The bumper hit the side of my wagon with a sound like a dropped plank. I was standing on the gravel shoulder with a dozen ears in each arm, and I watched the whole thing happen slow.
The side boards bowed out. One stake popped, then the next one, and then the crates on the ditch side of the rack tipped over the edge and let go of forty dozen ears, close to half of what I had picked that day.
Forty dozen ears of sweet corn rolled down the bank. They went into the weeds and the chicory and the gravel dust at the bottom of the ditch, and they kept rolling until they stopped.
My father-in-law put his truck in park. He sat there a moment with the engine running, and then he shut it off and climbed down and walked around his tailgate to look at what he had done.
Quincy Hollander was 66 years old. He wore the same navy work shirt he wore every day of summer and a tan seed cap so old the bill had gone soft as cloth.
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He came and stood beside me on the gravel, right next to the wagon, and the two of us looked down at the ditch together like neighbors looking at a calf that had gotten out.
“Thirty years,” he said. “Thirty years Elsie and me sold corn on this road. Seven dollars a dozen, and nobody ever complained about seven dollars.”
I had a crate of corn in my arms that I had not set down. I set it down. My hands were shaking, and I did not want him to see that, so I put them in the bib of my overalls.
“You sell at five,” he said. “Five dollars a dozen, two miles closer to town. You know where every car from Frankfort hits first.”
A woman with a car seat in the back had been waiting to buy when he pulled in. She pulled away slow and did not look at us, and then it was only the two of us on that shoulder.
My son was up in the front yard with the coffee can of change, sitting on the porch steps where I had sent him out of the sun. Zeke was seven that summer. He was very still, the way children get still when they understand that something has gone wrong with a grown-up.
“Grandpa,” he called down from the steps. “You knocked the corn down.”
Quincy looked at him, and something went across his face that I could not read. Then he looked back at me.
“Take the wagon in,” he said. “I’m not going to watch you finish off what she built.”
He got back in his truck and pulled out onto County Road 300 North and drove the two miles home, and the gravel he threw up pinged off the wheel of my wagon.