The Corn We Sold Off Our Own Tailgate

The New Sign

We planted the last week of April, the four of us down on our hands and knees in the dirt.

Jeff said a man who wants his kids to own a thing lets them put the seed in the ground with their own fingers, and so that is how we did it.

He walked the rows ahead of us with the hoe, marking, and Caleb dropped seed, and Hannah covered, and I tamped, and we did a half acre that way in two evenings and were sore for a week.

Jeff did the real planning at night at the kitchen table after the kids were down. Where to sell. He kept coming back to the same spot, and it was not the blacktop.

It was the firehouse.

The Oakvale Volunteer Fire Department sits right at the one four way stop in the middle of town.

On a Saturday in July every soul in the township comes through that stop at least once. To the hardware, to the Casey’s for gas, to the church rummage.

And the firehouse had a gravel apron out front big enough to back a pickup onto and leave room for cars to pull in. And the chief was a man Jeff had grown up two farms over from.

“Barnes won’t care,” Jeff said. “Barnes’d give us the apron just to have the smell of sweet corn around that station all morning.”

The sign was Jeff’s doing, and he would not let me buy a printed one from the office supply in Anamosa. He said that was not the point.

He got a flat sheet of cardboard out of the shed, off an appliance box, and a wide black paint marker, and he sat at the kitchen table one whole evening and lettered it slow.

Sweet Corn, in letters a foot tall. Under that, smaller, Homegrown by Caleb and Hannah, and the price, five dollars a dozen.

He is not an artist. The letters leaned to the right and the second line ran downhill. The kids thought it was the finest sign that had ever been made, and so did I, and I think so still.

The night before our first Saturday he backed the truck up to the shed, and he and Caleb loaded crates in the dark by the yard light, forty dozen picked that morning and kept cool, the husks still beaded with water.

Hannah counted the float into the cash box. Not Grandma’s old box. Ours. A tackle box Jeff had spray painted dark green so it would not belong to anybody in this world but us.

I did not sleep much. I lay there thinking we would sell ten dozen and drive the rest home to give away, and that even that would be worth it, just to see them stand behind their own sign one time.