The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

“Thank you,” I said. “We’ll be here.”

That is the thing about a place like this. Six thousand dollars is a lot of money to us, but it is not what keeps you going.

What keeps you going is a woman at the money table saying we’ll be back next year.

At two o’clock Reuben called. I walked out behind the barn to take it, where nobody could see my face.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” he said. His voice sounded like it had been scraped thin. “The nurse says her breathing’s changed. It won’t be long now. Tonight, maybe. Tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey.”

“How’s opening day?” he asked. “Did you get many?”

I stood there behind the barn with the phone against my ear and looked out at the hayfield.

I could see the new lane running across it, and the cars coming down it, and the blue truck at the end of the old lane.

“We got a lot,” I said. “It’s a good day. The weather held. Peyton’s running the wagon, and Lorrie’s out of pies already.”

“That’s good,” he said, and I could hear him smile. “That’s real good. Dad always said the first Saturday tells you the winter.”

I did not tell him about the truck. I have thought about that since, whether I should have.

But he had enough in his hands, and I decided right there that he would hear it from me later, sitting at our own kitchen table, when it was all over.

“Reuben,” I said. “Has Darla come?”

He was quiet a long time. “No,” he said. “Not yet. I keep thinking she will.”

“She might,” I said. “Keep the chair for her.”

“I’m keeping it,” he said.

After we hung up, I stood behind the barn a while longer.

Then I wiped my face with the sleeve of my green coat and went back to the money table, where there were people waiting.

At three o’clock the rush started to thin. It always does, with the light slanting low and families thinking about supper and the drive home.

Lorrie’s tally sheet had two full pages of bundles on it.

Abe came down from the road for the first time all day.

He had a cup of cider in one hand and a slice of pie Lorrie had saved back for him in the other.

“Truck’s still there,” he said, sitting down on a hay bale beside the stand.

“I know.”

“She drank the cider,” he said. “I saw her pick it up off the dash about one o’clock. Sat there with it a long time first.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything. Abe ate his pie and watched the trees. After a while he said, “Her daddy was a stubborn man too. You remember the year he wouldn’t sell to the packing house?”

“Reuben told me about it.”

“He sat on four hundred bushels for a month over a quarter a bushel. Darla’s just like him. Always was.” He finished his pie. “But he always came around. It just took him till the last minute.”

At four o’clock, I was helping a man load three bags of apples into his trunk when I heard an engine start up at the top of the old lane.