The Acre My Father Never Sold

Saturday

I drove back to the house and parked the tractor by the shop with the shredder still on it. Amber was at the table with her coffee and the envelopes, and our boy was on the floor with his trucks.

I told her about the trucks and the families and the woman named Gloria. Amber set her cup down. Then she said the thing I knew she would say, because it was the sensible thing and she is a sensible woman.

“Luke, it’s sad. It is. But we can’t run a charity off one acre of irrigated ground when we’re fourteen thousand in the hole. Your dad could. We can’t.”

“I know.”

“Merle wants it.”

“I know. Saturday,” I said. “I’ll shred it Saturday. Let them finish what’s ripe this week. Then it’s done.”

Keeping an eye on things

The next morning I woke at five without the alarm. I lay there and listened to Amber breathing and told myself I was going to go check the pivots on the river ground, like every morning.

I got dressed. I got in my pickup. And at the end of the lane I turned north instead of south.

There were three trucks at the corn when I got there. Then five. I parked across the road and sat with the window down and told myself I was only there to keep an eye on things. To make sure nobody tore anything up. To make sure nobody drove into the ditch.

Nobody tore anything up. Nobody drove into the ditch.

On the road rows, the ones closest to the gravel, the raccoons had been at it. You know how coons do sweet corn. They pull the stalk down and strip one ear and leave it half eaten, and the next ear over they chew the tip and leave it, too.

I got out and walked the road rows and pulled every ear the coons had touched and threw them in the ditch. I did not decide to do it. My hands just did it, because a coon-chewed ear in a sack is a bad surprise at supper.

A woman about eighty came up the road leaning on a younger man’s arm. She stood at the end of the row and looked at the stalks, and I could see her measuring how far down she would have to reach.

The young man was helping a little girl with a bucket. He had his hands full.

I took out my pocketknife and walked over. “Which ones do you want, ma’am?”

She pointed. I cut them for her, six ears, and put them in her sack. She patted my hand twice. She did not say thank you, and I found I was glad she did not.

I went back the next morning, and the morning after that.

Every morning there were a few more trucks than I expected, and every morning Gloria and Ana were among the first. On Wednesday Ana brought me a cup of coffee from the gas station in town, in a paper cup with a lid, and set it on the tractor step without a word.

“Where do you all come from?” I finally asked Gloria that morning.

She looked at me the way you look at somebody who has asked you to explain the weather. “Town, mostly.”

“How did you know about it?”

“Everybody knows about it,” she said. “Your dad’s corn.”

“I didn’t.”

She studied me. Then she looked away, out toward the river, and I saw her decide not to say any more.

“That’s his to tell,” she said. “Or it was.”