The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

The corn was yellow from the top down. That is how I knew before Colby said a word. Weed killer on corn does not start at the bottom like drought does. It starts in the whorl, in the new leaves, where the plant is still growing.

It was a Monday in late June, a little after six in the morning, and I was supposed to be at the post office by seven to case my route. I had my keys in my hand and my lunch cooler on the porch rail.

My son was standing in the middle of his two acres in his socks. He had not even put his boots on. He was fifteen years old, and he had a corn plant pulled up in each hand like he was weighing them.

“Mom,” he said. That was all. He did not have to say anything else.

I walked out across the yard in my work shoes. The grass was wet. The sun was just up over the Drees grove across the blacktop, and everything was gold and quiet, the way a June morning in northeast Iowa is supposed to be.

The corn had been hip high on Friday. I knew because Colby had stood in it Friday evening and held his hand flat against his hip, grinning, and said, “Knee high by the Fourth, and it’s only the nineteenth.”

Now every plant on the two acres had a pale yellow heart. The new leaves pulled out of the whorl like a loose tooth. The bottom leaves still looked green, which made it worse, because it looked like it ought to be fine.

“Pull the top,” I said, though I knew.

He did. The whorl slid out in his fingers, soft and rotten at the bottom, and he smelled it and dropped it on the ground. That is what glyphosate does. It does not knock corn down. It kills the growing point and lets the plant stand there and die.

I am not a farmer. I am a rural mail carrier. But I was raised on this place, and I was married for sixteen years to a man who sprayed other people’s fields for a living, and you learn things whether you want to or not.

“It’s all of it,” Colby said. “I walked every row. It’s all of it.”

There were tire tracks in the ground. You could see them if you knew to look, two narrow tracks running straight down the field, set wide apart, the kind a self-propelled sprayer leaves in a planted field. The tracks went the length of the rows and back, three passes.

Three passes with a hundred-foot boom covers two acres and then some. Whoever did it had not been driving through. He had been driving down.

Colby looked at the tracks. Then he looked at me. He was fifteen, but right then he looked about nine, and I would have given anything I owned to make it not be what we both knew it was.

“Tuesday,” I said. “Opal said she saw a sprayer on the corner Tuesday morning.”

She had. Opal Drees lives across the blacktop, sixty-eight years old, a widow, and she misses nothing that moves on that road. She had mentioned it Tuesday at the mailbox when I came by with her mail. She said the Haack sprayer had been on our corner with the booms out, and she figured I had hired Shane to spray the fence line for thistles.

I had not hired anybody. I had not even thought about it again. It had been a long week, and I had a lot on my mind that had nothing to do with thistles.

The week before that, on a Monday, a district court judge in Decorah had sat my son down in her chambers without either of his parents in the room and asked him where he wanted to live.

Colby told her. He told her he wanted to stay with me.

He did not tell me what he said, and I did not ask. But the judge’s order came on Thursday, and his father’s sprayer was on our corner the Tuesday in between.