The Corn We Sold Off Our Own Tailgate

Some mornings the heat laid on that blacktop so thick you could see it wave. Hannah would drink half a jug of water and Caleb would soak his cap in the cooler and put it back on dripping, and still they stayed till the last ear sold.

They came home brown as farmhands and slept hard and got up and did it again. I was proud enough to burst, and I told them so, and I told their grandmother so too, more than once, out there in her yard while they worked her field.

Five dollars a dozen. That was the price Grandma set, and the kids held to it, and they did not short anybody an ear or pocket a nickel.

By the middle of August that coffee can had twenty four hundred dollars in it and some loose change on top. Four hundred and eighty dozen ears, raised by her and picked and husked and sold by them.

The deal was they kept what they made. That was the whole deal. I heard her say it at her own table with her own mouth.

Hannah had already decided hers was going toward a horse she was never getting. Caleb wanted a good bike and then, he said, the rest in the bank. Twelve years old and talking about the bank.

Her Reason

I waited three days so I would not say a thing I could not take back. Then I drove over alone on a Tuesday morning while the kids were at vacation Bible school, singing songs in the Methodist basement.

She was out on the porch snapping green beans into an enamel bowl. She did not get up when I came up the steps.

“I figured you’d be by,” she said.

“The corn money,” I said. “The coffee can. That was theirs, Dean. We shook on it.”

“That was corn money,” she said, and she kept snapping, the beans going tick, tick into the bowl.

“My corn. My field. My stand. My name on that sign for thirty years so people know to pull over and buy. They didn’t grow one ear of it.”

“You told them to their faces they could keep what they made.”

“And I fed that field all summer,” she said. “You think seed is free. You think the sprayer runs on well water.”

She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were not mean. That is the part that stuck with me. They were tired, and underneath the tired they were scared.

“I’m an old woman trying to hold onto the place your husband’s daddy left me,” she said. “And nobody in this family lifts a finger for me unless there’s something in it for them.”