The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

Jaycee was asleep by nine that night, and every night after. Most nights she would hum something while she brushed her teeth, the hymn from the Sunday before, and then she was out before I got the dishes put away.

I would look in on her and she would be sleeping with her taped hands on top of the covers.

The second morning was worse than the first, because everything hurt. The third was worse than the second. By the fourth morning, your body stops arguing and just gets up.

That is the way with farm work. You get past the part that hurts into the part that is just work.

Darrin’s crew was across the road. The seed company had him on the field directly east of Merlyn’s, eighty acres, and his kids and his crew worked it the same mornings we worked ours.

Some mornings we could hear them laughing through the corn, and his radio playing at the end of the rows.

Most mornings he would stand at the end of his rows with his clipboard and look across the road at us coming out of ours.

He never waved. He never came over. He would watch for a minute and then turn back to his crew.

Jaycee saw him every time. She never said anything about it, and I never asked. Once she said, “His crew’s fast,” the way you would say it was going to rain.

“They are,” I said.

“I’m faster than I was,” she said. “I timed it.” She had too. She had started counting her rows on the back of her hand with a pen, and she was doing a row and a half in the time it had taken her to do one the first day.

On the sixth morning, an old man I knew from church named Bertram walked out of the house at the far end of the field road, where he lives alone, and stood at the end of the row Jaycee was coming out of.

Bertram is eighty-one. He farmed that land for fifty years before he rented it to Merlyn.

He was in his overalls and a straw hat, and he had a thermos with him. He held it out to her.

“Iced tea,” he said. “Sweet. I made it too sweet. You’ll have to help me get rid of it.”

Jaycee drank half the thermos standing there. Bertram watched her and nodded at nobody.

Then he walked back to his house without another word, and the next morning the thermos was there again, sitting on a fence post at the end of the field road.

It was there every morning after that. We never saw him leave it.

The ninth morning Merlyn walked a row with us. He had a bad knee and he was not supposed to, and he made it about halfway before he came out limping and sat on the tailgate.

He did not say anything about it, and neither did we. He just had the Popsicles ready a little earlier than usual.

By the end of the first week we had been through the field once. Every tassel the machines left, Jaycee and I had pulled.