The Gully in Dad’s Hayfield

He walked over to the flatbed by the gate, picked up a square bale by the twine, and carried it out to the line where Bud and Doyle were working. He set it down, pulled out his pocketknife, cut the twine, and started shaking straw.

Nobody said a word to him. Bud moved over about three feet to make room. Doyle handed him a pair of gloves out of his own back pocket.

Quentin spread straw with them until almost eleven o’clock. He didn’t look at me once. I didn’t look at him much either, to tell the truth. It wasn’t about me.

Marcy came out at noon with sandwiches and a jug of iced tea, and when she saw her husband in the straw line with his shirt soaked through, she stopped dead at the gate. Then she came over to the dozer where I was sitting on the track, and she sat down beside me.

“Did you know he was going to do that?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“Not a word.”

She looked out at the field for a long time. Then she leaned her shoulder against mine, the way she used to when we were girls on the school bus.

“Thank you,” she said. “For not saying anything.”

Dad said grace over the sandwiches, standing at the tailgate with his hat in his hand. It was short. He thanked the Lord for rain, even this rain, and for neighbors, and for daughters. Then he said amen and handed Quentin the first sandwich.

It had too much mustard on it. Quentin ate the whole thing.

Every day that summer, Quentin drove the section road past the south hayfield. Every day, he looked at it. You couldn’t help but look at it.

The oats came up in about eight days, a bright green stripe down the middle of the field. By the middle of June they were a foot tall and waving, and underneath them, if you got down on your knees, you could see the native grass coming, tiny and stubborn and green.

We had two more hard rains in June, an inch and a half one week and almost two inches the next. Both times I drove out the next morning and walked that waterway end to end, looking for the first sign of a cut.

The water had run right down it, in a wide, flat sheet, over the grass and the straw. It had laid the oats over in one direction like combed hair. It hadn’t moved a teaspoon of dirt.

Alma rode out with me after the second rain. She stood at the bottom by the draw and looked up the waterway at the combed-down oats, and she laughed out loud.

“My husband would have liked you,” she said.

In early July, the hay on the south field was ready. It was brome and some native grass and a little alfalfa that had come in on its own over the years, and it stood thick and green on either side of the new waterway, which was waving with oats.

Dad cut it himself.

I tried to talk him out of it. He’s seventy-six, with a cane, and his hip isn’t what it was. He told me he’d cut that field the summer he got married and the summer I was born, and he was going to cut it this summer too, and I could either help him onto the tractor or get out of his way.