The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

The rows

He stood up, then. He set his cap on the tailgate beside the pie, and he walked off across the road ditch and into his own sweet corn, the rows right there along the road, and went in about six rows deep and stopped.

I could see the top of his gray head over the tassels. He was standing with his back to the road. His shoulders were going.

I did not go after him. Some things a man has to do by himself in his own corn.

But Zeke did. Before I could say a word, Zeke had climbed down off his milk crate and crossed the ditch on the board Quincy kept there and gone into the rows after his grandpa, with half an ear of raw corn still in his hand.

I stood up. I almost called him back. Then I didn’t.

I could not hear what Zeke said. I could only see a little bit of his blue ball cap between the stalks, and Quincy’s gray head, and after a minute Quincy’s gray head came down low, the way a man kneels in the dirt to be at the height of a seven-year-old.

They were in there maybe five minutes. When they came out, Quincy was holding Zeke’s hand, and his face was wet and he was not hiding it, and Zeke was carrying the cap.

Zeke handed Quincy his cap on the edge of the ditch. “I told Grandpa it’s okay to be sad,” he said to me. “Like when I broke the bird feeder.”

Quincy made a sound that was half a laugh. He put his cap back on.

“He did,” Quincy said. “He told me that.” He looked at me. “He told me Grandma would want him to have the pie.”

“Well,” I said. “He’s probably right.”

The consequence

We ate the sugar cream pie right there on the tailgate, the three of us, with plastic forks out of my glove box. It was not a perfect pie. The top had cracked a little in the cooler. Quincy ate two pieces and said it was nearly hers.

At four o’clock I counted the coffee can on the plank table, with Quincy watching. It was six hundred and thirty-two dollars. I counted it out into two piles of three hundred and sixteen dollars each, and pushed one pile across the boards to him.

Quincy looked at the pile and then pushed two hundred dollars of it back to me.

“That’s for the forty dozen,” he said. “In the ditch.”

“Quincy, you don’t have to,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Don’t argue with me about this one, Ione. I’ll pay what I owe.”

I took it. I think he needed me to take it more than I needed the money. And there was one more thing, and I knew I had to say it, because Sid had asked me to, and because it was right.

“Sid’s not going to come over until you talk to him,” I said. “He’s not angry the way you’d think. He’s hurt. Zeke saw it. Zeke was sitting right there.”

Quincy nodded slowly. “I know it.”

“You’re going to have to tell Sid yourself,” I said. “Not me. You.”

“I’ll call him tonight,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No. I’ll drive over in the morning before he sleeps. I’ll tell him to his face.”

He did, too. He drove over Sunday morning and found Sid in the yard, and the two of them stood out by the mailbox for a long time talking. I watched from the porch. I did not go out.

When Quincy left, Sid came in and sat at the edge of the bed and did not say anything for a while, and then he said, “He told me he was ashamed. I’ve never once heard him say that.”