The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

He set his hat straight. He set the coffee can on his knee.

The honey lady came around her table right away. Her name is Ottilie Wenger and she is seventy-two years old, and she has known my grandpa since she was a girl.

She keeps bees on her place north of town and she has sold honey at that market for longer than I have been alive.

“Emmett Rasche,” she said. “I have not seen you up here since your wife passed.” Then she bent over and put her arms around his neck and held on, right there in front of everybody, and Grandpa patted her on the back with his shaking hand.

When she straightened up she looked at the sign, and then she looked at me, and I saw her eyes go to the empty can on his knee.

She didn’t say anything about it. She just opened her change apron and said, “I’ll take the first dozen. I want to be the first.”

Tobin got so nervous he nearly dropped the cash box. Ottilie handed him a ten, and he counted five ones back into her hand, slow and out loud, and then stood there frozen until Grandpa said quietly, “That’s right, son. You did that right.”

Ottilie pressed one of the ones back into his palm. “That’s for the change maker,” she said. Tobin folded it in half and tucked it into his shirt pocket, and he would not tell me why.

I didn’t find out until later what he meant to do with it.

The second customer was a man about Grandpa’s age in a seed cap. He shook Grandpa’s hand and said, “I bought my first sweet corn off you in nineteen seventy-four, Emmett. Didn’t know you were still at it.”

Grandpa said, “Still at it,” and the man bought two dozen.

Then a young mother with a baby on her hip and a little boy hanging on her leg. Then a couple from Iowa City who had driven down for the market.

Then one of the regulars, a widow named Della, who told me she had bought Grandpa’s corn off the honor table every summer for twenty years.

“I always put an extra dollar in his honor box,” Della said, “because I know he gives half of it away.” Grandpa told her he’d always wondered who that was.

People kept looking at the coffee can. It sat there on his knee all morning, and Grandpa held onto it with both hands.

Finally one of the old men from church asked him, “What’s the can for, Emmett? You’re not collecting for the missions?”

Grandpa just said, “Waiting on somebody.”

The man looked at the can, and looked at Grandpa, and then he looked at me. I kept handing out corn. After a while he nodded and walked on to the next stall, but I saw him stop at the coffee wagon and say something to another man, and that man looked back toward our truck.

That is how it goes in a small town. Nobody said Lowell’s name out loud. Nobody had to. By eight o’clock the line at my tailgate ran clear past the honey table, and I do not believe every one of those people came for sweet corn.