The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

I keep books part time for four farm families and the hardware store, and Merlyn has been one of mine since his wife, Lorene, passed three winters ago.

Merlyn is sixty-eight. He farms three hundred acres a mile east of us, and every year he grows forty acres of seed corn under contract for the same seed company Darrin detassels for.

The contract pays better than field corn, but it comes with work.

He was not looking at the ledger. He was looking out the window over the sink at the forty acres across his yard, and he was turning his coffee cup around and around on the table without drinking from it.

“You okay, Merlyn?” I asked.

“My crew quit me,” he said. “Saturday. All six.”

He had hired a crew of high school kids himself for the last two summers, a neighbor boy’s bunch, to do his hand pulling.

A bigger contractor out of the next county had offered them two dollars more an hour and a bus ride, and they had gone.

“The company already ran the cutter and the puller through,” he said. “Those get most of it. But what they miss has got to come out by hand, and it’s got to come out before the silks come. I’ve got ten days, maybe. Then it’s shedding, and then it’s too late.”

“Can’t the company send a crew?”

“They tried. Every crew around is booked solid till August.” He finally took a drink of his coffee. “Darrin’s full up. I asked him Sunday after church.”

I sat there with his pencil in my hand. I thought about Jaycee taping her notebook paper back up inside her closet door, where it had come loose. I thought about her saying, I went back and got them.

I heard myself say it before I had decided to. “Jaycee and me.”

Merlyn turned and looked at me. He has pale blue eyes that do not miss much, and he looked at me a long time without saying anything, like he was walking a fence line in his head.

“Forty acres is a lot of corn for two people, Steph.”

“I know what it is.”

“It’s three passes, probably. More if it comes on uneven, and it’s coming on uneven this year. That’s every morning, first light till the heat gets bad. Three weeks of it.”

“I know.”

He set the cup down. “Darrin cut her,” he said. It was not a question. Word gets around a county faster than rain.

“He did.”

Merlyn nodded slowly. “Fifteen an hour,” he said. “Same as anybody pays. For both of you.”

“Just her,” I said. “I’ll take mine out in sweet corn.”

He almost smiled. “You’ll take it out in a lot of sweet corn,” he said, and he shook my hand across the table like we were settling on a load of hay.

When I told Jaycee that afternoon, she was in the calf pen with a bottle in each hand. She stopped and looked at me over the gate with both calves butting at her knees.

“Just you and me?” she said.

“Just you and me.”

“For the whole field?”

“For the whole field.”

She thought about it the way her daddy thinks about things, quiet, with her mouth set. Then she said, “Can I still check every one?”