The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

I never told him what I was thinking, which was that it was the third week of June and that is late for sunflowers. A fast branching type takes fifty to sixty days to bloom. That would put us into the middle of August if nothing went wrong.

But you don’t tell a boy all that. You plant, and you pray, and you water.

Our hose wouldn’t reach the far end of the strip, so I bought a hundred feet more at the hardware store. Wyatt still carried his coffee can. He said the hose was for the plants and the can was for the ones he was worried about.

They came up in eight days. All but eleven of them. Wyatt replanted the gaps himself.

He told his dad about the sunflowers every single call. How tall. How many leaves. Which row was winning. My son would put me on afterward and say, “Mom, what is going on out there?”

“Your boy is growing flowers,” I said.

“Is he okay? About the other ones?”

“He’s better than okay.”

In the first week of July we got hail. It came in out of the west in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, white and loud on the roof for about ten minutes. Wyatt stood at the front window with both hands flat on the glass.

When it stopped, we went out. Most of the plants were fine. They were still young and flexible, and they bent. But three of them in the end row had snapped clean at the stem.

Wyatt knelt down by them and cried. He hadn’t cried over the sixty. Not once. But he cried over those three.

I sat down in the dirt beside him and put my arm around him and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. After a while he wiped his nose on his shoulder and said, “Two hundred ninety-seven is still a lot.”

“It’s still a lot,” I said.

At supper that evening, he folded his hands for grace the way he always did. He prayed for his dad on the rig. He prayed for my bad knee. He prayed for the two hundred ninety-seven.

Then he stopped, and opened one eye, and looked at me.

“Can we pray for Mr. Hatch’s alfalfa too? So it doesn’t get hail?”

I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. I said, “Yes, honey. Go ahead.”

So he did. “And please don’t let Mr. Hatch’s alfalfa get hail. Amen.”

I got up from the table and went and stood at the window over the sink a while. I told him I was checking the sky. I wasn’t.

I had spent three weeks being quietly angry at Merle Hatch, and I had kept it to myself, and I had been proud of keeping it to myself. And here was this little boy who had more right to be angry than anybody, praying for the man’s hay.

By the middle of July the sunflowers were up to my shoulders. By the end of July they were over my head. The tall single ones in the back row were pushing past seven feet.

The branching ones were thick with buds. Each plant had a main head starting and a dozen side shoots coming behind it. I started to think we might have more flowers than we knew what to do with.

People started to notice. You can’t hide two hundred feet of sunflowers along a state highway.