The Cornstalks I Tied Down Main

And somewhere in those nine years the doing it got quietly turned into her running it, in the way of things nobody argues about until the day they have to.

I never minded her name at the top. I minded my name gone from the middle.

Dale was in the machine shed when I pulled in, greasing the combine head because he meant to be in the beans by first light if the dew let him.

He is not a man who talks much. He has never once in twenty-three years told me I was being foolish, which is its own kind of love.

I told him what the map said. He wiped his hands on the rag in his back pocket and looked at me for a while.

“You want to go argue with Rochelle,” he said. It was not a question, it was him checking.

“No,” I said. “I want to cut cornstalks.”

He nodded slow, the way he does, and set the grease gun down.

Loading The Trailer

We cut by headlight after supper, in the east field where the sunflowers had come up volunteer along the waterway, tall and gone brown and heavy-headed the way I like them best for the posts.

Dale ran the combine down two rows of the standing corn he had left at the end to make me cornstalks.

I walked behind in my barn coat and gathered the stalks into bundles the size of a nail keg.

I tied each one with two wraps of baling twine, a slipknot up top so it would cinch to a post. My hands knew the work before my head caught up to it.

By full dark I had forty-some bundles laid in the trailer and my sunflowers laid on top so the heads would not crush.

I counted the lampposts in my mind while I worked. There are forty-one on Main between the bank and the old depot.

Twenty on the east side and twenty-one on the west, because the war memorial takes a spot on the west curb.

Nine years I had done twenty. I was going to do all forty-one.

Dale watched me lay the last bundle, and he did not say it could not be done in a night.

He said, “I will carry you in and set you up, and then I have to sleep two hours or I will put the combine in the ditch.”

That was fair, and more than fair. A man cannot stay up all night tying ribbon and then run a header through soybeans at daybreak.

I would not have let him try. Harvest does not care about your sister.

I told him two hours was plenty. Kurt would have the hardware open by six, and I would not be alone for the last of it even if I was alone for the middle.

We threw the step stool and the good snips and a box of florist wire in the cab, and two spools of orange ribbon I had bought that afternoon before I knew I was mad.

Sixty dollars of ribbon and wire that I had meant for twenty posts and was now going to stretch across forty-one.

I filled a thermos and did not fill a second one. I have thought since about why I only made the one.

He backed the trailer down our lane at a quarter to ten, and the yard light swung across Mom’s old mums by the step.

I thought of Dad saying a place ought to look like somebody loved it, and I got in the truck.