The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

I made a different plan. If Grandpa would not call his own son a thief, then I would put Grandpa back in business, and I would put him where people could see him.

That night I told my husband, Arlo. He works at the grain elevator outside town, and in late August they are getting the bins cleaned and the dryers ready for harvest, so he was working Saturdays.

He listened to the whole thing at the supper table without saying a word.

When I was done, he said, “Your grandpa’s right about the sheriff. Not because Lowell doesn’t have it coming. Because it’s Emmett’s call, and he made it.”

Then he said, “What time do you want to start picking Friday? I’ll go in late.”

That is Arlo. He doesn’t say much, but he never once in twelve years has left me standing in a field by myself.

I called the dentist’s office where I work as a hygienist and told them I needed Friday off for a family thing. I had not taken a day all summer.

Then I called the woman who runs the Saturday market in Kalona, and she said yes, she had a spot open on the grass square, next to the honey lady.

Friday morning we were in the patch at first light. The grass was soaked with dew, and the corn leaves were wet and cold and slapped at our faces and arms.

By the time we’d gone ten feet into the rows, all four of us were soaked to the elbows.

Arlo took the far rows. He picks fast, with a snap and a twist, the way you’re supposed to, pulling each ear down and away from the stalk so it breaks clean.

He had an old feed sack over his shoulder and he filled it in no time.

Tobin hauled the full sacks to my truck. He is nine and skinny as a fence post, and the sacks were nearly as big as he was, but he would not let anybody help him.

He dragged them across the grass, leaving a dark track in the dew, and heaved them up over the tailgate one at a time.

Grandpa walked the rows slowly, and he did not pick much, because his hands shake now and the ears are hard to snap.

But he went down the rows ahead of us, pulling back the husk on an ear here and there with his thumbnail and looking at the kernels.

“That one’s ready,” he’d say. “Pick that row. Leave this one, it needs another day.” He’d press a kernel with his thumbnail and a little milk would come out, and he’d nod.

His hands shake, but his eye does not, and he was not wrong once all morning.

He made us check the tips for worms. If an ear had a worm in the tip, we broke the tip off clean and it went in a separate pile for the hogs down the road, or for our own supper.

He would not sell a wormy ear. He never has.

We picked until almost nine. Then we laid the corn in the truck bed and covered it with wet burlap sacks to keep it cool, and I parked the truck in the shade of the machine shed.

Arlo went off to his shift at the elevator. Tobin and I counted.