The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

Everybody in the lot heard it. It had been sitting quiet so long that the sound of it carried across the whole field. People stopped what they were doing and turned to look.

The blue truck sat there a moment with the engine running. Then the backup lights came on, and it backed out of the lane slowly, onto the shoulder, and stopped.

Darla sat there with both hands on the wheel. She was looking down the old lane, toward the barn and the trees, and for a second I thought she might pull in.

I thought she might drive right down to the stand.

She did not. She turned the wheel and pulled out onto the township road, heading west, toward Gettysburg, toward the hospice house where her brother was sitting with an empty chair beside him.

Reuben called me that night at a quarter past seven.

He said Darla had walked into their mother’s room at ten minutes to five, without a word, and sat down in the chair, and taken their mother’s other hand.

He said their mother opened her eyes one more time, around six, and looked at the two of them, and smiled.

He said she did not say anything, but she did not need to. She went the next morning a little after eight, with both her children beside her.

I never did tell Reuben about the truck until after the funeral.

When I finally did, sitting at our kitchen table on a gray Wednesday, he put his face in his hands for a long time. When he looked up, he was not angry.

“She was there,” he said. “At the end. She came.”

“She came,” I said.

That was enough for both of us. It still is. Darla comes to Sunday dinner now, once a month or so.

She and Reuben do not talk about the land. She brought Peyton a card on his seventeenth birthday with twenty dollars in it.

Lorrie’s count that Saturday came to two hundred and six cars.

The cash box and the card reader came to six thousand, one hundred and forty dollars, the best first Saturday we had ever had. It carried us through the winter, and then some.

We put the fence back up the next week. Peyton and I did it together on a Tuesday afternoon, stretching the old woven wire back onto new posts.

Except we left a gate in it this time, a good steel one, right at the hay crossing.

Peyton hung the gate himself, and he got it plumb on the first try.

I asked him why he wanted a gate there, since we had the lane, and he shrugged in that way his father does.

“A place ought to have more than one way in,” he said.

I think about that Saturday every October now, when the trees come in heavy and the cars start lining up along the road.

I think about the little girl in the pink jacket, and Abe in the road, and Lorrie’s tally marks.

But mostly what I see is that blue truck backing out onto the shoulder in the late afternoon sun and turning west toward Gettysburg, toward her mother, toward the chair her brother had been saving all day.

The sign was still hanging over the lane when she pulled out.