The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

Jab, Step

Here is what planting two acres by hand is like.

You jab the planter into the ground and squeeze the handle open. You hear the little click of the seed dropping. You close it, step forward the length of your foot and a half, and do it again. Every now and then you press the dirt shut with your heel.

The first hundred are easy. By the first thousand, you know where every muscle in your back is. By the third thousand, your hands have stopped asking you anything and just do it.

We worked in rows side by side. Colby took the row next to mine, and Dad came off the tractor once he had a long enough strip disked, and took a third row with the other old planter. When Colby’s seed box ran low, he went back to the bucket and refilled it from the bag.

We did not talk much. I do not think any of us could have.

Every so often a car went by on the blacktop and slowed. Out here, if you see three people jab-planting a whole field in June, you slow down. A couple of them honked. One of them was the pastor’s wife, and she waved and kept going, and I knew the whole church would know by supper.

At noon Opal came across the road with a cooler. She had made egg salad sandwiches and a gallon of iced tea, and a pan of bars she must have had in the freezer. We sat on the tailgate of my dad’s pickup in the shade of the maple and ate without saying much.

My hands were shaking a little when I held the tea. Dad’s were not. Seventy years old and his hands were steady as a fence post.

“How many rows is that?” Colby asked.

Dad looked out at the field. “Little over a third,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

He said it like a man saying the sun will come up. I believed him because I have always believed him. I am not sure he believed it himself.