We had nineteen scarecrows on posts along the hayride trail, and on the second Friday in October of 2016, my tractor driver counted twenty.
Delbert Sayre counted everything. He counted hay bales when he stacked them and riders when they climbed onto the wagon, and he counted fence posts out loud as we passed them, the way other men hum. So when he stopped the tractor at the bottom of the hollow on the 10:40 Blackout Ride and said “Twenty” into the dark, I thought he had miscounted for the first time in eleven years.
“Nineteen, Del,” I said.
“Twenty,” he said. “That last one’s not on a post. It’s standing on the ground.”
My name is Joanie Teets. That fall I was forty-nine and running my late father’s haunted hayride on our farm in the hills of southeastern Ohio, because the bank note on the farm came due on the first of November, and the hayride was the only thing we owned that made money in a hurry. Four weekends. Fourteen paid scare actors. A wagon of thirty riders every twenty minutes from dusk to midnight, and after ten o’clock the Blackout Ride: adults only, lights off, and a walk on foot through the back corn.
I had drawn the trail myself on a sheet of poster board that hung in the ticket shed, every post a red dot with a number beside it, one through nineteen. My actors signed in on a clipboard under that map every night, fourteen names and fourteen signatures, and I checked them off myself because I paid them in cash.
Behind us, thirty grown people sat on hay bales in the dark and laughed, waiting for something to jump out at them. I stood up on the hitch and put my flashlight on the corn where Delbert was pointing.
It was taller than the posts. I told myself it was one of my actors standing on a bucket for the scare. Then the wind came down the hollow and I smelled it, and it was not wet hay and it was not diesel. It was the smell of something that had lain in a ditch for a week.
“Now that’s a good one,” a man on the back bale called out.
I counted my actors in my head, the way Delbert would have. Fourteen signed in. Fourteen at their marks. I knew where every one of them was standing.
Keep reading
