A Flood Destroyed My 76-Year-Old Dad’s Best Hayfield, but When My Brother-in-Law Tried to Buy It Cheap, I Stepped In
The rain came through on a Thursday night in the middle of May,
the kind of storm the Flint Hills get maybe once in ten years. It rolled in from the southwest around nine o’clock with lightning so steady you could have read a newspaper by it, and then it simply sat over Chase County and emptied itself. I lay awake in my house in Cottonwood Falls listening to it hammer the roof, and I thought about my father alone in the farmhouse eleven miles south, and I thought about his hay.
By morning the rain gauge on Dad’s porch post read six inches, and the creek behind his barn had climbed out of its banks and spread across the bottom like a brown lake. I drove out at seven in my county truck, splashing through water on the low places of the section road, and found his pickup gone from the yard. The house was empty. His coffee cup was still warm on the kitchen counter beside the
radio, which was turned to the farm report out of Emporia, the way it has been every morning of my life.
I found him at the edge of his south hayfield a little before noon. He was standing at the fence line with his cane planted in the mud and his feed cap pushed back, perfectly still, the way he stands when a cow is calving and there’s nothing to do yet but watch. He didn’t turn around when I pulled up. I got out and
walked over and stood beside him, and then I saw what he was looking at.
A gully ran right through the middle of the field. It started at the north fence, where the ground slopes down from the neighboring quarter, and it cut across forty acres of the best brome and alfalfa in the county in a long, crooked line toward the creek. It was raw brown dirt with roots hanging out of the sides
like torn threads, and in the middle, where the slope was steepest, it was deep enough to hide a pickup truck. The water had carved it in one night.
Dad didn’t say a word. He just looked at it for a long time, and I stood beside him and didn’t say anything either, because in our family you don’t talk while a man is taking something in. After a while a
meadowlark landed on the fence post next to him and sang, and Dad finally moved. He reached out with the tip of his cane and touched the lip of the gully where the sod hung over the edge, and a chunk of it broke loose and fell in.
“Fifty years,” he said quietly. “I’ve cut this field fifty years.”
Chapter Two: The Best Ground
My father’s name is Leroy Haskell, and he is seventy-six years old. He was born in the white farmhouse at the end of the lane, in the front bedroom, the same year his father bought this place with a loan from the Federal Land Bank and a handshake. He has run cattle on it his whole life, and for most of that life he has put up hay for those cattle off the same forty acres on the south side, the field we always just called
the south hay.
It is the best hay ground in Chase County. Everybody says so, and Dad will tell you so if you give him half a chance. The soil is deep and dark there, washed down off the hills over ten thousand years, and the brome comes up thick and green in April and the alfalfa underneath it grows like it means it. In a good year, Dad would put up two cuttings off those forty acres, eighteen hundred small square bales the first
time and twelve hundred the second, and every one of them went into the loft of the big red barn to carry his cows through the winter.
When I was nine, he started taking me with him to the hayfield. I rode on the hay rack behind the baler while he drove the old Farmall, and in the afternoon we’d stop under the cottonwood at the edge of the
field and he’d pour me coffee out of his green Stanley thermos, mostly milk and sugar, in the little cup that screwed onto the top. I thought I was the most grown-up girl in Kansas. I still remember the smell of fresh-cut alfalfa and diesel and that sweet, terrible coffee.
My mother died nine years ago, of a stroke, at sixty-four. After that, it was just Dad on the place, and the cows, and the south hay. My sister Joanie lives three miles north with her husband and their two boys,
and I live in town, and between the two of us we look in on him most days. He doesn’t make it easy. He still gets up at five and feeds his cows and checks his water tanks, and when he fell off the stack wagon three summers ago and busted his hip, he was back out in the pasture with a walker inside of six weeks.
He walks with a cane now. He doesn’t run the baler anymore; for the last four years he’s hired the hay put up by a custom outfit out of Strong City, and he rides along in his pickup to watch. But that field is
still the thing he loves best in the world after his family. I know that because the week after Mom’s funeral, when none of us could get him to eat or talk, I found him sitting on his tailgate at the edge of the south hay at sunset, just looking at it, and that was the first evening he came home and ate supper.
I run a dozer for the Kansas Department of Transportation. I’ve done it for twenty-two years, mostly on
highway jobs, building road shoulders and cutting ditches and cleaning up after washouts like the one that had just torn through my father’s field. I know dirt the way some people know horses. I know how it moves and how it settles and how water finds every weakness in it, and standing beside Dad that Friday, I knew one thing for certain. That gully could be fixed.
