The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

The Question

It was about two o’clock, in the worst of the heat, when Colby asked.

We were near the middle of the field. I was bent over my row, pushing that red planter into the dirt, and he was one row over, holding the burlap seed sack against his hip so he could refill without walking back to the bucket. The sun was right overhead and the light was so bright it made everything look white.

Behind us the old corn stood yellow and dying, hip high, the rows we had not gotten to yet. In front of us were the new rows, bare dirt with nothing showing, just the little dents where the planter went in. From the field I could see the white farmhouse and the county blacktop, and the corner where Colby’s card table had stood the summer he was thirteen.

“Why would he do that?” Colby said.

I did not look up right away. I jabbed the planter in and opened it and heard the seed drop.

“I don’t know, honey,” I said.

“Yes, you do,” he said.

That stopped me. I straightened up. My back made a noise.

He was looking at me across the row with the burlap sack still on his hip, sandy hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, and he was not crying. He was just asking. He wanted the truth, and he was old enough to get it.

So I told him what I thought, which was the truest thing I knew.

“I think your dad thought that if there was nothing to keep you here, you’d come home to him,” I said. “I think he thought the corn was the reason you wanted to stay.”

Colby was quiet a long time.

“It wasn’t the corn,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“It was never the corn.” He looked down at the dirt. “It was that he yells. Not at me. Just at everything. He yells at the radio. He yells at the cows on the road. I just wanted it to be quiet.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing I could say that would have been better than not saying anything.

“Does that make me a bad son?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It makes you a boy who told a judge the truth when somebody asked him. That’s all it makes you.”

He nodded. He refilled the seed box. Then he bent back over his row, and after a minute I bent back over mine, and we did not talk about it again that day.

The Sprayer On The Road

About four o’clock, Shane went by.

I knew his pickup before I could see who was driving it. Everybody out here knows everybody’s pickup. He was coming from the north on the blacktop, probably from a job, and he slowed down at the corner the way every other car had.

He did not stop. He slowed down to almost nothing, and he looked out at the field, at the three of us bent over our rows, at the disk sitting at the end of the strip, at the yellow corn going down.

My dad stood up straight with his planter in his hand and looked right back at him. He did not wave. He did not shake his head. He just stood there and looked at him, the way he used to look at a calf that had gotten through the fence.

Shane drove on.

Colby had not looked up. I do not know if he saw. I never asked him.

“Keep going,” my dad said quietly. And we kept going.