The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

The wagon

Dan ran that wagon from a little after five until almost ten o’clock. I stopped counting the trips at twenty-five.

He went slow along the field road, the wagon swaying, kids hanging off the bale seats and shrieking at the dark.

Reid rode up front with him on every trip, standing in the cab beside the seat, holding the grab bar like he had been born there.

Hope rode the first three and then went to work at the cider table, because she is my daughter.

Every time the wagon came back across the road, Dan would stop at the edge of the parking area and the next load of families would climb on.

People said thank you to him. Some of them said it carefully, the way you do when you are not sure yet.

Bill Hanson came over and shook his hand. So did the man from the feed mill. I watched it the way you watch a calf stand up for the first time, not wanting to breathe on it.

About eight o’clock Leonard Kowalski stood up out of his lawn chair and asked to ride the wagon.

Dan got down and helped him up the step himself, one hand under his elbow, and set him on the front bale, closest to the tractor.

I saw Leonard lean forward and say something to Dan. I do not know what it was. Dan nodded, and did not say anything, and drove a little slower on that trip than on any of the others.

Two hundred and forty kids

We let in two hundred and forty-one children that night. One came in without a ticket and Julie pretended not to see.

The maze held up. Not one wall came down, though a few of the high school boys tested it.

Kids got lost in the straw walls and found again. Somebody’s grandpa got lost and had to be found by a five-year-old dressed as a ladybug.

The pumpkins glowed at the dead ends. The cheese curds were gone by seven.

At about nine I walked out to the center of the maze alone, where we had put a little scarecrow on a stool.

I stood there and looked up at the walls of standing corn on both sides of the swath, black against the stars, and the bales running between them.

It was smaller than the maze we cut in June. It was nothing like the drawing I had made in April on graph paper at my kitchen counter.

It was better than that drawing. Half the township was in those walls.

I thought about Leonard’s bales, the ones his wife had helped put up.

I had set them myself near the center, on the last turn before the scarecrow, so that every kid who made it through would walk past them.