The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

The third pass started in the third week. The silks were coming now in the early plants, little green threads at the tops of the ears.

Merlyn walked the end rows every afternoon looking at them, and every afternoon he looked a little easier.

There were not many tassels left. Some rows we would walk the whole quarter mile and find three.

But you walk it anyway, every plant, because it is the three you did not find that the field man finds.

By then Jaycee’s hands had toughened up. She still let me tape them every night. I do not think she needed the tape anymore.

I think she just liked sitting at the table with me at the end of the day, with her hands on the dish towel, telling me about the rows.

“I found one today that was hiding behind a leaf,” she would say. “It was barely out. I almost missed it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” She would look at her taped fingers. “Got it.”

The last morning of the third pass, the eighteenth morning, we came out of the last row at about ten o’clock and there was nothing left to pull.

We had walked every row three times. Merlyn kept the hours in a little spiral notebook in his shirt pocket, and he wrote that morning in, and then he closed it and put it back.

Merlyn said, “Field man’ll be out Monday.” He looked out over the corn, and I could see what it meant to him. A rejected field is a lost year on that ground. He had been growing seed corn for twenty-two years and he had never had one rejected.

“It’s clean,” Jaycee said. She said it plain. “I know it is.”

Merlyn looked at her for a long minute. “I believe you,” he said.

The field man came out Monday morning. His name was Fletcher, a quiet man in a seed company polo shirt with a counter clicker in his hand.

He shook Merlyn’s hand and went into the corn by himself, and we stood at the end of the field road and waited.

Merlyn stood with his hat in both hands. He did not sit on the tailgate the whole time. Jaycee stood next to him. Neither of them said anything.

Bertram came down from his house and stood with them, and the three of them stood in a row at the end of the field and looked at the corn like it was a church.

Fletcher walked the field for over an hour. He came out at three different places, and went back in at three different places.

Every time he came out, he looked at his clicker and wrote something on his clipboard, and then went back in.

When he finally came out the last time, he walked straight to Merlyn and put out his hand.

“Clean,” he said. “Cleanest I’ve walked this year. Who’d you have on it?”

Merlyn did not answer him. He just turned his head and looked at Jaycee.

Fletcher looked at her too. He looked at her taped fingers. “Just her?” he said.