The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

Building it

The plan came together on the back of the same receipt. We would lay the new maze right in the swath Dan had cut.

Sixty feet wide and most of the length of the field. The standing corn on both sides would be the outer walls.

Inside that, straw bale walls, two bales high. Low enough that a parent could see over to find a child. High enough that a seven-year-old could not.

A small square bale runs about three feet long and weighs forty or fifty pounds, depending on how dry it was baled.

Two courses high, every three feet of wall takes two bales. We did the math in the dirt with a stick.

We had something like six hundred and forty bales by noon. That is a little under a thousand feet of wall. Not a five-acre corn maze.

But a real maze, with dead ends and turns and a center, a maze a kid could get turned around in on Halloween night.

The FFA advisor from the high school brought eleven kids out at noon.

They were the best help I had all weekend, big farm kids who could carry a bale under each arm and did not need to be told twice.

I laid out the paths with orange flags from the clinic, the kind we use to mark off pens.

The boys followed behind me and set the bottom course, and the girls set the top course and kicked the joints tight.

Lance got home at half past twelve. He had been up since four, driving back from the last pole on the storm job.

He pulled into the yard, walked out into the field in his work boots, and looked at it.

“Well,” he said. “Okay then.”

He did not go in to sleep.

He hooked our trailer to his pickup and spent the afternoon running out to farms that could not bring their own straw, hauling it back and unloading it himself. I counted. He made seven trips.

Kelli

Kelli came out at about three. She walked out to the field from her house, slow, in her chore boots, and stood at the edge of the swath with her arms crossed.

She was sixty-six. She had buried her husband four years before and she still kept the books for the farm in a ledger on the kitchen counter, by hand, the way Vince had.

“I told him I said yes,” she said, without me asking. “This morning. He came over for coffee and I told him. He said I should have told him in April.”

“You should have,” I said. “And I should have asked him in April. That’s on me more than you.”

She looked at me a while. “He’s not a mean boy, Becca.”

“I know he isn’t.”

“He’s been farming this place alone since his dad died. He was thirty-five. He put his whole life on hold to keep it in the family, and every year he’s a little more behind, and every year nobody notices because the crop always comes off.”

She uncrossed her arms. “And then a maze shows up on his ground and the whole county’s talking about how nice it is, and nobody once said his name.”

I thought about the sign on the highway. Fall Fun Night, Corn Maze, Saturday. I had made it myself. It did not say whose corn.

“That’s fair,” I said.

“It’s not fair what he did,” Kelli said. “Two days before. With the children coming. I told him that too.” She looked out at the bales. “But I wanted you to know he had a reason. Even if it was a poor one.”