The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

Then the posts. Most were wood, set back when Reuben was in high school.

You chain the post puller around the base, set the foot on the ground, and work the handle. Some came easy. Some did not.

About half past eight, the first cars started coming. I heard them before I saw them, tires on the blacktop slowing down.

A minivan stopped at the lane, sat there with its blinker going, and then a second car pulled in behind it.

From where I stood I could see the people in the minivan reading the sign. I could see the little arms in the back seat.

Then the van backed out, carefully, and pulled off on the shoulder to wait, and the car behind did the same.

By a quarter to nine there were seven cars lined up along the road. Then eleven.

People were getting out and standing beside their cars with their arms crossed, looking at the truck and the sign and then at each other.

Darla never got out. I could see the back of her head through the cab window. She had turned the radio on.

I could hear it faintly across the field, a country station, some man singing about a pickup truck, of all things.

Peyton came down to my end. He was sweating already, his curly dark hair stuck to his forehead. He looked at the cars, and then at me, and then at the truck.

“Mom,” he said. “People are going to leave.”

“Some will,” I said. “Go get the tractor.”

He went off at a run. I kept working on the post in front of me, the last stubborn one at my end, rocking it back and forth with the puller, and I said a prayer while I did it. It was not a fancy prayer.

I said, Lord, I don’t want to hate her. Please don’t let me hate her today. And please let Mom go easy, if she has to go, with her boy holding her hand.

Behind me I heard the tractor start up. It is a little red tractor, older than Peyton, with a mower on the back that we use for the aisles between the trees.

It sounded like a sewing machine next to the big one, but it was what we had.

Peyton drove it down through the hay and stopped right behind me, at the opening in the fence, and dropped the mower.

He sat there with the engine idling, waiting on me and that last post.

I put my weight on it one more time and looked up toward the road at all those cars waiting in the sun.

The post came loose all at once, the way they do, and I nearly sat down in the hay.

I dragged the post clear and tossed it on the pile.

Then I looked back at Peyton and nodded, and he eased the clutch out and started across the hayfield toward the market stand.

He mowed it straight. I want that on the record.

His father had taught him to pick a mark on the far side and never take his eyes off it, and he picked the corner post of the market stand and drove right at it.

When he got to the stand he swung wide, came around, and mowed back the other way, doubling the width so two cars could pass.