The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

I stood beside her and looked down the field and I could see it. I could see exactly where her husband had walked in 1961, staking his line.

I started on the dozer at eight o’clock Tuesday morning.

The gully was about nine hundred feet long. At its worst it was close to seven feet deep and twelve wide, with straight walls that were still caving in where the water had undercut them.

You can’t just shove dirt in a hole like that and walk away. Loose fill settles, and the next hard rain finds the soft spot and opens it right back up. You have to put the dirt back in layers, called lifts, and pack each one before you start the next.

So that’s what I did. I’d cut down from the high ground on each side, push a lift of dirt into the bottom of the gully, maybe eight or ten inches thick, and then walk the D6 back and forth over it until the tracks packed it hard.

Then the next lift. Then the next.

The ground was still damp from the flood, which was good for packing. Dry dirt won’t pack, and wet dirt turns to grease. This was right in between, and I said a little thank-you every time the tracks left a clean print.

Dad sat on the tailgate of his pickup at the edge of the field all morning. He had a lawn chair in the truck bed and he never once used it. He sat on the tailgate with his cane across his knees and watched every pass I made.

Around ten he climbed down and walked to the edge of the field and held up the old thermos. I shut the machine down and climbed off.

It was the same thermos. The one he used to carry to the hayfield when I was nine years old and riding the fender of his tractor, before anybody worried about such things.

“You still have this,” I said.

“Your mother would have thrown it out,” he said. “I hid it in the shop.”

The coffee was terrible, the way it always was. Black, boiled, strong enough to strip paint. I drank every drop.

Quentin drove past on the section road that first morning around nine. I saw his pickup slow down at the gate. I saw his head turn.

He didn’t stop.

He drove past again at noon, coming back from town with a load of something in the bed. He slowed down again. He didn’t stop again.

By Wednesday it had become a kind of routine. Quentin drove that section road every morning and every evening to check cattle on a rented pasture south of Dad’s, and every time he passed the field, the pickup slowed to a crawl. I could feel him looking.

I never waved. I never stared. I kept the blade down and kept working.

Marcy called me Wednesday evening. I’d just shut the dozer down for the day and was sitting on the track in the low sun, eating a sandwich Dad had made me, which had too much mustard and no lettuce at all.

“Stace,” she said. “What are you doing out there?”

“Filling the gully.”

“You know what I mean.”