The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

The Elevator

I called the post office first. I have a substitute, a rural carrier associate named Dorene, who runs my route when I am off. She had been my sub for six years and had never once turned me down.

“I need you today,” I said. “Family thing.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, and she did not ask me what kind. That is a good sub.

Then I drove to town to the co-op elevator. They keep a back room of garden seed and sweet corn seed for the people around here who still put in a patch for the roadside. The man at the counter had known my dad forty years.

I told him I needed enough sweet corn seed for two acres, the shortest-season yellow and white he had.

He looked at me over his glasses. “Two acres? In June?”

“Today,” I said.

He did not ask why either. He went in the back and came out with what he had: enough of a seventy-eight-day bicolor for about fifty thousand kernels, in bags. It came to four hundred and eighteen dollars. I put it on my card.

At thirty-inch rows and a kernel every nine inches or so, that is about twenty-three thousand seeds an acre. Two acres is near forty-six thousand. I bought a little extra for the hills where the jab drops nothing.

He helped me carry the bags out to my car. When he set the last one in the back seat, he said, “Tell Lyle I said he’s too old for this.”

“He knows,” I said.

The Afternoon

When I got back to the place, my dad’s old tractor was already in the field with the disk on behind it, and the dead corn was going down in front of him in long yellow strips.

He had worked out a plan without telling anybody, the way he always did. He would disk a strip ahead, and we would plant behind him in the fresh dirt. That way the new rows would not be fighting old stalks, and by the time we caught up to him, he would have another strip ready.

Colby was standing at the end of the first strip with both jab planters and a bucket. He had his boots on. He had changed into a green T-shirt, and he had already filled one seed box.

It was going to be hot. By ten o’clock it was eighty-five and climbing, with no clouds at all, the kind of June sky that is so blue it looks painted.

I went in the house and changed into a gray T-shirt and my oldest jeans. I twisted my hair up in a bun and pushed my sunglasses up on my head so I could see the seed box. Then I went out to the shed for the third planter.

The third jab planter was not ours. It was Opal’s. Her late husband had kept one, and when she saw the tractor in the field and my car in the drive in the middle of a workday, she walked across the blacktop with it in her hand. It was painted red.

“My husband used to fill in his low spots with this,” she said, handing it to me. “I never knew why he painted it red.”

“So he could find it in the grass,” I said.

She almost smiled. “That sounds like him.” Then she looked out at the field, at the yellow corn going under the disk, and she did not smile anymore. “I should have said something Tuesday,” she said. “I should have known.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said. “Nobody would think that.”

She put her hand on my arm. “I’ll bring dinner out at noon,” she said, and she walked back across the road.