The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

Why I Did Not Make The Call

I know what you are thinking. I thought it too, standing there with my keys still in my hand.

Call the sheriff. Call my lawyer. Call the state, even, because there are people at the Department of Agriculture whose whole job is investigating spray that ends up where it should not. I had the number of every one of those people in my phone.

And I did think about it. For maybe two full minutes I stood at the edge of that field and thought about every phone call I could make and every piece of paper I could file.

Then I looked at my son.

He was holding a dead corn plant and trying very hard not to cry in front of me, because he was fifteen and he thought he was too old for it. And I understood that whatever happened next, it was going to be the first thing he learned about his father that he could not take back.

I did not want that first thing to be a courtroom. I did not want my son sitting on a hard bench in Decorah listening to a lawyer explain to a judge what his dad had done to his corn. He had already sat in one judge’s chambers that month. That was enough for a boy his age.

And there was the plain arithmetic, too. Sweet corn takes about seventy-five to eighty days. If we planted that day, the twenty-second of June, it would come in around the second week of September. If we spent a week on phone calls and paperwork, we would lose the window.

A lawsuit might get him six thousand dollars in two years. Seed in the ground that day might get him a crop.

“Colby,” I said. “Put your boots on.”

He looked at me.

“We’re going to plant it again,” I said. “Today. All of it.”

He stared at the field. Two acres. It looks small when you drive past it. It does not look small when you are standing in the middle of it thinking about doing it over with your hands.

“We don’t have a planter,” he said.

“Grandpa does,” I said, and I went inside to call my dad.

Grandpa

My dad is seventy years old. He farmed this ground for forty-four years and retired eight years ago, the spring after my mother died. He sold the line of machinery at a farm auction and moved into a little house in town by the church so he could walk to coffee.

He did not sell everything. He kept an old tractor and an eight-foot disk for the garden and for the food plot he puts in every year for the deer he never shoots. And in the back of his garage, on two nails, he kept a pair of hand jab planters.

If you have never seen one, a jab planter looks like a long steel shaft with a handle across the top, a little seed hopper on the side and a steel beak at the bottom. You jab the beak into the ground, squeeze the handle to open it, and it drops a seed or two into the hole. Then you step forward and do it again.

Farmers used them to fill in skips, the places where the big planter missed or the creek washed out a corner. Nobody plants a whole field with one anymore. Nobody sane, anyway.

My dad picked up on the second ring. He was already at coffee. I could hear the cups behind him and somebody laughing about the price of fuel.

I told him. I told him in about four sentences, and I kept my voice flat, because if I had let it go I would not have been able to stop it.

He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “Glyphosate?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then there’s nothing in the ground to stop a new crop,” he said. “It doesn’t stay in the dirt. You can plant into it today.” He was quiet again. “I’ll be out in twenty minutes with the tractor. Go get seed.”

That was the whole conversation. My dad has never been a man for a long phone call.