The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

She was slow. Darrin was not wrong about that. She stopped at every plant and looked up into it, and if she could not see the tassel she pulled the top leaves apart with her fingers to make sure it had not just not come up yet.

When she found one hiding she would say, “Got you,” under her breath. Every single time. I heard it maybe four hundred times that first morning, from the next row over. “Got you.” “Got you.”

By ten the sun was up full and the dew had burned off and the heat came down into the rows. There is no wind down in tall corn.

It is like a kitchen with the oven on and the windows shut. Your shirt goes from wet with dew to wet with sweat, and you do not notice when it changes.

We quit at noon. That was the rule Merlyn made, and it was a good one.

After noon the heat gets dangerous for anybody, and it is no place for a fourteen-year-old. We came out of the last row onto the field road, and there was Merlyn.

He was sitting on his tailgate with a red cooler beside him. When he saw us, he opened the lid and held out two Popsicles without a word.

Grape for Jaycee. Orange for me. He had asked nobody what we liked. He had just guessed, and he had guessed right.

Jaycee sat down in the grass at the end of the row with her back against his back tire and ate hers in about four bites. Then she looked at her hands.

They were already blistered across the inside of her first two fingers on both hands, where the tassel stalks rub when you pull.

I had known they would be. Mine were too. But hers were worse, and she had not said a word all morning.

“Those’ll toughen up,” Merlyn said, looking at them. “Lorene used to tape mine.”

That night at the kitchen sink, after Jaycee’s shower, I doctored her hands.

I washed the blisters with soap and warm water and put on salve and taped her two first fingers on each hand with Nolan’s white tape, the way you would tape a ballplayer.

She held her hands out flat on a dish towel and watched me do it. She did not wince, but I could feel her hold her breath when I pressed the tape down.

“Don’t tell Dad they hurt,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because he’ll say I don’t have to go back.” She looked at me. “And I want to go back.”

I did not tell him. But he knew. He came through the kitchen while I was taping and stopped behind her chair and looked down at her hands on that dish towel.

Then he went out on the back porch and did not come back in for a long time.

When I went out to see about him, he was just standing there looking at the yard light coming on over the shop, with his hands in his pockets. He did not turn around.

“She’s tougher than me,” he said finally. His voice was not right.

“She’s yours,” I said. “That’s where she got it.”