The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

“Dad, you can’t keep cash in a coffee can,” my uncle Lowell said, and he reached over the kitchen sink and lifted it off the shelf like it was his to lift.

“I’ll run it to the bank in Washington. Keep it safe.”

It was a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August, hot and still, with the box fan in the window pushing the same warm air back and forth across Grandpa’s kitchen.

I was sitting at his table filling his pill box for the week, Monday through Sunday, morning and night.

Grandpa was in his chair by the back door with his straw hat on his knee. He looked at the can in Lowell’s hands for a long moment.

Then he looked at me, and then he looked back at his son.

“There’s nine hundred dollars in there,” Grandpa said. “I counted it Sunday after church. That’s the great-grandkids’ Christmas.”

“Then it ought to be in a bank and not over a sink where anybody could walk in and take it,” Lowell said.

He laughed a little when he said it. I remember that laugh, because later I would hear it in my head every time I washed a dish.

I said, “Lowell, Grandpa’s had that can on that shelf for thirty years. Nobody has ever walked in and taken it.”

I said it lightly. I did not want a fight in Grandpa’s kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon over a coffee can.

“Well, times change, Wren,” he said. He tucked the can under his arm like a football. “I’ll bring you the deposit slip, Dad. You’ll sleep better. You’ll see.”

Grandpa didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He just nodded once, slow, the way he nods at the auctioneer when he has decided not to bid.

The screen door slapped shut behind Lowell, and a minute later I heard his truck start and turn out of the lane.

The kitchen was very quiet after that. The box fan hummed. A fly bumped the window. Grandpa set his hat on the table and smoothed the band with his thumb, which is what he does when he is thinking and does not want to say what he is thinking.

“He’s going to put it in the bank,” Grandpa said finally. It was not quite a question.

“Sure he is,” I said. I snapped the lid shut on Thursday night’s pills. I did not believe it, and I could tell from his face that Grandpa did not believe it either. But neither of us said so.

I should tell you about the can, because if you do not understand the can you will not understand the rest of this.

My grandpa is Emmett Rasche. He is eighty-six years old and he has lived his whole life within six miles of the farm where he was born in Washington County, Iowa.

He farmed corn and beans and raised hogs until his knees quit, and then he rented the ground out to a neighbor.

But he kept two acres behind the machine shed for sweet corn. He has grown sweet corn on that same patch since before I was born.

He plants it in three batches, a couple of weeks apart, so it comes on all through July and August instead of all at once.