The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

Here’s what I knew. If I called Quentin and told him what I thought of him, he would call Marcy, and Marcy would call Dad, and Dad would end up in the middle of his two girls fighting over him. He would feel like a burden. He would feel like the reason his family was coming apart.

And Dad, being Dad, might sell Quentin the field just to make the fighting stop.

Arguing with my sister’s husband would only make Dad feel like a burden. Dirt could answer faster than words.

I’d been looking at that gully for three days. I had a pretty good idea what it would take. What I didn’t have was time, a way to get my machine out there, or anybody who knew why the water had chosen that line through the field in the first place.

So I went to work on all three.

The dozer I run for the highway crew belongs to the contractor. I can’t take it home, and I wouldn’t ask. But I have my own.

Nine years ago the county sold off some old equipment at auction, and I bought a Caterpillar D6 that was older than I was. It had a cracked seat and a sticky steering clutch and about eleven thousand hours on it. I paid more than I should have and spent two winters making it right.

But the D6 can’t go down the highway on its own tracks, and I don’t own a trailer big enough to haul it. For that, I needed Bud Kasselman.

Bud is seventy. He hauled cattle and equipment for forty years and still keeps a lowboy trailer and an old Peterbilt in his machine shed, because he says he can’t sleep at night without them. He lives four miles north of Dad.

I drove over that afternoon. Bud was in his shop with the big door open, greasing a mower, and he wiped his hands on a red rag before he shook mine.

“I heard about your dad’s field,” he said. “Heard about the other thing too.”

I didn’t ask how. Out here, you don’t.

“I need my D6 out there,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, if you can. I’ll pay your fuel and your time.”

Bud looked at me for a long minute. Then he folded the rag and put it in his back pocket.

“I’ll be at your place at sunup,” he said. “And you’ll pay me nothing, and you’ll quit asking.”

I called my crew boss from Bud’s yard. I had three weeks of vacation built up and had not taken a day of it since Christmas. I told him I needed this week, starting tomorrow, for my dad. He told me to take it and not to hurry back.

The third thing I needed was to understand the water.

A gully doesn’t just happen anywhere. Water goes where it wants to go, and if you fill a gully without knowing why the water chose that line, it will cut the same line next spring. I’ve seen it happen on road ditches more times than I can count.

The person who knew that field better than anyone alive, other than Dad, was Alma Rutledge.

Alma is eighty-eight. Her husband worked for the soil conservation office in this county for thirty-one years, back when they still drove out to every farm and walked the ground with the farmer. He laid out half the terraces in Chase County. He died in 1998, and Alma still lives on their little place on the blacktop.