The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

I’ll tell you what I noticed. Around the middle of August, he started slowing down. Not stopping. Just slowing. From sixty-five to fifty, maybe, right along the strip, and then speeding back up past the stand.

Every morning for three weeks, Merle Hatch drove past two hundred feet of sunflowers taller than he was, with a little boy in an orange shirt standing at the end of them, and a sign with a backward S painted over.

I didn’t do that to him. I want to be clear about that. I never said a word to him all summer. I never said his name in town. If people knew, it was because they could see a fence line and a highway and do their own arithmetic.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it. A man who sprays a little boy’s flowers doesn’t get to choose what he has to look at afterward. That’s not a punishment I gave him. That’s just how roads work.

It was Wyatt’s idea to take him some.

It was the last week of August, a Thursday morning. We’d just come in from cutting and Wyatt was sitting on the porch step with a bunch in his lap that he’d picked out special. Seven of them. Big ones.

“Who are those for?” I asked.

“Mr. Hatch.”

I sat down on the step beside him. My knee told me about it.

“Honey,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“Why do you want to?”

He thought about it the way he thinks about everything, slow and careful. “Because he doesn’t have any,” he said. “And his wife died. And we have two hundred ninety-seven.”

I didn’t have an argument for that. I don’t think there is one.

So we walked over. Down the drive, along the shoulder, up Merle’s lane. It was about ten in the morning, bright and already hot. Merle’s pickup was gone. He was at the co-op.

Wyatt walked up onto Merle’s porch by himself. I waited at the bottom of the steps. He laid the flowers down on the bench by the door, very carefully, the way he’d set down the coffee can on the fence post that day in June.

Then he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and tucked it under the stems.

I didn’t read it. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t mine to read.

Around eleven, Merle’s pickup came back from town. It slowed down along the strip the way it had been doing. Then it went on up his lane. We were out at the stand and we watched it go.

Labor Day weekend, my son came home. He drove straight through from North Dakota, eleven hours, and he pulled into the drive on Saturday morning in broad daylight and got out of his truck and just stood there.

The strip was past its peak by then. Some of the big single heads were starting to droop and go to seed. But the branching ones were still putting out flowers, and from the highway it was still a wall of gold.

Wyatt came flying off the porch and hit his dad around the middle so hard he almost knocked him down. My son picked him up, eight years old and all knees and elbows, and held him there in the drive a long time.

Then Wyatt took him by the hand and showed him everything. The rows. The hail ones, where he’d put a stick in the ground for each one. The stand. The sign. The coffee can. The bike.