The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

So I helped him onto the tractor.

He cut the whole forty acres in one long day, starting at seven in the morning and finishing just before supper. He cut right up to the edge of the waterway on both sides and lifted the sickle over it every time, careful as a man setting down a baby. You don’t mow a waterway the first year. Alma had told him that, and he listened.

The next morning, while the hay was curing in the windrows, I was at Dad’s kitchen table having coffee from the old thermos when we heard a tractor on the section road.

It was Quentin, pulling his round baler.

He didn’t call ahead. He didn’t come to the door. He just pulled in at the gate, raised a hand to us through the kitchen window, and started baling.

Dad watched him through the window for a long time. Then he picked up his cup and his cane and went out on the porch, and I went with him, and we sat in the shade and watched Quentin make bales out of Dad’s hay.

“Did you ask him?” I said.

“No,” Dad said. “I figured he might.”

Quentin baled the whole field. Ninety-one bales, the most that field had made in ten years, because the flood had laid down a little new silt in places and the hay had come in thick on it.

When he finished, he pulled up by the porch and climbed down off the tractor, sweaty and covered in chaff. He didn’t come up the steps.

“I’ll haul them in for you next week,” he said.

“What do I owe you?” Dad said.

Quentin shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “You don’t owe me a thing, Leroy.” And he climbed back up and drove home.

That was two years ago. The native grass in the waterway is waist-high now in late summer, thick and blue-green and rooted down so deep you couldn’t pull a clump of it with a tractor. Meadowlarks nest in it. Dad says he likes to watch them.

He doesn’t cut the field himself anymore. Last summer his hip finally said no, and he let me run the swather while he rode along in the cab with his cane between his knees, telling me I was going too fast.

Quentin still bales it. Dad still doesn’t ask him to. He just shows up.

Marcy and I have Sunday dinner at Dad’s every week now, all of us. Quentin carves the roast. He’s not a bad man. I never said he was. He was a man behind on his payments who saw an open door, and he walked through it, and then he walked back out.

Some people don’t. He did. I give him that.

I still have the D6. It’s sitting behind my house under its tarp, with the cracked seat I never did fix. The neighbors in town still think I’m a little touched.

Every once in a while, I drive out to Dad’s and walk the waterway. Nine hundred feet, north fence to the draw. I walk it slow, the way Alma did that Thursday, the way her husband must have when he staked it in 1961.

And when I get to the spot about halfway down, where Dad pressed the dirt with the toe of his boot that Saturday morning, I stop.

Sometimes I press it down with mine.

It still holds.