The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

Nobody to call

Lance was two counties away on storm duty. A line of wind had come through the day before and taken down poles from Neillsville to Black River Falls, and every lineman at the electric co-op was out on it.

He called me at nine that night. I was sitting on the front porch steps in the dark with my coat on, because I could not stand to be inside.

“Mom sent me a picture,” he said. He sounded tired all the way down. “He really went through it.”

“Four passes. Right through the center.”

There was a long quiet. I could hear a generator running somewhere behind him, and men’s voices, and a truck backing up.

“I’ll call him,” Lance said.

“Don’t. Not tonight. You’re up a pole at six in the morning.” I pulled my knees up. “Anything you say to him tonight, you’ll say tired. And he’ll say it back tired.”

“Becca, he can’t just…”

“He can, though. That’s the thing. It’s his corn. It’s his lease. There’s nobody to call and nothing to sue, and even if there were, he’s your brother and he’s my kids’ uncle and he lives a mile up the road.”

I heard Lance breathe out. He is a patient man in a way I have never been.

He takes the long way around a problem the same way he takes the long way around a downed line, slowly, looking at everything.

“Do you want me to come home?”

“No. Those people need their lights back. Come home when you’re done.”

“What are you going to do about Saturday?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. And that was true for about another hour.

Two hundred and forty tickets

Julie Hanson was the PTO president that year. She had three kids at the elementary school and a dairy herd of sixty cows, and she was the most organized woman I have ever met.

She called me at ten. Somebody had driven past on the highway and seen the swath. In a small town that is how news travels: not by phone, by windshield.

“We sold two hundred and forty tickets,” she said. “Five dollars a kid. That’s the bus fund for the spring field trip. But Becca, listen to me. We can cancel. We can do a bake sale in the gym. Nobody in this town is going to blame you.”

“I know they won’t.”

“Then let it go. You’ve done enough on this thing.”

I sat there and looked out at the field.

You could see it from the porch in the moonlight, the dark standing corn on both sides and that pale bare strip down the middle where the stubble caught the light.

“Julie,” I said, “how much straw do you have in the shed?”

She was quiet for a second. “Small squares? Maybe sixty. Why?”

“Because a maze doesn’t have to be corn.”