The Cornstalks I Tied Down Main

The Town Wakes Up

The festival opens at eight, but a small town is awake by six-thirty, and by seven they were coming out onto the sidewalks of a street that had been bare when they went to bed.

I sat in my truck at the depot end with the heater on and both hands wrapped around the dregs of Kurt’s coffee, and I watched them find it.

A man came out of the apartment over the drugstore in his undershirt to get his paper and stopped on the step and just looked up the street.

Two women on their way to open the diner stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. Kids.

A boy on a bike rode the whole length of Main slow with his head turned sideways, looking up at every post.

Nobody knew it was me. That is the part I had not planned on and had not thought through.

That I would do the whole street in the dark and then sit in a truck while the town stood in the sunrise asking each other who on earth had done it.

I heard the word go up and down the block. Who did the square. Did you do the square. The committee must have gone all out this year.

That last one stung, and then, sitting there bone-tired, started to be funny.

The committee. I thought about the map in the window with my name gone, and the committee getting the credit for a street one left-off woman had tied up by hand in the cold.

I laughed out loud alone in my truck until it turned over into crying again, because twenty-three hours with no sleep does that to a person.

Then I saw Rochelle.

She parked in her committee spot by the bank at seven-fifteen, the way she does festival morning, early to set up the ribbon-cutting.

She got out with her clipboard and her good fall jacket, and she looked up to check the bank corner the way she always checks it first.

And she stopped.

I watched my sister stand on the sidewalk and turn a slow circle on the heel of her good shoe, looking at the bank post and the Rexall post and the diner and the long gold length of it down to where I sat.

And I watched her do the arithmetic she is so good at. The map said east side open. The map said Patty begged off.

And here stood forty-one posts dressed by a hand she had known her whole life.

She did not come down the street to me right away. She stood by the bank a long time with her clipboard hanging at her side.