The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

My son walked the whole strip with him, all two hundred feet, listening. When they came back to the stand, my son looked at me over Wyatt’s head the way Nora had, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

That Monday was Labor Day. Wyatt and his dad took the bucket into town together for Opal’s counter, and the old farmers at the long table shook my son’s hand and told him what a boy he had.

That afternoon, I was sitting at the stand by myself. My son and Wyatt had gone fishing at the reservoir. It was quiet. A few cars. A woman from Otis bought two.

And then I saw Merle coming down his lane on foot.

He didn’t take the pickup. He walked. Down his lane, along the shoulder, past the end of his fence, past the whole strip of flowers, slow, like a man who had decided to do something and was giving himself time to change his mind.

He stopped at the stand. He had his cap in his hands.

He looked at the sunflowers for a long time. Then at the sign. Then at the coffee can.

“Boy around?” he asked.

“Fishing with his dad.”

He nodded. He turned his cap around in his hands, once, all the way around.

“He left a note,” Merle said. “With the flowers.”

“I know he did. I didn’t read it.”

Merle reached into his shirt pocket and took out a folded piece of notebook paper. It had been folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone soft. He held it out to me.

I didn’t want to take it. But he held it out until I did.

It was in Wyatt’s big, careful second-grade printing. It said: “Dear Mr. Hatch. These are for you because you don’t have any. I am sorry about your alfalfa and the thistles. I prayed it would not get hail. From Wyatt.”

I read it twice. Then I folded it back up along the soft creases and handed it back to him, because it was his.

Merle put it in his pocket. He looked out at the highway a minute.

“Sixty,” he said. “That’s what it was. Along the fence.”

“Sixty.”

“I knew they were in a row,” he said. “When I sprayed. I knew. I told myself they were volunteers. They weren’t volunteers.”

I didn’t say anything. I let him have the quiet. Sometimes a man needs to hear his own words land without anybody picking them up for him.

“I should’ve walked over,” he said. “It’s a quarter mile.”

“It is,” I said.

“I’ll tell the boy I’m sorry myself. When he gets back. I’m not going to have you do it.”

“All right, Merle.”

He stood there a little longer. A grain truck went by, and the front row of sunflowers swayed toward us and then back. Merle watched them sway.

“Thistle’s a misery,” he said quietly. “But I never lost a thing to sunflowers in my life.”

Then he cleared his throat, and set his cap back on his head, and looked down at the dirt along the edge of the strip, where a few of the big heads had already dropped their seed.

“Fern,” he said. “Next spring. Along the fence. How deep do you plant them?”