The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

Summer

He came over the first morning the corn spiked through. I looked out the kitchen window at seven o’clock and there was Dad’s pickup parked at the end of the field, and Dad walking the rows with his hands behind his back.

After that he came every morning. Every single one. He would drive the six miles in his pickup, park in the same spot, walk the field, and then come in and drink one cup of coffee at my table and tell me what he saw.

“Stand’s good,” he would say. Or, “Couple of skips on the east end. Orville’s planter’s dropping doubles on number nine.” Or, in late June when it had been dry for two weeks, nothing at all, just a long look out the window at the sky.

He started going back to the café in town for morning coffee, where the old farmers sit at the round table by the window. He started singing in church again. He started getting the mail before noon.

It rained in July. Not a lot, but enough, and at the right time, just as the corn was tasseling. Dad stood in my yard in the rain with his cap off and his face up, and I went out and stood with him. Neither one of us said anything. We did not need to.

Randy did not come to the field once.

The body shop

In August I went to see my brother.

His shop is on the highway at the edge of town, a long metal building with three bays and a hand-painted sign. He was under a pickup when I came in, and he rolled out on his creeper and looked up at me and did not get up.

“Dad’s been walking your corn,” he said. “Everybody at the café knows about it.”

“It’s his corn.”

“It’s your ground. It’s your money. It’s Orville’s planter.” He wiped his hands on a red rag. “You know what you’re doing, Tammy? You’re giving him a reason to get back on a ladder.”

“There’s no ladder. That’s the whole idea. It goes straight to the elevator.”

“There’s always a ladder,” Randy said. “There’s the truck. There’s the hoist. There’s the box. He’s 81 and his wrist is held together with a plate.”

I sat down on an upturned bucket by his toolbox. And because I had been angry at him for five months and was tired of it, I asked him what I should have asked in March.

“Randy. Why did you really sell them?”

He was quiet so long I thought he was not going to answer. Then he sat up on the creeper with his elbows on his knees.