The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

The cut hay lay in rows behind him, sweet smelling in the cold air.

While he mowed, I walked up to the road. There were fourteen cars now.

A man in a ball cap was standing by a pickup with two boys in the bed, and he looked at me like he was trying to decide if I was somebody.

“Are you folks closed?” he asked. “We drove up from Westminster. Sign says closed.”

“We are not closed,” I said. “We’re open. We’re just opening a little late, and we’re coming in a different way this morning. Give us about an hour.”

“What about that?” He nodded at the blue truck.

I looked at Darla’s truck. I could have said a lot of things. I could have told him whose truck it was and why.

I could have told the whole line of cars, and they would have taken it home and told everybody they knew.

“That’s family business,” I said. “You’ll come in through the hayfield. My son’s mowing it now. There’ll be cider at the top for anybody who waits.”

He looked at me a long moment, and then he nodded and went back to tell his wife.

I watched him lean in the window, and I watched her look at the blue truck, and then at me, and then she smiled.

That is when Abe pulled up. Abe has the dairy farm a mile down the road.

He is seventy-four and still milks sixty cows twice a day, and he was coming back from the feed mill with his truck bed full of bags.

He stopped in the road and rolled his window down and took it all in. The line of cars.

The blue truck. The sign. The gap in the fence and the little red tractor going back and forth across the hayfield.

“Marisol,” he said. He knew Darla. He had known her since she was in a car seat. “How’s Reuben’s mother?”

“Not good, Abe. He’s with her.”

He nodded slowly, like that answered everything he needed to know. He did not ask a single question about the truck.

He pulled his pickup off on the shoulder, got out, and walked up to the head of the line of cars.

“Folks,” he said, loud enough for the whole line to hear. “You’ll go in through the opening there in a few minutes. Single file. I’ll wave you in. Keep it slow, there’s kids.”

And that was all. He stood out on the blacktop in his barn boots and his feed store jacket, and when somebody new pulled up behind the line, he walked back and told them the same thing.

I went down to the market stand. Lorrie was there already. She is my friend from church, and she has worked the money table on u-pick weekend for eleven years running.

She had the cash box out and was setting up the card reader.

“I saw,” she said, before I said anything. “I came the back way, past Abe’s. I saw the truck from the hill.”

“I know.”

“Do you want me to go up there?” Lorrie is a small woman, but she raised four boys, and there was something in her voice that made me believe she would.