The man in the gray suit at the center of the maze stood up from the picnic table and set his stack of folders on the boards, and Brett did not move. I knew every turn of that maze, because Herman had drawn it on graph paper at our kitchen table in the winter, a great cross with a spiral of corn at its heart, and I knew that from the point where Brett stood there was exactly one way out. The seven deacons stood behind us in the dusk, in their church clothes, listening. The man said, “Brett, I am Walter Pryor, a forensic accountant for the diocese insurance company.”
He said it in the tone of a man reading the weather. Brett had withdrawn eleven thousand dollars from the building fund of the church on thirty seven Fridays, always before a game of Ohio State, and had replaced some of it on Mondays when he won. He had won only fourteen times. The balance missing was one hundred and sixty three thousand dollars, and Mr. Pryor had the statements in the folders. He had been engaged by the church bond company in August, when the church secretary came to me in the parking lot and I told her where to call.
The head deacon, a stout man named Mr. Kessler, took off his cap. Behind him the other six did the same, slowly, as men do in church. “Bernadette,” he said, in a voice thick with shame, “we should never have believed him.” I told him it was all right. I had known for weeks that he would need to see the center of the maze to understand. Out beyond the high green walls of corn, a hundred yards away, I could hear the youth group of the church setting up the lanterns for the festival, laughing.
A corn maze walked at dusk gave one widow the evening to bring her son in law back to the truth in Lancaster.
I gave my terms at the center of Herman last maze, with the dusk settling over the corn. “Brett, the money you took will be repaid by the bond company, and you will repay them in turn, by your own labor, for as long as it takes. Linda will be told tonight, by me, in her own kitchen. You will go to the Gamblers Anonymous meeting on Tuesday nights at the Lutheran church in Lancaster, and you will go to the sheriff on Monday. And the harvest festival will go on as it always has, because it is not mine. It belongs to the children.”
Brett looked at the faces of the seven deacons in the lantern light, men who had trusted him with the keys, and the wrongness of the thing crashed down on him. “Bernadette,” he said, in a broken voice, “I never meant to lose that much. I only meant to borrow it for a week. Then it was a month. I told myself the fund was so big that nobody would feel it. I looked at your face every Sunday and wanted to disappear.” He pressed his hands against his eyes. “I was going to put every dollar back before Herman memorial.”
Then, like a hunted man, Brett turned and bolted back down the path of the maze, snatching up the top folder of Mr. Pryor as he went. “Brett!” the head deacon cried. But Brett was already gone, crashing through the corn, taking the first turn to the left, then the next. He did not know that a man who runs the maze from the center in the dark must take the right at the cross, the left at the spiral, and the right at the lantern. He took the wrong ones. Within three minutes, the sound of his shoes was going in a circle.
We followed at a walk. I led the deacons through the passage, and at every crossroads I stopped and listened. The youth group, who had heard the shouting, were in the corn with flashlights, a dozen teenagers in orange vests, who knew every turn better than I did. They found Brett at the far end of the Jonah passage, with the folder clutched to his chest, on his knees in the cornstalks, breathing in short gasps. The youngest of them, a boy of fourteen, held out a hand and said, “Mr. Brett, we can show you the way out.”
The money consequences were gentle. The bond company repaid the building fund in full, and Brett signed a repayment agreement with the diocese and the sheriff, and worked the harvest festival cleanup crew for free every year. Linda sat with me at the kitchen table that night, and then she called her husband and told him she would stand by him if he went to the meetings. The three million, eight hundred thousand dollars from the agritourism company went into a trust, and the thirty six mazes of Herman were licensed, not sold outright.
In the name of Herman, who passed in 2022, I started the Herman Schultz Fund. It pays for church youth programs, harvest festivals and gambling counseling, in Fairfield, Hocking and Perry counties. In the first year we sponsored eleven festivals and counseled thirty four families. One was a Methodist church in Logan that had not held a festival in a decade. They cut a maze in the shape of a cross, with a spiral at the center, and four hundred people came, and the pie auction raised nine thousand dollars.
The fall festival opened on the first Saturday of October, with the lanterns glowing in the dusk and the smell of caramel apples in the air. The pattern of the maze was the last one Herman ever drew, the cross and the spiral. Brett stood at the entrance in an orange vest, handing out maps to families. When the little boy of a young couple asked if he could get lost, Brett knelt down and said, “Not if you follow the lanterns.” He looked up at me and nodded, and I nodded back.