The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

Spray doesn’t show right away. People don’t always know that. It takes four or five days, sometimes a week. The plant goes on looking fine while it’s already dying inside.

So for five days Wyatt watered sixty plants that were already dead, and neither one of us knew it.

That’s what I kept thinking about, that Thursday morning, standing at the fence with my house shoes soaked. Five mornings of that coffee can.

I went inside and found Wyatt sitting at the kitchen table in front of a bowl of cereal he wasn’t eating.

“Did Mr. Hatch do it?” he asked.

I wasn’t going to lie to him. Children always know when you’re lying, and it teaches them that the truth is something grown-ups hide.

“I think he sprayed his fence line,” I said. “And I think the spray got our flowers too.”

“Was he mad at me?”

“No, honey. I don’t think he was thinking about you at all.”

I could have marched across that fence and had it out with Merle Hatch. I’m 70 years old and I’ve broken up fights in a junior high hallway. I can raise my voice when I need to.

But I kept coming back to one plain thing. Arguing with Merle would never grow a flower back. Not one.

A friend at church said to call the county, and I could have. But a complaint takes weeks, and a boy’s summer does not. Still, I believe a person should be asked. So that afternoon I walked down our drive, along the highway shoulder, and up Merle’s lane to his gate. It was a bright day, a hot wind out of the south.

Merle was in his machine shed with the big door open, working on the cutter bar of his swather. He’s 66, a big, quiet man who has farmed that ground since his father passed. His wife died two winters ago, and since then he’s mostly kept to himself.

He saw me coming and wiped his hands on a rag. He didn’t come out. He let me come to him.

“Merle,” I said. “Did you spray the fence line Saturday?”

“I spray it every June.”

“My grandson had sixty sunflowers planted along there. On our side.”

He looked at me for a while. “I saw something growing. Figured it was volunteers.”

“They were in a row, Merle. A straight row.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He folded the rag and set it on the bench.

“Years back,” he said, “I had Canada thistle come off that fence line. Blew right into my alfalfa. Took me three years to get it out, and I lost a whole cutting the first year. You know what a cutting’s worth?”

I did know. I’ve been a farm wife. A cutting of alfalfa on that much ground is real money, and thistle is a misery, and once it’s in you fight it for years.

“I’m sorry about your alfalfa,” I said. “But those were sunflowers. A little boy planted them.”

“Shouldn’t have planted on my line,” he said.

That was it. That was all he gave me. He turned back to the cutter bar.

I want to be fair to Merle. He had a reason, and it was a real one. Thistle had cost him money he couldn’t spare, and a man who has lost something once gets careful in a way that doesn’t always look like sense.