would have been easier if she had cried. Instead she stood at the fence with her hand still on the wire and looked at the field like she was trying to memorize it.
“Mom,” she said finally. “Is Uncle Warner mad at me?”
I did not have an answer for her. I put my arm around her and we stood there until the mud quit dripping off the vines.
My name is Patrice Pryor. I am thirty-eight years old, and I carry the mail on a rural route out of the Bremen post office. Eleven miles of Coonpath Road and the township roads that come off it, thirty-one boxes, six days a week.
I grew up on the farm I was standing on. My dad, Amos Hollins, still runs it at seventy-four, mostly hay and a few head of beef cattle, and he still gets up at five whether there is anything to get up for or not.