The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

I thought about a deputy pulling in with his lights on, and Darla refusing, and a tow truck coming out from Gettysburg on a Saturday.

I thought about the cars full of families watching all that from the road.

And I thought about somebody, sooner or later, saying it out loud in that hospice room: your daughter got arrested at the orchard today.

You do not do that to a dying woman. You do not do it to your husband.

You do not call the sheriff on your husband’s sister while his mother is dying. You find another way in.

“No sheriff,” I said. “Get your boots on. And get the fence pliers out of the shop.”

Peyton looked at me a long second, and then I saw him understand, because he had grown up on this place too. “The hay crossing,” he said.

“The hay crossing.”

Let me explain what that meant. Our lane comes off the township road at the south corner.

Along the road, running north from the lane, there is a woven wire fence, and behind it is our hayfield, about eleven acres.

Back when Reuben’s father was alive, before he put the fence up, he used to pull hay wagons straight out of that field onto the road at a spot where the shoulder runs flat.

There is no ditch there. The ground is level with the blacktop.

From that spot, if you cut straight across the hayfield, you come out at the top of the orchard by the market stand, where we park the cars.

It is maybe four hundred yards. The field had its second cutting in September and had grown back about six inches.

It had not rained in nine days. The ground was hard and dry. A mowed lane across a dry hayfield will carry cars all day long.

My father-in-law used to say a hayfield in October was better road than half the roads in the county.

The only thing in the way was sixty feet of fence.

We went out to the shop. Peyton got the fence pliers, the post puller and a five-gallon bucket for the staples.

I put on my old green barn coat, the one with the torn pocket, because the morning still had a bite to it.

The sun was just clearing the ridge behind the orchard when we got to the fence.

It was a clear October morning, the kind with no wind at all, and the apple trees down the slope were so heavy with red fruit the limbs bowed.

I want you to see it the way I saw it, because it is the picture I carry. The trees loaded and red.

The frost burning off the hayfield. And up at the corner, that blue truck sitting across our lane under her sign.

Peyton started at the north end and I started at the south. You pull the staples first, working the claw of the pliers under each one and prying it out of the post.

There are four or five staples on every post, and the old ones fight you.

The wire was old woven wire, the kind with the squares smaller at the bottom.

Once the staples were out, Peyton walked it back and rolled it on itself, loose, so we could stand it up again in a week.