15. Matt
Matt
Ihadn’t understood, until I stood in the middle of it, what the maze meant to this town.
I’d thought it was a field with paths cut in it.
A seasonal attraction. A way to charge eight dollars a head to walk in circles.
But by full dark the lower acreage had become something I didn’t have words for and hadn’t expected to be moved by, and I’d been standing at the gate of it for hours watching the town pour through, and I was starting to understand.
They came in waves. The after-dinner families first, parents with headlamps and kids vibrating on cider doughnuts, a toddler in a pumpkin costume who fell asleep against his father’s shoulder before they’d even reached the entrance.
Then the teenagers, in packs, boys shoving each other deeper into the maze to prove they weren’t scared, girls shrieking with varying degrees of sincerity, and more than a few of the girls proving considerably braver than the boys, everyone secretly hoping to get lost in the dark with the right person.
Then the couples, the old ones, Ben and Dahlia Barrett at the head of them, Levi and Jude’s parents, who’d walked this maze every year for forty years and didn’t need the map and went in holding hands as if they had nowhere in the world to be but next to each other.
Ben had been my chief, back when I was twenty-three and working doubles I didn’t need to work because the alternative was going home to an empty house.
He’d taught me how to write a clean report and how to talk a drunk out of a bad idea and, though I didn’t notice him doing it at the time, how to be a person someone could count on.
He retired since, and Cade took the job.
He stopped now, at the gate, and looked at me a long moment in the lantern light. “Well,” he said. “There he is.”
“Ben. Good to see you.”
“I worked beside you for years, son, and I don’t believe I ever once saw you off the clock.” He nodded out at the field, at the maze. “And here you are.” He was smiling, but his eyes had gone soft in a way that made my throat tight without warning. “Took you long enough, Matt.”
“It’s for the festival,” I said. “The farm’s having a hard year.”
“Sure it is.” He clapped me on the shoulder, his hand warm and heavy and certain.
He glanced across the field, to where Elizabeth was lighting up the dark with her clipboard and her grin, and then back at me, and he didn’t say anything else about it, because Ben never did.
“Suits you, all of it,” he said. “I mean that.”
And Dahlia took his arm and towed him into the maze before I could find anything to say back, which was a mercy, because I didn’t have anything.
I just watched the man who’d guided me into the job walk into the corn beside the wife he’d loved, and I felt the desire to have everything he had go through me like cold water.
My people came through too. Becca and Levi first, my sister tucked under her husband’s arm against the cold.
Becca handed me her ticket and didn’t let go of it, so we were both holding it.
She looked at me, looked across the field to Elizabeth, looked back, and raised one eyebrow clear up into her hairline.
“So,” she said, far too sweetly. “What are you up to lately, big brother?”
“Taking tickets.”
“Mm-hmm.” She let go of the ticket. “Taking tickets. In a costume. On your night off. At Elizabeth’s farm.” She kissed my cheek before I could mount a defense. “I’m thrilled for you, and I’m going to be unbearable about it, just so you can plan.”
And Levi, grinning, towed her into the maze before I could get a single word out, which was lucky for me, because my sister had read the whole thing off my face in under five seconds and we both knew it.
Then Jude, still in his Paul Bunyan flannel, the foam ox abandoned somewhere up by the gazebo, with Bella riding high on his shoulders so she could see out over the tops of the corn.
Harper walked alongside with one hand hovering to catch her, though Jude had a grip on both her ankles like he’d done it a hundred times.
“Officer Hartford, you won,” Bella informed me from her great height, as though I might not have heard.
“I did.”
“Jude got beat by your pot.”
“Bella,” Harper said.
“It’s true though.” Bella patted the top of Jude’s head consolingly. “I’m just telling the truth.”
“This is your influence,” Jude said to Harper. “You raised her to be honest and now look. No loyalty. None.”
“She’s loyal,” Harper said. “She’s also right.” She reached up to steady Bella out of reflex. “The pot was funnier than the ox. I’m sorry. It’s a fair loss.”
