The Cornstalks I Tied Down Main

Kurt Brings The Coffee

Kurt Dees has run the hardware since his father ran it, and he is a big quiet man who has sold me every roll of wire and sack of bulbs I ever bought.

He came down Main in the first light with a coffee in each hand and set one on the hood of the parked car beside me without a word.

I wrapped both my stupid hands around it and could not say anything for a second.

It was hot, and he had put in the cream the way I take it at the counter, which meant he had watched me take my coffee for twenty years and filed it away the way quiet men do.

“Dale called the shop phone last night,” he said. “Said his wife was out here losing her mind on the square and to keep an eye out.”

He looked up the long street at the forty-some posts behind me, all cornstalks and sunflowers going gold now as the light came, down to the nine bare ones at the depot.

“He undersold it.”

“I ran out of ribbon,” I said. My voice came out cracked. “And sunflowers. And I think I ran out of hands.”

Kurt set his coffee down on the hood next to mine. He went back up the street to his store.

He came out with two cardboard flats of the fall ribbon he sells off the spool rack, the good wide orange and a burgundy, and a box of floral wire.

He did not say a word about putting it on my account, and I did not ask.

He is a head taller than me and his fingers are the size of carpenter’s pencils, and he could not tie a bow to save his life.

So I tied and he held and wired, and we did the last nine posts of Main as the sun came up over the depot, the two of us, not talking much.

At the very last post, the one by the old depot where the rail used to run, I set the last sunflower, a bent one, the last bent head off the bottom of the trailer.

I could not get the wire to turn, and Kurt put his big hand over my frozen one on the post and turned it for me, gentle, and we got it.

I stood back off the stool one more time in the full morning light and looked up the whole length of Main, forty-one posts, bank to depot, every one of them dressed, the courthouse clock behind it all.

And I cried right there in front of Kurt Dees, and he let me and looked the other way like a gentleman.

“Hank would’ve stood right here,” he said. “And said move that one up a hand.”

I had not told him about my father and the eye. He just knew. Small towns know.