The Row She Planted on Her Own Ground
The Morning
Saturday the tenth of May came up clear and cool, with the kind of low light that makes worked ground look like it has oil poured over it. We had the field ready, disked and run over once with the field cultivator, the dirt just dry enough on top to crumble in your fist and not slick up.
Perfect planting dirt. My father used to say you plant corn when the ground smells like a cellar, cool and open and a little sweet, and I bent down that morning and took up a handful and it smelled like exactly that.
Like 1994. Like him.
Shelby got out of her truck at twenty past five with a thermos under her arm and her hair pulled back tight, and she looked at the planter sitting there hitched and ready, the seed boxes needing filled, and then she looked at me, and she did not say anything smart. She just walked over and hugged me hard enough that the thermos dug into my back.
“Alright,” she said into my shoulder. “Alright. Let’s put it in the ground.”
I had brought the good travel mug for her, the steel one that keeps coffee hot till noon, filled the way she takes it, two sugars and enough cream to make it the color of a deer. She climbed up onto the first step of the cab and I stood on the black ground and reached up and handed it to her, and that is a picture I will carry with me until the day I die.
My daughter up in the open door of that green tractor in the first spring light, bending down out of the cab to take a cup of coffee from her mother’s hand.
“Which hybrid are we running?” she said, settling into the seat.
“The one in the seed tender. It’s a hundred-nine-day number.
Your grandpa always ran the longest season he dared on the river piece, because it drains good and it’ll finish before the frost even in a wet fall.”
She nodded like she was filing it away where she keeps such things. “And the population? What do you want?”
“You’re the one planting it. You tell me.”
She chewed her lip a second. “Thirty-four five across the field,”
she said. “But that river bottom dirt on the north end drains so good I’d push it to thirty-six where it’s heavy.
Grandpa’d say waste seed on bad ground and you’ve bought nothing, but skimp on good ground and you’ve left money laying in the dirt.”
“That’s word for word what he used to say,” I told her. I had not heard it in thirty years and it came out of my daughter’s mouth like he was standing right there.
Behind me a truck door shut up on the blacktop. I turned around.