The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

Under the yard light

Lance got back at seven. I left him with the kids and a pot of chili and drove the mile up the road to Dan’s place.

Dan was out in his yard under the light pole, greasing the combine. He had the corn head off and set on its stand, and he was lying on a creeper under the feeder house with a grease gun.

He heard my car. He did not roll out. I walked over and stood next to the big tire and waited, the same way I had waited in the field.

After a while he rolled out and sat up on the creeper and wiped his hands on a rag.

“If you came to yell, go ahead,” he said.

“I didn’t.” I put my hands in my coat pockets. “I came to say I should have asked you. In April. Not your mother. You. I didn’t, because I figured you’d say no, and I wanted it more than I wanted to hear no. That was wrong. I’m sorry.”

He looked at me for a long time. He was not expecting it. I could tell.

“I’d have probably said no,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Then you’d have been mad at me in April instead of me being mad at you in October.” He put the rag down. “I don’t know which is better.”

“Neither one,” I said.

He laughed once, not a nice laugh, but not a mean one either. He looked off toward our place. You could see the yard light at our end of the road, and past it, in the dark, the field.

“I hear the whole township brought you straw.”

“Most of it.”

“Leonard brought his.” It was not a question. “The ones from the year Marion got sick.”

“Yes.”

He was quiet a long while after that. Then he said, “I didn’t do it to hurt the kids. I want you to know that. I sat in that cab at the end of the row and saw Hope coming at the fence and I about threw up.”

“You still did it.”

“I still did it.” He looked down at his hands. “I was mad for five months and I picked the worst day there was to stop being quiet about it. That’s the truth.”

I nodded. I did not tell him it was fine, because it was not.

“Bill Hanson’s tractor might not make it tomorrow,” I said. “It’s been smoking for a week. He’s supposed to run the hay wagon from the parking area across the road. If it quits, people walk a quarter mile of gravel in the dark.”

Dan did not say anything.

“I’m not asking you,” I said. “I’m just telling you what’s coming. Same as I should have in April.”

Then I walked back to my car and drove home.

What people said

I will not pretend the town was quiet about it. A town like ours is never quiet about anything.

By Friday night it was all over. At the Kwik Trip in town, at the co-op, at the feed mill. Who had brought straw, and how many bales, and whose combine had made the swath that needed filling.

Nobody said much to Dan’s face. That is not how we do it here.

But the man at the elevator mentioned to Lance that Dan had come in Thursday night with a load, and that he had not said ten words, and that the men in line had not said ten words back to him.

That is a kind of consequence, in a town of eleven hundred. Being the man that everybody knows about and nobody brings up. I did not wish it on him. But I did not take it off him, either.