Chapter Three: At the Fence
My sister’s husband, Quentin Ames, farms the ground next door. He’s forty-eight, a big, friendly man with a sunburned neck and a laugh you can hear across a sale barn, and he’s farmed in Chase County his whole life. He married Joanie when they were both twenty-two, and for most of those years he and Dad got along fine. Quentin helped Dad work cattle every spring, and Dad lent Quentin his stock trailer whenever he needed it, which was often.
But Quentin has been running hard the last few years. He rents more land every year, three thousand acres now between his own and what he leases, and he’s bought bigger machinery to cover it. There’s a combine payment, a planter payment, and a new tractor with a cab like an airplane cockpit. Joanie doesn’t talk about money much, but she told me last Christmas, after a glass of wine, that the payments on his equipment came to more than they used to spend on everything in a year.
He came over on Monday morning, three days after the flood. I was at Dad’s place because I’d taken the day off to help him check fence where the water had torn it out along the creek, and we were standing in the yard by the stock tank when Quentin’s pickup came up the lane. He got out and walked over to the yard fence and leaned his forearms on the top wire, the way men do out here when they have something to say and don’t want to come all the way in.
“Leroy,” he said. “Stacy.” He nodded to us both and looked off toward the south hay for a minute, though you couldn’t see it from the yard. “That field’s done, Leroy. I drove by it yesterday. That gully’s going to cost you more to fix than the ground is worth, and it’ll just wash out again the next big rain.”
Dad didn’t say anything. He was standing with both hands on the top of his cane.
“I’ll take the forty off your hands,” Quentin said. “Twelve hundred an acre. Cash. I can have the bank write
it up this week, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.” He smiled, kind of sheepish. “Keep it in the family, you know. Joanie’d like that.”
Twelve hundred an acre is forty-eight thousand dollars. I knew, because I’d looked it up the week before for no reason except curiosity, that good hay ground in Chase County was selling for better than three thousand an acre that spring, and the south hay wasn’t just good ground. Even with a gully in it, it was
worth twice what he was offering, maybe more. And I knew why he wanted it. That forty joined his rented ground on the north and the west, and with it, he could farm straight through.
I understood the payments. I understood that he was running scared. I’ve seen what a bad year does to a farmer who’s borrowed heavy. But it didn’t make it right to shop an old man’s field while the mud was still wet.
“I’ll think on it,” Dad said.
Quentin nodded like that was more than he’d hoped for. He tapped the fence wire twice with his knuckles, said he’d call later in the week, and drove off down the lane. Dad watched his truck go, and then he turned and walked slowly back to the house without saying anything to me, and I stood in the yard by the stock tank and felt something cold settle in my stomach.
He’d think on it. That scared me more than the gully did. In fifty years I had never once heard my father say he would think about selling a single acre of that place.
That evening I sat at Dad’s kitchen table while he heated up a can of chili, and I tried to find a way to say it. I could tell him Quentin was lowballing him. I could call Joanie and tell her what her husband had done. I could drive over to Quentin’s shop and have it out with him. But every one of those roads ended
with Dad in the middle, watching his children fight over him and his land, feeling like a burden and an old man. Arguing with my sister’s husband would only make Dad feel like the problem. Dirt could answer faster than words.
Chapter Four: The Old Cat
I own an old Caterpillar D6 dozer. I bought it eight years ago at a Butler County sale for twenty-one
thousand dollars, a 1979 model with a rebuilt engine and a blade that had moved half the dirt in southern Kansas. I keep it on a lot behind my house in Cottonwood Falls and use it for side work on weekends, cleaning out ponds and pushing up brush piles and building the occasional terrace for farmers who can’t get a contractor to come out for a small job. It’s yellow under all the rust, and it smokes when it starts, and I love it more than any vehicle I’ve ever owned.
Tuesday morning I called my foreman at KDOT and put in for a week of vacation. He asked me if everything was all right, and I told him my dad’s hayfield washed out, and he didn’t ask anything else. He grew up on a farm in Marion County. He said take two weeks if I needed them.
Then I called Bud Kasselman. Bud is sixty-eight and runs a little trucking outfit out of Strong City, hauling grain and cattle and the occasional piece of equipment on an old Peterbilt with a lowboy trailer. He’s
known Dad since they were boys at Chase County High School, and he’s hauled my dozer for me a dozen times. I told him what I needed and asked what it would cost.
