Three Summers in the Corn

Why I didn’t call anybody

People have asked me since why I did not call a lawyer. I did think about it, for about the length of time it took to pick up the milk.

But I work in an office. I know what paper says. The title said Darren Fritz, and Darren Fritz had signed it over to Vern Pohlman, and Vern Pohlman had paid a fair price in cash to the man whose name was on it. Nobody had broken a law. The sheriff would have told us it was a family matter, and he would have been right.

I could have called Darren. I did, actually, once, standing at the sink. It went to voicemail, and I did not leave one, because I could not think of a sentence that would bring back money he had already spent.

Caleb could have asked his grandpa. Dad would have emptied his savings in a minute, and his savings were about eight hundred dollars and a Social Security check. Caleb knew that. He said it before I could.

“I’m not taking Grandpa’s money.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I want to go see the guy.”

I looked at him. “And say what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’m not going to just let it be gone.”

So I put the milk away. I did not change out of my scrubs. We got in my Malibu, and I called my dad from the driveway to ask him which Pohlman it was.

“Vern,” Dad said, and there was a long pause on the line. “His wife was Marlys. Passed two years ago this winter. He farms that whole three hundred acres alone now. You be nice to him, Angie.”

“I’m always nice.”

“I know it. I’m telling Caleb.”

The county road

It was about twelve miles out. The sun was getting low over the beans, and the light came across the fields sideways and gold the way it only does the last two weeks of August. The soybeans were starting to yellow at the edges. Somebody was chopping silage a few sections over, and you could smell the dust from the road.

Caleb didn’t talk. He sat with his detasseling gloves in his lap, the old leather ones from his third summer, with the fingertips worn through. I don’t know why he brought them. I don’t think he knew either.

The Pohlman place was a white farmhouse with a screened porch, set back off the gravel behind a windbreak of old cedars. A red machine shed. A round-top hay barn with the big door open. And there, parked by the shed in the last of the light, was the Silverado. Pink hood. Duct tape. You could see the air freshener hanging from the mirror from fifty yards.

Caleb made a sound I had not heard him make since he was small.

I parked in the yard. He got out before I had the car in park. I got out too, and then I did the hardest thing I have done as a mother. I stopped a few steps back in the grass and let him go up alone.

He walked up the porch steps. He knocked on the frame of the screen door, three times, polite.

It took a while. Then a light came on inside, and an old man came to the screen. Bib overalls, a straw hat he must have forgotten to take off, a white undershirt. Tall, but stooped a little, and holding his right arm close against his side the way men do when a shoulder has gone bad.

“Help you?” he said.