The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

I stopped there on my way home Monday evening, while it was still light. She was out in her garden in a straw hat, pulling weeds from between her onion rows.

“Stacia Wendling,” she said, before I was halfway across the yard. “You’re here about Leroy’s south field.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She straightened up slow, one hand on her back. “My husband built a waterway through that field in 1961,” she said. “A good one. Grassed. Wide and shallow, right down that low line from the north fence to the draw.”

I stood there with my mouth open. “There’s no waterway there now.”

“No,” she said. “There isn’t. Somebody farmed it flat. Probably your granddad, in the seventies, when everybody was plowing fence row to fence row. He used to fuss about it at supper.”

The water hadn’t cut a new path at all. It had simply gone home.

“Would you ride out there with me in the morning?” I asked her. “And show me where it ran?”

Alma took off her gloves and laid them on the fence post. “I’ll be ready at seven,” she said. “Bring coffee.”

Bud pulled into my place at six Tuesday morning, with the first sun on the hills. We chained the D6 down on his lowboy together, the same way he’d chained down a thousand machines, checking every binder twice.

He drove the eleven miles to Dad’s at forty-five miles an hour, with me following in my pickup with the flashers on. The sun climbed higher while we were on the blacktop, and it lit the whole valley gold.

Dad was standing in the yard when we pulled in. He had his cane in one hand and his coffee in the other, and he watched Bud back that lowboy up to the field gate with a look on his face I couldn’t read.

“What’s all this?” he said.

“That’s my dozer, Dad.”

“I know what it is.”

I walked over to him. “You told Quentin you’d think on it,” I said. “I’m asking you to think on it one more week. That’s all. One week. Then you sell him whatever you want, and I’ll never say a word.”

He looked at me. He looked at the D6 coming down the ramps, and Bud walking beside the tracks with one hand up, guiding me.

“One week,” Dad said.

I picked up Alma at seven. She came out of her house in the same straw hat with a folded paper in her hand. It was one of her husband’s old field maps, the lines drawn in pencil, soft from being folded and unfolded for sixty years.

We drove out the section road and through Dad’s gate and right to the edge of the gully. Alma got out of the pickup by herself, waving off my hand. She walked up the north fence line, slow and sure, studying the ground.

“There,” she said, and pointed with the folded map. “You see how the ground falls, just a little, off that pasture? He started it right there, about forty feet wide. Then it ran down this low line, wide and flat like a saucer, all the way to the draw.”

“Forty feet wide,” I said.

“Forty at the top, narrowing some at the bottom. No deeper than your knee in the middle. Grass all the way across. The water ran over the grass in a sheet instead of tearing at bare dirt. That’s the whole secret, Stacia. You don’t fight water. You give it a road.”