The Cornstalks I Tied Down Main

The First Post By The Bank

Main was empty the way a small-town street is empty at ten at night, which is to say completely, a dog somewhere and the light at Second blinking yellow to nobody.

Dale pulled the trailer up under the bank’s corner post, and I climbed out into air that had turned since supper. You could smell the cold coming.

I set the step stool at the base of the first lamppost, the tall black kind the town put in for the bicentennial.

I handed Dale a bundle and he held it to the post at the height I pointed to, and I wired it on.

Cornstalk bundle to the pole with three twists of florist wire, high and low. Then the sunflower heads tucked into the face of it so they looked up the street.

Then the ribbon, a length down each side and a bow I have tied so many times my fingers do it in the dark, which was good, because it was near dark.

I stepped back off the stool and looked. It was right.

First try, it was right, and something in my chest that had been clenched since the window came loose a little.

“That is the one,” Dale said, which from him is a speech.

We did the bank’s second post and the corner by the Rexall, three posts, and then he put his hand on my shoulder.

I told him to go, that the beans would not wait and I had this. He looked down the long dark street at the thirty-eight posts still bare and I watched him decide to believe me.

“I will send Kurt down,” he said. “He is up at five anyhow.”

Then the trailer lights swung around and went, and the red of them got small at the end of Main and turned off toward the home place.

It was me and the yellow blinker and forty-some bundles and the whole street.

I want to say I was brave. The truth is I stood there by the Rexall post for a minute with my hands cold already and thought, Patty, you have lost your mind, go home.

Then I picked up a bundle and carried it to the fourth post, because the only way through a field is to start at the near end and not look at the far one.