The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

But a reason is not the same as being right. He saw something growing in a straight row on my side of that fence. He could have walked to my door. It’s a quarter mile. He didn’t.

And he didn’t say sorry to the boy. Not then, and not for a long time after.

Two hundred feet of it. Maybe a little more.

Nowhere near Merle’s fence.

When I got home, I went out to the shed. My husband’s old rear-tine tiller was back in the corner under a tarp, where it had been since the last garden he ever put in.

I pulled the tarp off. The tires were low and there were mouse nests in the shroud. I sat down on an upturned bucket and looked at it for a while.

Wyatt came out and found me there.

“What’s that?”

“That,” I said, “was your grandpa’s tiller. And I am going to need some help with it.”

The tiller wouldn’t start. I pulled that cord until my shoulder burned. I checked the gas, which had gone stale, and drained it, and put in fresh from the mower can. Still nothing.

After church on Sunday, I mentioned it to a young man who farms east of town and sits two pews behind us. He came by Monday morning on his way to the elevator, cleaned the plug and the carburetor, had it running in fifteen minutes, and wouldn’t take a dime.

Before I started, I sat Wyatt down on the porch step.

“I’m going to till up all the grass between the house and the highway,” I said. “The whole strip. And you and I are going to plant sunflowers in it. Not sixty. As many as it’ll hold.”

He looked out at the yard. Then at me. “All of it?”

“All of it.”

“What about Mr. Hatch?”

“Mr. Hatch’s fence is a long way from the highway,” I said. “Nobody’s going to spray this.”

He pressed his tongue into the gap in his teeth. But this time it was a different kind of pressing.

It took me two days to till it. The ground along the highway hadn’t been broken in forty years, and the sod fought me. That tiller dragged me more than I drove it. My hands were blistered by noon the first day.

Wyatt walked behind me the whole time picking up rocks. He put them in a five-gallon bucket and dumped them at the edge of the drive. By the end, there was a pile as high as his waist.

Merle drove past twice that afternoon in his white pickup, on his way to the co-op and back. He didn’t slow down. I didn’t wave.

We went to the co-op ourselves on Wednesday. I bought five more packets of seed, mostly the branching kind this time because they bloom longer. Wyatt counted out the seeds at the kitchen table that night into egg cartons. Three hundred exactly.

We planted the next morning, early, before the heat. I staked a string line so the rows would come out straight. Five rows along the highway, sixty seeds each, a foot apart, an inch deep.

“Sixty,” Wyatt said when he finished the first row. He was quiet for a second. Then he moved the string over and started the second one.