The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

I set the sandwich down on my knee. “I’m fixing Dad’s field, Marcy. That’s all I’m doing.”

She was quiet a long time. I could hear her kitchen faucet running, and then I heard her shut it off.

“He’s not a bad man,” she said. “Quentin. I know how it looked. He’s just so far behind. You don’t know how far.”

“I know,” I said. And I did, a little. “I’m not doing this to him, Marcy. I’m doing it for Dad. That’s the whole of it.”

“Dad could use the money,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.

“Dad could use his field,” I said.

She didn’t argue. After a while she said, “Is he eating?”

“He’s making me sandwiches.”

Marcy laughed, a little wet. “With too much mustard?”

“Way too much.”

“Tell him I love him,” she said, and hung up before I could say anything else.

By Thursday noon, the gully was gone.

I had pushed the last lift into the deep end down by the draw and packed it until the tracks barely marked it. Where there had been a raw brown wound through the middle of the hay, there was now a long strip of packed brown dirt, level with the field on both sides.

But level wasn’t what I wanted. Level was what had been there before the flood, the flat field somebody had plowed over the old waterway. Level was what had failed.

So Thursday afternoon I started shaping.

I took Alma’s line and her husband’s old map, and I set grade stakes every fifty feet down that strip. Then I cut it down into a wide, shallow saucer, forty feet across at the top, sloping gently down to a flat bottom maybe a foot and a half below the field on either side.

Alma came out at three o’clock. Bud brought her in his pickup. She stood at the north fence with her hands folded on top of her cane and watched me make the last pass down the line.

When I shut the machine down, she walked the whole length of it. Nine hundred feet. It took her twenty minutes, and she wouldn’t let either of us help.

At the bottom, by the draw, she turned around and looked back up the waterway toward the north fence.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s his waterway. That’s exactly it.”

She pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything else for a while. Bud took his cap off and looked at the ground. Dad, on his tailgate up by the gate, lifted one hand.

A waterway is just a dirt ditch until the grass takes. And it had to take fast, because if a hard rain came before the roots got down, all that bare dirt would wash right out of it.

Mid-May is late for cool-season grass like brome in Kansas. So I went with what the extension office in town recommended over the phone: oats for a quick nurse crop, to hold the dirt in the first few weeks, and a native mix underneath it, switchgrass and big bluestem and a little sideoats grama, the grasses that grew in these hills before anybody ever plowed them.

The seed cost me a little over four hundred dollars at the co-op in town. The girl at the counter asked what it was for, and when I told her, she knocked off the tax. I didn’t ask her to.