“Your daddy’s south hay?” Bud said. “The one with the gully?” Word gets around fast in a county with twenty-six hundred people. “I’ll be at your place at sunup.”
He was there at five-forty Tuesday morning with the lowboy hitched and the headlights on. We chained
the D6 down in the half-dark, and he hauled it the eleven miles out to Dad’s place with me following in my pickup. When we unloaded it at the edge of the south hay, I asked Bud what I owed him for his diesel. He looked at me like I’d insulted his mother.
“Your daddy pulled my truck out of the creek with his tractor in 1986,” he said. “In a thunderstorm. In the middle of the night. He never took a dime.” He climbed back up in his cab. “I’ll come back for it when
you’re done.”
Dad came out of the house about the time Bud’s truck disappeared down the lane. He stood in the yard in his overalls and looked at the dozer sitting at the edge of his field, and then he looked at me.
“Stacy,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing your hayfield,” I said.
He looked at the dozer a long time. “Quentin says it’s not worth fixing.”
“Quentin’s wrong,” I said.
Chapter Five: Alma
Before I started the dozer, I drove into town and picked up Alma Rutledge.
Alma is eighty-eight years old and still lives by herself in a little stone house on Broadway in Cottonwood
Falls, three blocks from me. Her husband, Ted, was the county man for the Soil Conservation Service from 1955 until he retired in 1988, back when the government first started paying farmers to build terraces and grass waterways to stop the land from washing down the rivers. Ted Rutledge built half the conservation work in Chase County with his own hands and a transit, and Alma rode along with him on most of it. She knows more about how water moves across these hills than any engineer in Topeka.
I’d called her Monday night and asked if she’d look at the field with me. She said she’d be ready at six-thirty, and she was, sitting on her porch in a canvas jacket and a sun hat with her purse in her lap. I helped her into my pickup and we drove out together, and she didn’t say much on the way except to point out every pond and terrace along the road and tell me who built it and what year.
I drove the pickup right out into the hayfield along the north fence and parked at the top of the gully.
Alma sat in the passenger seat for a long time looking at it through the windshield. Then she asked me to help her out, and I came around and took her arm, and she stood at the edge of that raw brown cut with her hand on my sleeve.
“There,” she said, and pointed across the field with one thin finger. “That’s where the old grass waterway ran. Before somebody farmed it flat.”
I followed her finger. She was pointing straight down the line of the gully, from the north fence to the creek.
“Ted built a waterway right through here in 1961,” she said. “For Leroy’s daddy. Wide and shallow, maybe sixty feet across, seeded down to brome and switchgrass. It carried the water off that quarter up there,” she nodded toward the north fence and the ground above it, “and down to the creek without cutting anything.” She looked at the gully. “The water didn’t make a new path, Stacy. It just went back where it
always used to run. Somebody took away the grass that was holding it.”
I stood there with her on my arm and understood exactly what she meant. The water had remembered. When Dad reseeded this field in the early nineties, he must have worked the old waterway in with the rest, smoothing it out to make the haying easier, and for thirty years the sod had held it anyway. Then the big rain came.
But Alma wasn’t finished. She turned and looked north, past our fence, toward the quarter above it, the old Hadley place. Quentin had rented it for the last three years from the Hadley heirs in Wichita. It was bare and black and freshly planted to soybeans, with a long, raw notch cut through the middle of it where the flood had come through.
“Ted’s waterway started up there,” Alma said quietly. “On the Hadley ground. It ran all the way from that ridge down to your daddy’s creek. One long strip of grass.” She was quiet for a moment. “There was a grass waterway on that quarter for sixty years. I drove by it with Ted a hundred times.”
I looked at the bare black dirt on the Hadley quarter. There was no strip of grass. There was nothing at all except planted rows running straight across where the waterway should have been, and a fresh gully
cutting through them that led directly to the fence where my father’s field began.
“When did that come out?” I asked.
“Last fall,” Alma said. “I saw it from the road when my nephew drove me to church. Somebody worked it all up flat and planted right through it.” She shook her head. “Ted would have had a fit.”
Chapter Six: In Layers
So I didn’t just fill the hole.
That’s what a lot of people would have done. Push the dirt back in, smooth it over, call it fixed. And the next big rain, the water would come off the Hadley ground just the same and find the soft fill and cut it right back out, and probably worse. I’ve cleaned up a hundred washouts on Kansas highways, and I know
the difference between hiding a problem and fixing one.
