The Corn I Hauled for Verna

But his mother’s corn was standing in the field, and the weather was turning, and he walked out of her kitchen with his hand on the door before she was finished talking. There is no note on earth that makes that right.

After he left, Annelie washed the dishes and I dried, and Verna sat at the table and did not get up. When I looked over, she had Wendell’s seed cap in her lap, the green one with the frayed bill, turning it around by the brim.

“Lyle said the forecast’s bad,” she said. “Snow by the first week of November, he said. He said if the stalks go down in a wind, he can’t pick it up off the ground.”

“How many acres is it, Verna?”

“Seventy. The home eighty, less the yard and the waterway. Wendell planted it the last week of April.” She turned the cap. “He walked it in August. He said it might be the best corn he ever raised. He wasn’t here for August, Eldon. I walked it.”

I hung the towel on the oven door. My hands were not shaking, but I could feel them wanting to.

That night Annelie and I sat at our own kitchen table in Fairbury and did the arithmetic, the way you do when you are too angry to do anything else and too old to throw things.

The home eighty is good black Livingston County ground. Wendell’s corn would run something over two hundred bushels an acre. Seventy acres of it came to fourteen thousand bushels, give or take what the wind had already knocked down.

Corn was bringing about three dollars and ninety cents a bushel at the elevator that week. Even after drying charges, that was better than fifty thousand dollars. It was her taxes, her propane, the last of the hospital bills from July, and her whole winter.

“She could sell it standing,” Annelie said. “Like Kurt said.”

“She’d get maybe two-thirds of it. Whoever bought it would come get it after they’d finished their own, and if it snowed first, that’s their luck and her loss.” I shook my head. “That corn was the last thing your dad planted. She walked it all summer by herself.”

Annelie was quiet. Then she said, “You could call Kurt tonight. You could tell him what you think of him.”

I had thought about it. I had thought about it all the way home from Verna’s.

“I could,” I said. “And he’d yell, and I’d yell, and you’d cry, and your mother would get in the middle of it. And a week from Saturday that corn would still be standing in the field when the snow came.”

“So what do we do?”

I looked out our window at the old green tandem truck parked beside the shed. I bought it used in 2009, a twenty-foot box on a straight truck, and I had kept it running for neighbors at harvest every fall since, on weekends, for gas money and a thank you.

“I’ve got eleven days of vacation coming,” I said. “I was saving them for the spring.”

Annelie looked at me for a long time. Then she got up and got the phone book out of the drawer, because she still keeps a phone book, and she found Lyle Ahrens’s number.

Lyle Ahrens farms the ground across the road from Verna. He is sixty-six, a widower himself, and he had farmed next to Wendell Brockhoff for forty years. They had borrowed each other’s tools so long that neither one could have told you who owned the post driver.