“I’m surrounded,” Jude announced to the night sky. “Fair and square, Hartford. I respect the game. I’m not going to say the pot was better craftsmanship, because there’s a child present and I won’t lie to her, but you won the crowd, and the crowd is what matters.”
“That’s very gracious.”
“I’m a gracious man. Ask Bella.”
“He’s not that gracious,” Bella said.
“Bella.”
And she shrieked with laughter and nearly went over backward doing it, twisting around to wave at me as Harper reached up fast to steady them.
“BYE OFFICER HARTFORD,” she shouted.
I waved and watched the three of them disappear laughing into the corn, Jude’s hands locked around her ankles, Harper’s hand at the small of his back to keep them all upright.
And something rose up in my chest I still hadn’t built a fence around—a kind of ache that wasn’t quite an ache, the feeling of a door standing open in a house that had been shut a long time.
Somewhere deep in the rows, a kid kept shrieking “MOM” with the delight of a child who is not actually lost and is having the time of his life.
The hayride wagon ground back and forth across the top of the field with Jonas at the wheel, silent and content, hauling load after load of bundled-up riders out to the ridge and back. The cider press ran nonstop.
And June worked the whole thing with her phone held out in front of her like a divining rod, narrating to the little glowing crowd that lived inside it. I caught pieces of it every time she swept past my gate.
The maze was giving autumn. The maze was giving cozy. The cider is giving exactly the seasonal serotonin you came here for, you guys, I’m not okay.
She panned across the lantern-lit rows and the hay bales and the kids with their flashlights and told twelve thousand strangers that this, this, was why she’d moved back to Sweetbriar.
I watched three separate people stop her to say they’d driven up from Portland because of her videos and could they get a picture by the Sweetbriar Starling Harvest Festival sign.
Then she found me.
I knew it was coming. I’d watched her clock me from forty feet out, watched the grin start, watched her cut through the crowd with the phone already swinging around, and there was nowhere to go because I was tethered to a ticket gate and someone had to collect the cash.
“You guys. You guys.” She planted herself in front of me and flipped the camera so we were both in it, her delighted and me in a Johnny Appleseed costume with a burlap sack of apples, looking, I have to assume, like a hostage.
“This is Officer Hartford. He is the law in this town, and he is currently Johnny Appleseed, and he WON the costume round, which means our town’s grumpiest man wore a pot on his head for a what is essentially a festive pageant. Officer Hartford. Wave to the people.”
I looked at the camera. I did not wave.
“He’s not going to wave,” June informed twelve thousand people, gleeful.
“He’s giving us nothing. This is the most I’ve ever gotten out of him, and I’ve known him my whole life.
Look at this. A stone. A handsome autumn stone.
” She swung the phone back to her own face, beaming.
“Anyway, he’s single, the comments are going feral, I’m not reading them out, moving on—”
“June,” I said.
“He SPOKE.”
And she was gone, swallowed back into the crowd, leaving me at my gate to contemplate the fact that I had just been broadcast to more people than lived in three Sweetbriars, and that somewhere in the comments my entire romantic situation was apparently being adjudicated by strangers, and that the only person whose opinion of it I cared about was forty feet away under the work lights, pretending she hadn’t watched the whole thing and grinning at her clipboard.
And under all of it, the smell—spiced apple cider and sweet kettle corn, pumpkin donuts and cold mud and chimney smoke from town rolling up the hill on the night air, and the sound, that big layered murmur of a few hundred people being happy in the dark all at once, and over the top of the whole scene, off to the east past the dark shoulders of the hills, Mount Hood stood white against the last light in the sky, close the way it gets on clear nights, like you could walk to it, snow on its summit.
It looked, that night, like it was presiding.
Like even the mountain had come out for the maze.
I’d grown up in this town, walked its main street my whole life, and I had never once, in all those years, been part of a night like this.
I’d worked the edges of plenty of them. Directed the traffic, kept the peace, gone home alone.
The festival had been happening a mile up the road every fall since before I was born, and I’d spent every one of them on the outside of it, on duty or on purpose, telling myself I didn’t have time.
I had never been standing inside one with a stamp in my hand and a place to be and a woman across the field who kept finding my eyes in the crowd.