I started the D6 at seven-fifteen Tuesday morning. It coughed and smoked and then caught, the way it always does, and I backed it to the top of the gully and dropped the blade. I pushed dirt from the high sides of the field down into the cut, a little at a time, in layers about eight inches thick. After each layer, I walked the tracks back and forth over it, packing it down with fifty thousand pounds of steel until it was
tight enough to hold. Then I’d push the next layer and pack that one.
It’s slow work. You can’t rush it. If you dump too much loose fill at once, it settles unevenly and the water finds the soft spots. So I pushed and packed and pushed and packed, lift after lift, and the gully slowly filled from the bottom up.
Then, as it came up near the top, I did what Ted Rutledge did in 1961. I didn’t bring it back up to the
level of the field. I shaped it wide and shallow, a broad swale about sixty feet across and maybe a foot and a half deep in the middle, with gentle sloping sides you could drive a hay rake across without noticing. A grass waterway. When the water came off the hill next time, it would spread out and slow down and run across grass instead of cutting into bare dirt.
Grass would hold it this time. That was the whole idea. You can’t stop water from running downhill. You
can only give it a place to run that it can’t tear up.
I worked three days on that machine, sunup to supper. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I’d climb up in the seat at six-thirty and climb down at seven in the evening, with my ears ringing and my back aching and dust in every crease of my face. I ate lunch sitting on the dozer track, a sandwich and an apple out of
a paper sack.
Dad sat on his tailgate and watched every pass. He’d back his pickup out to the edge of the field every morning after he fed his cows and drop the tailgate and sit on it with his cane across his knees. He never said much. He’d watch me push a load and pack it, push a load and pack it, and every so often he’d nod, the way he nods at the auction when a good calf sells for what it should.
At ten o’clock every morning and three every afternoon, he’d climb down off the tailgate and walk over to the dozer with something in his hand. He brought me coffee in the same green Stanley thermos he carried to the hayfield when I was nine. The paint had worn off around the handle, and there was a dent in the side from the time it fell off the hay rack in 1993, and the coffee was still mostly milk and sugar. I drank every drop.
Quentin drove by on the section road every morning. I’d see his pickup come over the hill from the north around seven-thirty, heading toward his shop. He slowed down when he got even with the south hay, every single time, and I could see his face turned toward the field through the side window. He never stopped. He’d slow down to about fifteen miles an hour and look at the dozer and the dirt and Dad on his tailgate, and then he’d speed up and go on.
My sister called once, on Wednesday night. I was sitting on Dad’s porch with my boots off and a glass of iced tea, too tired to drive home yet. Joanie didn’t say hello. She just said my name, the way she does when she’s upset, and I knew Quentin had told her about the offer, or about the dozer, or both.
“He’s not a bad man, Stace,” she said.
“I know he’s not,” I told her. I meant it. Quentin had been my brother-in-law for twenty-six years. He’d
taught my nephews to drive tractor and stood up at Mom’s funeral as a pallbearer. “I’m not doing this to him, Joanie. I’m doing it for Dad.”
She was quiet on the line for a long time. “He hasn’t been sleeping,” she said finally. “Since the rain. He gets up at two in the morning and sits in the shop.”
“I know how that is,” I said.
Chapter Seven: Saturday
Saturday the sun came up bright over the Flint Hills, the kind of clear May morning that makes you forget there was ever a storm. The big bluestem hills to the west were going green, and the meadowlarks were singing on every fence post, and the air smelled like wet ground and cut grass from somebody’s yard in the next section.
I’d finished the dirt work Friday evening just before dark. The gully was gone. In its place, running from
the north fence all the way down to the creek, was a long, shallow green-brown strip of packed dirt sixty feet wide, shaped as smooth as the inside of a bowl. It looked like it had always been there, like the field had just been waiting for it.
I seeded the strip at daylight. I used a broadcast seeder on the back of Dad’s old four-wheeler, a mix of oats for a quick cover crop and a native grass blend for the long haul. Switchgrass and big bluestem and
western wheatgrass, the same kind of mix Ted Rutledge would have used. The oats would come up in a week and hold the dirt through the summer while the native grasses got their roots down. By next spring, if the rain was kind, the waterway would be solid sod.
