Three Summers in the Corn

“You don’t own a truck, Caleb. You own a receipt for some corn.”

That is what my ex-husband said to our sixteen-year-old son on a Wednesday evening in August, standing on the cracked front step of the rental he had moved into after our divorce. I was not there to hear it. I heard it forty minutes later, at my own kitchen table, from a boy who was trying very hard not to let his voice go.

I was still in my scrubs. I work the front desk at Dr. Lindgren’s dental office on Main Street, and I had walked in the back door at a quarter to six with a bag of groceries and a headache. Caleb was sitting at the table with his hands flat on the oilcloth, the way he sits when he has decided not to break anything.

“Dad sold my truck,” he said.

I set the milk down. I remember that, because I set it down on its side and it rolled, and neither one of us reached for it.

“What do you mean, sold it?”

“He sold it Monday. To some farmer out north of town. Pohlman. Three thousand cash.” He swallowed. “He said it was his truck on paper.”

The truck

You have to understand what that truck was before you can understand what that sentence did to my kitchen.

It was a 2004 Chevy Silverado, the half-ton, maroon that had gone pink on the hood from twenty-some Iowa summers.

It had 211,000 miles on it, a bench seat with a split in the vinyl that Caleb fixed with gray duct tape, and a tailgate you had to lift a little before the latch would catch. It was not much of a truck. It was the most important thing my son had ever owned.

He paid for it with three summers of detasseling.

If you did not grow up out here, detasseling is how a lot of Iowa kids earn their first real money. The seed companies need the tassels pulled off the female rows of corn so the plants cross the way they are supposed to.

Machines get most of them. Kids get the rest, walking the rows in July in long sleeves and rain ponchos, reaching up and yanking tassels for two or three weeks straight.

Caleb started the summer he turned thirteen, which is about as young as the crews around here take them. The bus left the school parking lot at five in the morning. I would drive him over in the dark with a lunch in a cooler and a gallon jug of water frozen solid so it would still be cold by ten.

The first week he came home with his forearms looking like somebody had dragged a cheese grater across them. Corn leaves will do that. They are edged like paper, and when you are walking into them all morning they leave a thousand little cuts. He put bag balm on them at night and didn’t say a word about quitting.

The second summer he made crew leader’s list for not missing a single day. The third summer he walked rows that were wet to the chest at six in the morning and came home soaked through and grinning, because the check that year was the biggest yet.

He cleared about a thousand dollars every summer. He did not spend it. Not on shoes, not on a phone, not on the county fair. It went into a savings account at Farmers Trust with his name on the passbook, and every August he would show me the balance like it was a report card.

When it hit three thousand, his grandpa Gene went with him to look at trucks.