The Cornstalks I Tied Down Main

The Long Middle Of The Street

The middle of the night on Main is a place most people never see, and I will tell you it is not lonely the way you would think. It is more like church when the lights are low.

I worked north to south, post to post, carrying a bundle and the wire and dragging the stool a few feet at a time.

My system got quicker. By the diner I could wire a bundle, set the sunflowers, and tie the bow in under four minutes.

I started talking to the posts a little, which I will not pretend I did not. Telling them to hold still. Telling Dad this one was for the corner he would have liked.

Around midnight the cold got into my fingers so bad I had to warm them under my arms every third post. The thermos coffee went lukewarm and then cold, and I drank it cold.

I had done fourteen posts. I did the arithmetic I should not have done, and it said I was not going to make it.

I sat down on the step stool in front of the shoe-repair shop and nearly cried.

Then a car came. Only one came the whole middle of the night, and it slowed, and it was Deputy Rhodes, who went to school two grades under me.

He rolled his window down and looked at the street, at the dozen posts behind me all cornstalks and sunflowers and the long dark ahead, and he looked at me on my stool.

“Patty,” he said. “This you?”

“It is me,” I said, and I did not explain, because what was the explanation.

He looked at it a while. Then he said, “Festival’s gonna look good,” and he put the window up and drove on slow.

At the next post he tapped his horn once, soft, and that one little toot in the empty dark put something back in me that the cold had taken out. I got up off the stool.

I thought about my sister while I worked the long middle. I tried to hate her and could not quite do it, which annoyed me.

Rochelle had sat in Dad’s cold machine shed as a girl and kept his books so straight the banker complimented a twelve-year-old.

Nobody ever said to her the thing they said to me, that she had the eye, that she was Hank’s girl. She had Hank’s columns.

It is a lonesome thing to be the one who keeps it straight and never the one they say loved it.

I knew that about her. I had known it my whole life and used it to feel sorry for her and never once to forgive her.

I did not forgive her on Main at one in the morning. But I stopped tying the bows quite so angry.