I was standing on the dozer track at eight o’clock looking at it, trying to figure out how I was going to get straw on it before the wind came up. You have to mulch a new seeding or the first hard rain washes the seed away. I had a few bales in my truck, but not nearly enough for a strip that long.
Then Bud and Doyle from down the road pulled in.
Nobody called them. I swear it. Bud came up the lane in his flatbed pickup with forty small square bales of wheat straw stacked on the back, and Doyle Fenstermacher, who runs cattle on the place south of Dad’s, was right behind him with another thirty in his stock trailer. They parked at the edge of the field and got out in their caps.
“Heard you might need some straw,” Bud said.
They started spreading straw by hand off the square bales, the old way, the way nobody does anymore. They’d cut the twine on a bale and break it apart into flakes and then shake the flakes out loose over the fresh seed, walking slowly down the waterway in a line. I climbed down off the dozer and started helping, and before long Doyle’s wife, Marcie, showed up with a cooler of sandwiches and her two teenage grandsons, and they started spreading too.
I stood on the dozer track for a minute and just watched. Five people walking down a strip of new dirt in the morning sun, shaking straw out of their hands like they were feeding chickens. Bud’s gray head and Doyle’s bad knee and Marcie’s grandsons laughing at each other. It looked like something from 1955.
Dad got up off the tailgate. He walked to the edge of the new dirt with his cane, slowly, the way he walks everywhere now, testing every step. He stopped right at the edge of the waterway where the straw
hadn’t reached yet. He stood there looking at it.
Then he reached out and pressed the fresh dirt down with the toe of his boot. Carefully. Twice. Like he was checking a pie.
He looked up at me and nodded once.
That nod was worth more to me than any paycheck I ever earned. I had to look away for a second and
pretend there was dust in my eye.
That was when Quentin pulled over on the section road.
This time he got out.
Chapter Eight: The Shirt Pocket
He parked his pickup on the shoulder of the section road with the flashers on, the way you do when you
mean to stay a minute. He stood beside it for a while looking at the field. At the waterway. At Bud and Doyle and Marcie and the grandsons spreading straw. At the dozer. At Dad standing at the edge of the new dirt with his cane.
Then he climbed through the fence and came straight across the hay toward Dad, walking fast through
the knee-high brome with one hand pressed flat against his shirt pocket like something in it might fly away.
The straw spreaders saw him coming and slowed down. Bud stopped with a flake of straw in his hands. Doyle straightened up and put a hand on the small of his back and watched. Nobody said anything.
Dad turned on his cane to meet him.
I climbed down off the dozer track and walked over. I didn’t hurry, and I didn’t get between them. I just came close enough to hear, because whatever was about to happen, I’d started it.
Quentin stopped about six feet from Dad. He was breathing hard from the walk. His face was red under his cap, and he hadn’t shaved, and he looked like Joanie said, like a man who had been sitting in his shop at two in the morning for a week. He stood there with his hand on his pocket and didn’t say anything for
so long that Dad finally spoke first.
“Morning, Quentin.”
“Leroy,” Quentin said. He looked at the waterway, at the long strip of straw and fresh dirt. Then he looked at me. “Stacy.” He swallowed. “Alma Rutledge’s nephew told me she rode out here with you Tuesday.”
“She did,” I said.
He nodded slowly, like that settled something he’d been dreading. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was a letter, a single page, with a government letterhead at the top that I recognized from twenty-two years of highway work. United States Department of Agriculture. Farm Service Agency. Chase County.
He held it out to Dad. Dad didn’t take it.
“I got this Thursday,” Quentin said. “From the FSA office in Cottonwood Falls. They’re doing a conservation compliance review on the Hadley quarter.” He was looking at the ground now. “Somebody from NRCS drove out after the flood and saw the washout. That ground’s classified highly erodible. There was a grass waterway on it that was part of the conservation plan. And I took it out last fall.”
Dad still didn’t say anything.
“I worked it up flat,” Quentin said. “With the big disk. So I could plant straight across with the new planter and not have to lift it over the waterway every pass.” His voice was getting rougher. “Forty-eight rows. That planter’s forty feet wide, Leroy. Every time I hit that waterway, I had to pick it up and lose a strip. I figured, what’s one waterway. I figured nobody’d notice.”
He looked up at the Hadley ground, at the raw notch running down through the soybeans to Dad’s
fence.
“The water came off my ground,” he said. “Six inches of rain, and there was nothing up there to slow it down. It came off my rows and hit your fence and cut that gully right through your best field.” He made himself look at Dad. “That was mine, Leroy. Not the Lord’s. Not the weather’s. Mine.”
