The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

The Corner

I should tell you about the corn, because you will not understand any of this unless you understand what that corn was.

Colby started growing sweet corn when he was thirteen. My dad, Lyle Engebretsen, gave him a quarter acre at the corner of the home place, the piece between the house and the county blacktop, and told him that if he grew it and picked it and sold it himself, he could keep every dollar.

That first year he sold it off a card table under the maple by the road. He made a little over nine hundred dollars and put eight hundred of it in the bank at the credit union in town. He was the only kid I ever knew who opened a savings account on purpose.

The next year he did an acre. He made almost three thousand dollars. And this year, the year he turned fifteen, he asked my dad for the whole corner, two acres, and said he would have enough for a pickup by the time he turned sixteen in October.

My dad said yes before Colby finished asking. He rents the rest of the ground to a neighbor, but the corner was his to give, and he gave it.

Colby did everything himself. He had a neighbor plant it the first week of May with a four-row planter, and he paid for that out of his own savings. He walked it for weeds. He strung an electric wire around it in June because the raccoons find sweet corn the same week you do.

He had it figured out on a sheet of notebook paper stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet from the vet. Two acres, about twelve hundred dozen if the raccoons left him alone, five dollars a dozen. Six thousand dollars, give or take.

He had already picked the truck out in his head. Not a new one. Something with a bench seat, he said, and a hitch, and under two hundred thousand miles. He said that like he was asking for the moon.

That was the corn. That was what was standing yellow in the sun on a Monday morning in June with the whorls pulling out like loose teeth.