The Pantry Rows on Our Farm

People went past Mom on their way down the steps, and a lot of them stopped. An old man in overalls shook her hand.

A woman with a baby in a sling bent down and said something in her ear, and Mom patted her arm and nodded.

A little boy, maybe six, came up the line holding his mother’s hand and stopped in front of Mom’s chair. He looked at her straw hat. Then he said, “Are you the corn lady?”

“I suppose I am,” Mom said.

“It’s the best corn,” he said, very seriously, and his mother laughed and pulled him on down the steps.

Around ten, Bess came up out of the basement with the notebook in her hand.

She sat down on the top step next to Mom’s chair, a little out of breath, and turned the notebook around so I could see the bottom of the page.

Four thousand and sixty pounds.

“Since the twentieth of June,” Bess said. “Beans, sweet corn, tomatoes. That’s not counting the cucumbers. I didn’t weigh the cucumbers the first two weeks.”

Mom took the notebook out of Bess’s hands and looked at that number for a long time. She did not say anything. She just kept running her thumb along the bottom of the page.

That was when Rod’s pickup came down the street.

I knew it before I saw it, the way you know your own family’s engine. He was coming from the elevator.

He drives that way to get to the café. He was not coming to the church. He did not know we were there.

He slowed down at the corner. I watched him see the line.

I watched him see how long it was, and then I watched him see the back of our pickup, the bushel baskets stacked in it, the husks of the corn sticking up out of the top.

He did not turn into the lot. He pulled up along the curb across the street and stopped. He was not looking at Mom. He had not seen her yet, back in the shade by the door.

He was looking at a man in the line.

The man was about thirty-five, in a work shirt with the sleeves cut off.

He had a little girl on his hip, maybe three years old, and a plastic sack of sweet corn in his other hand. The little girl was gnawing on a raw green bean like it was candy.

It was Isom. He had worked on Rod’s crew at the elevator for six years. In March the co-op had cut the second shift, and Rod had been the one to hand Isom his slip.

Rod told me about it at Easter. He said it was the worst thing he had ever had to do at work.

Isom’s wife cleaned rooms at the motel out by the highway. Her hours had been cut too.

I knew that because she had brought the little girl to the school clinic in May for a cough, and she told me while I listened to the girl’s chest.

I had not known they were coming to the pantry. Rod had not known either. I could see that on his face from across the street.