Chapter Nine: What Dad Said
Nobody moved. Out on the waterway, Bud set his flake of straw down very carefully, like it might go off.
“The letter says if I don’t restore the waterway,” Quentin went on, “I could lose my eligibility for farm program payments. Crop insurance premium help. All of it. On every acre I farm.” He held the paper out again, and this time his hand was shaking. “That’s a lot of money, Leroy. That’s the difference between making my payments and not making them.”
“So you came over Monday,” Dad said slowly, “and offered me twelve hundred an acre for the field your water washed out.”
Quentin closed his eyes.
“I did,” he said. “I’ve been telling myself all week it was to help you out. That you couldn’t fix it at your age. That I’d take it off your hands.” He opened his eyes. “But that’s not why. I think I wanted it because if
I owned it, nobody’d ever look at that gully and ask where the water came from. And because I could farm straight through it with the big planter.” He shook his head. “I was going to buy your best ground cheap to cover up my own mess. That’s the truth of it. I’ve been sick about it since Monday.”
He reached into his pocket again and took out a second piece of paper. A check, folded once. He held it out.
“That’s for the dozer work,” he said. “And Bud’s diesel, and the seed, and the straw. I asked around what a contractor would charge. It’s what’s fair.” He swallowed. “And I’m taking back the offer. I’m sorry I ever made it.”
Dad looked at the check. He looked at Quentin for a long time. Then he looked past him, out at the waterway, at Bud and Doyle and Marcie and the boys standing in a line in the straw, waiting.
“Put that back in your pocket, son,” Dad said.
Quentin stared at him.
“You’ve got a planter payment,” Dad said. “And a combine payment, and two boys who’ll want to go to K-State. Put it back in your pocket.” He shifted his weight on his cane. “I don’t want your money. I want something else.”
“What?” Quentin asked.
“I want you to go get a bale of straw off Bud’s truck,” Dad said, “and help these people finish my field. And then next week I want you up there on the Hadley ground building back that waterway Ted Rutledge put in for my daddy. Wide and shallow, the way he made it.” He nodded at me. “Stacy’ll help you. She’s got the dozer here already.”
Quentin’s face crumpled. He stood there in the middle of Dad’s hayfield with an FSA letter in one hand
and a check in the other and his chin shaking, a forty-eight-year-old man with three thousand acres and a planter forty feet wide.
“I’ll lift the planter,” he said hoarsely. “Every pass. For the rest of my life.”
“Good,” Dad said. “Grass doesn’t care how wide your planter is.”
Quentin put the check back in his pocket. He folded the letter and put it in the other pocket. Then he
turned and walked over to Bud’s truck without saying another word, and he pulled a bale off the back and carried it out onto the waterway and cut the twine with his pocketknife. Bud handed him a flake to start on. Doyle moved over to make room in the line. And the six of them went back to shaking straw over the new seed, slower now, nobody talking.
Dad watched them for a while. Then he turned to me.
“You knew,” he said. “About the Hadley waterway.”
“Alma showed me Tuesday.”
“And you didn’t say anything to him. All week.”
“No, sir.”
He nodded slowly. “Why not?”
I thought about it. About Quentin slowing down on the section road every morning. About Joanie saying he hadn’t slept. About Dad on his tailgate watching every pass.
“Because I figured the dirt would say it louder than I could,” I said. “And because he’s Joanie’s husband.
And because you’d have hated it if I made him say it in front of everybody.”
Dad looked at me for a long moment.
“Your mother would have done it the same way,” he said. Then he turned and walked back to his tailgate, and he sat down and watched until the last flake of straw was spread.
Chapter Ten: The Hadley Waterway
We started on the Hadley ground the next Wednesday.
Quentin called the NRCS office in Cottonwood Falls on Monday and asked them to come out. A young woman named Brianna Koehn showed up Tuesday afternoon in a government pickup with a GPS unit on a pole, and she and Quentin and I walked the Hadley quarter together while she shot elevations. She was twenty-eight, a K-State graduate, and she knew her business. When she found out I was the one who’d
built the waterway on Dad’s field, she walked down and looked at it, and then she came back and asked me if I’d ever thought about working for the government.
“I do work for the government,” I told her. “I just push dirt for the highway department instead of the USDA.”
