The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

I heard the combine before I saw it. I was coming up our lane from the clinic on a Thursday in late October, windows down, and the sound came across the field like weather.

That sound is normal in Clark County in October. Every farm on our road had a combine out that week.

But this one was running in the wrong place, and I knew it before I ever came around the windbreak.

It was in the maze field. The five acres by the road, the ones my kids and I had walked and mowed and flagged and fussed over since the second week of June.

By the time I had the car in park, he had made four passes straight through the middle.

Each pass took a strip about fifteen feet wide. Sixty feet of fresh stubble ran right where the heart of our maze had been.

My daughter Hope was six. She had just gotten off the bus at the end of the lane, and she saw it at the same moment I did.

She dropped her backpack in the ditch and ran for the field.

I caught her at the fence by the back of her jacket. I said, “Stay with your brother,” in the voice I almost never use, and she stopped. Reid was five and already crying a little, standing in the lane with his lunchbox.

Then I climbed through the fence myself and walked out into the stubble.

The combine was turning at the end of the field for a fifth pass. I walked into the row it was lining up on and stood there.

I am not a brave person about machinery. I work at a large animal clinic. I have seen what a corn head does to a coyote that gets in the way.

But I stood there in the stubble with my hands at my sides, and I waited.

He stopped about forty feet short of me. The head came up. The engine dropped to an idle, and the cab door opened, and my husband’s brother Dan looked down at me.

He was thirty-nine that fall. He had his dad’s shoulders and his dad’s way of not talking until he had decided exactly what he would say. He did not climb down.

“Get out of the row, Becca.”

“There’s a school fundraiser in this field on Saturday, Dan. You know there is. There’s been a sign up on the highway for a month.”

“That corn is my rent.” He said it flat, the way you would read a number off a scale ticket. “I’ve got eighty acres of this ground and five of it was standing out here as a decoration.”

“Your mother said we could use it.”

“Mom doesn’t farm it. I do.” He looked past me at the ruined middle of the maze, then back at me. “Nobody asked me. Not once. Not in June, not since.”

I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out of it. Behind me I could hear Reid crying in the lane, and Hope telling him to hush in a voice that was trying to be mine.

Dan looked at the kids for a second. Something moved in his face that I could not read.

Then he shut the cab door, backed the combine out of the row, and drove it out the field road toward his place without finishing the pass.

I stood there in the chaff until the sound was gone. The light was going orange over the tree line.

I remember thinking that the corn left standing on both sides of the swath looked like two pages of a book someone had torn the middle out of.