The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

We counted out loud, thirteen ears to the dozen, the way Grandpa always counts. He says a dozen is twelve but a dozen of sweet corn is thirteen, because people shuck it at home and find one they don’t like, and he doesn’t want anybody to feel cheated.

That’s a baker’s dozen, and it’s how he has sold corn for sixty years.

We came out at sixty dozen even. Tobin wrote it on the back of his hand in ballpoint pen. “That’s three hundred dollars,” he said. “If we sell it all.”

“If we sell it all,” I said.

Then I went into the machine shed and found the sign.

Grandma painted that sign before I was born. It is a plain board of weathered wood, maybe two feet wide, with the words brushed on by hand in black, every letter square and steady. It says Emmett’s Sweet Corn.

It used to hang off the table at the end of the lane. When Grandpa went to the honor box table a few years back, he took the sign down and leaned it in the corner of the shed, because the wind kept knocking it down and he couldn’t climb up to fix it anymore.

It was behind a roll of snow fence, covered in dust and mouse tracks.

I carried it out into the daylight and wiped it off with a wet rag. The black letters were faded but every one was still there.

Grandpa came out of the house and saw me holding it, and he stood very still for a moment.

“I’d forgot about that,” he said. Then he cleared his throat and said, “You’ll want baling twine. There’s some on the nail by the door.”

Saturday morning we left Grandpa’s place at six. The sun was just up and the fields were gold with it. Grandpa rode in the passenger seat with his straw hat on and his white short-sleeve shirt pressed and buttoned to the top, and his suspenders, and his good shoes.

He had the empty coffee can on his knee. I had not told him to bring it. I had not even thought of it.

But when I came out to the truck, there he was with that can in his lap, and he did not explain, and I did not ask.

Tobin rode in the middle with the cash box, which was a fishing tackle box with the trays taken out.

I had gone to the bank Friday afternoon and gotten forty dollars in ones and fives for change. Tobin had counted it four times.

Kalona is a small town, with the Amish all around it. On a Saturday morning in August there are buggies tied up on the side streets, and Amish girls selling pies and noodles, and town people with their coffee walking from stall to stall.

The market sets up on a grass square with big old shade trees on the edges.

Our spot was in the sun, next to a long table covered in jars of honey that glowed like lamps when the light came through them.

I backed the truck in, left the tailgate up, and tied Grandma’s sign to it with baling twine so it hung down across the back where everybody could see it.

I pulled the burlap back. The corn was still cool and green and wet. I set Grandpa’s green lawn chair on the grass beside the tailgate, in the sun, and I helped him down into it.