The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

I handed sacks across that tailgate until my arms ached. Paper grocery sacks, thirteen ears in each, the tops folded over twice.

My red gingham shirt was stuck to my back. My braid came loose and I didn’t have time to fix it.

Tobin worked that cash box like a bank teller. He counted out loud. He said “thank you, ma’am” and “thank you, sir.” When somebody’s grandson came through with a little sandwich bag of quarters, Tobin counted every quarter out on the tailgate in rows of four and said, “That’s exactly five dollars. You’re good.”

And all that time, Grandpa sat in his green lawn chair in the sun with his empty coffee can on his knee and shook every hand that was held out to him.

Some of those people he had not seen in years. Some of them I had never seen at all.

He knew most of them by name, and the ones he didn’t know, he asked.

At one point, I looked over and he had his eyes closed and his head tipped back a little, and his lips were moving.

I thought for a second he was tired. Then I heard him. He was humming the old hymn Grandma used to sing on wash day, very quiet, under all that market noise.

Ottilie brought him a cup of coffee from the wagon about nine and wouldn’t let me pay for it. She brought Tobin a lemonade.

She didn’t say anything to me about Lowell, but she squeezed my arm when she went back to her table, and that was plenty.

About ten o’clock a man from the bank came through, a loan officer who knew Grandpa from his farming days. He bought a dozen, and then he leaned over and said something quietly in Grandpa’s ear.

Grandpa shook his head. The man straightened up, put his hand on Grandpa’s shoulder for a second, and walked off.

I asked Grandpa later what he’d said. Grandpa told me the man had offered to cover the nine hundred himself, as a gift, and Grandpa had told him thank you, but no.

“That’s not his to pay,” Grandpa said. That was all he would say about it.

By a quarter to eleven, the truck bed was bare except for one sack. The burlap was lying flat and wet on the bed liner.

Tobin counted the cash box twice, his lips moving, and then he looked up at me and said, “Two hundred ninety-five dollars, Mom. Fifty-nine dozen.”

“One left,” I said.

“Grandpa,” Tobin said, “we’re almost sold out.”

Grandpa nodded. But he wasn’t looking at the truck. He was looking past me, out toward the street on the far side of the grass square.

I turned around to see what he was looking at.

Lowell had just pulled in by the curb.

He parked his truck and sat there in the cab with the engine off for what felt like a very long minute.

I could see him through the windshield, both hands on the wheel. Then he opened the door and got out and started across the grass toward us.

The line went quiet. It went quiet the way a church goes quiet before the first hymn, all at once, people’s voices dropping off one by one.