The Corn We Sold Off Our Own Tailgate

Then it was everybody.

The hardware man bought a dozen on his way to open up the store. The Lutheran ladies setting up their rummage sale across the street sent a girl over for five dozen for the lunch counter they ran off a card table.

A man I did not know, down from Monticello for a family reunion, bought four dozen and told Caleb it was the best looking sweet corn he had laid eyes on all summer, and Caleb went red clear to his ears.

Hannah stood on her bucket and ran the green box and never missed a nickel of change. Caleb hauled and husked and bagged and did not sit down one time in four hours.

Jeff leaned on the cab with his arms crossed and a look on his face I would have driven a hundred miles to stand and watch.

At eleven forty Caleb came around the side of the truck to where I was folding empty crates, and his ears were red and he could barely get the words out of his mouth.

“Mom,” he said. “We’re almost out. We counted. We sold forty dozen.”

Forty dozen before noon. Two hundred dollars in a dark green tackle box by lunchtime, and we had driven in that morning hoping to sell half that much and call it a fine day.

Barnes heard him say it from the bay door, and he laughed that big laugh of his that you could hear over the engine fan.

“Every Saturday,” he said, pointing his coffee at Caleb. “You hear me. You have got this apron every Saturday I am chief of this station. The whole town needs to know where the corn is.”

When She Pulled In

We had maybe a dozen ears left on the tailgate, loose, not even bagged up, when the tan Buick turned off the highway and came slow across the four way stop and into the apron.

I knew that car. I had followed that car to church a hundred Sunday mornings, going fifteen under the whole way.

Grandma Dean parked it crooked at the far edge of the gravel and she sat in it a minute with the engine ticking before she got out. And when she did get out she did not come fast.

She came the way a person comes to a thing they have been driving past all morning, telling themselves they were not going to stop at it.

She had heard. Of course she had heard. In a township this size the whole county knew by ten o’clock that the Dean kids were moving forty dozen off a pickup at the firehouse.