She laughed and wrote up a plan. She said the waterway on the Hadley ground needed to be restored to the original design standards, which happened to be the ones Ted Rutledge drew up in 1961, still sitting in a file drawer in her office. She said because the restoration was required for compliance, Quentin wouldn’t get cost-share money from the government for it. He’d have to pay for it himself. Seed, fuel,
labor, all of it.
“How much?” Quentin asked.
Brianna looked at her notes. “If you hired a contractor, probably eleven or twelve thousand dollars,” she said. “Then you’d have to take that strip out of production. About four acres.”
Quentin was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at me.
“I’ll pay you what a contractor would charge,” he said. “You and the dozer both. I’m not asking you to do it for free.”
“Dad said I’d help you,” I said. “He didn’t say anything about charging.”
“Stacy.”
“Pay for the seed,” I said. “And buy Bud’s diesel when he hauls it home. And we’ll call it square.”
He started to argue, and then he stopped and just nodded.
It took us four days. I ran the dozer, and Quentin ran his big tractor with a box scraper on the back, smoothing out the edges behind me. Brianna came out twice to check the grade. Alma rode out on the
third day with her nephew and sat in his pickup at the edge of the field with the window down, and every so often she’d wave me over and tell me to make it a little wider at the bottom, a little shallower at the top, the way Ted did. She was right every time.
On the last afternoon, Quentin seeded it himself, walking it with a hand seeder because the strip was too
narrow at the top for his big equipment. Joanie came out with their two boys and spread the straw. Dad sat on his tailgate at the fence line between the two fields, right where the waterway crossed over from the Hadley ground into his south hay, and watched.
When the last of the straw was down, Quentin walked over to the fence and climbed through it and stood beside Dad’s pickup. He looked up the long strip of new seeding on the Hadley ground, curving
down off the ridge, and then down across the fence at Dad’s waterway, already showing a faint haze of green from the oats.
“It’s one strip now,” Quentin said. “All the way to the creek. The way it used to be.”
“The way it ought to be,” Dad said.
Quentin stood there a while longer. “I’m going to have to tell the planter dealer I want to trade down,” he said. “To a twenty-four row. I can’t keep up the payments on the big one anyway, not with this year.”
He laughed, short and tired. “Joanie’s been telling me that for two years.”
“Joanie’s usually right,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir,” Quentin said. “She is.”
Chapter Eleven: Papers
Two weeks later, Dad asked Joanie and me to drive him to Emporia.
He had an appointment with a lawyer there named Ruth Ellen Baird, who had done Mom’s estate and
who Dad trusted the way he trusted the weather report, which is to say mostly. He didn’t tell us what it was about. He just said he had some papers to fix and he wanted both his girls in the room.
Ruth Ellen’s office is on Commercial Street above a bank, with tall windows that look out over downtown. She sat behind a big walnut desk with a stack of folders and peered at the three of us over her reading glasses. Dad sat in the middle with his cane across his knees, Joanie on one side and me on the other.
“Leroy tells me there was some trouble with a hayfield,” Ruth Ellen said.
“There was,” Dad said. “There isn’t anymore.”
He laid it out for her plainly, the way he does everything. He wanted to put the farm into a revocable trust, with himself as trustee as long as he was able, and the two of us as successor trustees together.
When he passed, the land would go to Joanie and me in equal shares, with a written agreement that neither of us could sell to anyone outside the family without the other’s consent. He wanted the cattle sold and the money split. He wanted the house to go to whichever of us wanted to live in it.
“And the south hay,” he said. “I want to put in writing that the waterway stays in grass. Forever. Whoever owns it, whoever farms it. It doesn’t get worked up, and it doesn’t get planted through.”
Ruth Ellen made a note. “We can record a conservation restriction with the deed,” she said. “It’ll run with the land.”
“Do that,” Dad said.
Then he turned to Joanie.
“Quentin’s been asking to rent my hay ground,” he said. “The south hay and the bottom pasture. He
wants to put up hay for his own cows now that he’s cutting back on the row crops.”
Joanie looked surprised. “He didn’t tell me he asked you.”
“He asked me last week,” Dad said. “Stood on my porch with his hat in his hand.” He looked at Ruth Ellen. “I want a written lease. Five years. Fair rent, at the Kansas State cash rent survey rate for Chase County. And I want it to say he cuts around the waterway, not through it, and if he ever plows it, the lease is over.”
Ruth Ellen smiled a little. “That’s very specific, Leroy.”
