The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

Saturday morning the sun came up bright over the Flint Hills, with a clean blue sky and no wind to speak of. It was the kind of late-spring morning you’d order from a catalog if you could.

I was in the field at daylight with a borrowed broadcast seeder on the back of Dad’s little utility tractor. I seeded the whole strip, oats first and then the native mix, crossing it twice so it would come in even.

The plan was to cover it with straw next. Straw mulch keeps the seed from washing, keeps the ground damp, and keeps the birds from eating half your money. I’d bought thirty square bales from a man up by the county line, and they were stacked on Dad’s flatbed by the gate.

I figured I’d be spreading straw by myself until noon.

I was wrong.

At about seven thirty, Bud’s pickup came down the section road and turned in at the gate. Right behind him was Doyle, from three miles down the road, who used to buy Dad’s extra hay when his cows ran short. Neither one of them said much. They got out in their caps, pulled on gloves, and started breaking open bales.

Nobody called them. I want that to be clear. I didn’t call a single soul.

That’s how it works out here. Somebody sees a dozer in a field all week, and somebody sees an old man on a tailgate, and somebody hears from somebody at the elevator, and by Saturday morning there are men in caps spreading straw off square bales in a field that isn’t theirs.

An hour later a third pickup pulled in. It was a young fellow I didn’t know well, a son of one of the families from church, and he had two kids in the cab who spent the morning chasing grasshoppers and getting in the way. Nobody minded.

I climbed up and stood on the dozer track, the D6 parked off to the side of the strip, and I just watched for a minute. My red work shirt was soaked through at the shoulders already. My cap was full of dust. I didn’t care.

The straw went down across that brown dirt in a gold sheet, thick enough to shade the seed and thin enough to let it through. The men worked in a line, walking backward, shaking the flakes loose by hand and letting them fall.

Dad was on his tailgate. He’d been there since six, with the thermos, watching.

Around nine, he got down. I saw him do it, slow, the way he does now, one foot and then the cane and then the other foot. He walked across the grass toward the new strip of dirt.

He didn’t walk out onto it. He stopped right at the edge, where the green hay met the brown dirt and the straw.

And then he reached out with one boot, and pressed the dirt down with the toe of it.

He pressed once. Then again, a little to the side. Testing it. Like Mom used to press the top of a pie with one finger to see if it was done.

The dirt held. It was firm and damp and packed, and it didn’t give at all.

Dad stood there a long minute with his boot on it. Then he looked up and found me standing on the dozer track, and he nodded once.

That’s all. Just once.