The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

Darrin met us at the end of his field at noon on the first day, standing in the dust where the rows quit and the gravel road began, with a clipboard under his arm and his cap pushed back.

Jaycee came out of the corn behind the other kids, red in the face, wiping her safety glasses on the sleeve of her shirt.

She had been in there since a quarter to six. She was fourteen years old and she was smiling.

I had pulled up to take her home. I was out of my car and halfway to her when Darrin stepped between us, not unkindly, the way a man steps in front of a gate he does not want opened.

“Steph,” he said. “Can I talk to you a minute.”

He did not wait for me to answer. He said it plain, the way he says everything. “She’s slow. She’s a good kid, but she’s slow. I can’t carry slow. Don’t bring her tomorrow.”

Behind him his own three kids were passing the water jug around. His oldest is sixteen, his middle boy is fifteen, and his youngest, a girl, had turned twelve in May.

Every one of them was on his payroll at fifteen dollars an hour.

I had seen his youngest come out of her row twenty minutes before Jaycee did.

I had also heard one of the older girls on the crew tease his youngest about all the tassels she had walked right past. I did not say so. It was not the time.

“She’s never done it before,” I said. “It’s her first day, Darrin.”

“I know it is.” He tapped the clipboard against his leg. “Steph, the company docks me for every tassel we leave. They walk it, they count, and if we’re over, it comes out of my check per acre. I need kids who can keep up. I’ve got fifty acres a day to get through some days.”

That was his reason, and I knew it was a real one. Seed corn is not sweet corn.

If the tassels stay on the wrong rows and shed pollen, the whole field can be worth nothing to the company. A contractor who leaves too many does not get hired back.

But his own twelve-year-old was slower than mine, and she was going back tomorrow. He knew that too. He just did not look at it.

Jaycee had walked up beside me by then. She had heard enough. She held her safety glasses in both hands and looked at her uncle and said, “Okay. Thank you for letting me try.” Then she walked to the car.

Darrin looked at the ground. “She’s welcome next year, maybe,” he said. “When she’s bigger.”

I said, “Sure,” and I got in the car. I did not slam the door. I have never in my life slammed a door at Darrin Kramer, and I was not going to start in front of his crew.

We drove home on the blacktop with the windows down because the air in the car was too hot to breathe.

The corn on both sides of the road stood over the top of the car. July in east-central Illinois is green from ditch to ditch.