“I’ve been farming seventy years,” Dad said. “I’ve learned that if you don’t write it down, it doesn’t
happen.”
Joanie was crying by then, quietly, with her hand over her mouth. Dad reached over and patted her knee without looking at her.
“He’s a good man, Joanie,” Dad said. “He just got in a hurry. Most men do, at that age. I did too.” He
looked out the window at Commercial Street. “Your mother made me slow down. You make him slow down.”
“I’m trying,” Joanie whispered.
“I know you are,” Dad said.
On the drive home, Joanie sat in the back seat and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, somewhere
around the county line, she leaned forward between the seats and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you, Stace,” she said. “For not making it a fight.”
“Thank Dad,” I said. “He’s the one who told Quentin to put the check back in his pocket.”
“I know,” she said. “But you’re the one who brought the dozer.”
Chapter Twelve: The Next May
The oats came up thick and green in two weeks, and by the Fourth of July you couldn’t tell where the waterway on Dad’s field started and the hay ground ended, except that the grass in the swale was a little taller and a little greener than the brome on either side. The native grasses came up underneath the oats in August, thin at first and then thicker, switchgrass and bluestem putting down roots six feet deep. By the time the first frost came in October, the whole strip from the Hadley ridge down to the creek was
solid sod.
Quentin put up the second cutting on the south hay in September, under his new lease. He cut around the waterway, every pass, lifting the mower and dropping it again, and he baled the waterway separately at the end so it wouldn’t get torn up. Dad rode along in his pickup and watched, the way he watched me. When Quentin climbed down off the tractor at the end of the day, Dad handed him the green Stanley
thermos without saying anything, and Quentin drank from it standing beside the baler.
Alma Rutledge died in January, peacefully, in her own bed in the stone house on Broadway. She was eighty-nine. At her funeral at the Methodist church in Cottonwood Falls, her nephew stood up and read a list of every conservation project Ted Rutledge built in Chase County between 1955 and 1988, which took eleven minutes. Then he said that the last one Alma ever worked on was a grass waterway on the Haskell
place and the Hadley quarter, and that she told him afterward it was the best one she’d seen since Ted passed. Brianna Koehn from the NRCS office cried in the back pew.
The rain came through again the next May. It came on a Wednesday night, the third week of the month, almost a year to the day after the flood. It wasn’t six inches this time. It was four, which is still a lot of rain for the Flint Hills, and it came hard and fast with lightning and wind, and I lay awake in Cottonwood Falls listening to it and thinking about the south hay.
I drove out at first light. Dad’s pickup was already gone from the yard, and I knew where he’d be.
He was standing at the edge of the south hay at the top of the waterway, right where the Hadley ground crossed the fence into his field, with his cane planted in the wet sod and his feed cap pushed back. He didn’t turn around when I pulled up. I got out and walked over and stood beside him, the way I had a year before.
The water was still running. It came down off the Hadley quarter in a wide, shallow sheet, brown with a
little silt, and crossed the fence and spread out across the waterway on Dad’s field. It ran slow and smooth over the grass, bending the switchgrass and bluestem down flat but not tearing at them, sixty feet wide and maybe four inches deep, all the way down the long gentle curve to the creek. On either side of it, the brome stood dry and green and untouched.
There was no gully. Not a single raw cut. Just water running over grass, the way it had run for sixty years before anybody farmed it flat.
Dad didn’t say anything for a long time. Neither did I. A meadowlark landed on the fence post beside him and sang, and the water ran, and the sun came up over the hills to the east and turned the wet grass gold.
Then I heard a pickup on the section road. Quentin’s. It slowed down when it got even with the field, the
way it had every morning a year ago. This time it pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped, and Quentin got out and climbed through the fence and walked across the hay toward us, not fast, just walking. He stopped beside Dad and looked down the waterway at the water running across the grass.
“Held,” he said quietly.
“Held,” Dad said.
The three of us stood there in a row at the top of the field and watched it. After a while Dad reached out with the toe of his boot and pressed down on the wet sod at the edge of the waterway, carefully, twice,
like he was checking a pie. It didn’t give. He looked up at me, and then at Quentin, and he nodded once.
Then he turned and started back toward his pickup with his cane, slow and steady through the wet hay, and called back over his shoulder that there was coffee in the thermos if anybody wanted it. Quentin and I looked at each other, and neither of us said anything, and then we followed him across the field together to the tailgate, where the old green Stanley was waiting with three cups.
