The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

The corn was his, and that was the trouble

I want to be honest about this part, because it is the part I have thought about the most since.

Dan was not wrong about the corn. The ground belonged to Kelli, my mother-in-law, since Vince passed.

Dan rented all eighty acres of the home farm from her, cash rent, a handshake lease that had run the same way for six years.

He planted the whole field himself in May. Every stalk in that maze was his seed, his fertilizer, his diesel.

What we did in June was walk in with a mower and a string trimmer, when the corn was knee high, and cut paths through it.

That is how most corn mazes get made. You plant it like any field, you lay your design out with stakes and flags, and you cut the paths while the corn is young.

You keep them mowed all summer. In the fall, everybody gets lost for an evening.

So it was his corn standing in the walls of our maze. At about a hundred and seventy bushels to the acre, five acres was something like eight hundred and fifty bushels.

At the price that fall, that was a little over three thousand dollars.

That was real money to Dan. It was close to a fifth of his rent to his mother on that ground.

Farmers do not have three thousand dollars to stand around as scenery, and I knew that, because I grew up two miles from there.

And I never asked him. That is the plain truth of it. I asked Kelli in April, at the end of her driveway, and she said, “Oh, honey, of course, the kids will love it,” and I took that and ran.

Part of me knew I should go to Dan. Part of me did not go because Dan always said no. He said no to the church using his hay wagon, no to Lance borrowing the good tractor, no to just about anything that came with the word “fun” attached to it.

So I went around him. I told myself his mother owned the ground and that settled it. It did not settle it. It just meant nobody could tell me no before the work was done.

That was the piece I carried out of the field that night along with Hope’s backpack. Not that he was cruel. That he was a person, and I had treated his field like a backdrop.