The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

Before Dark

By six o’clock we were two-thirds of the way across. My right hand had a blister in the web of the thumb that had already broken. Colby had a bandana wrapped around one palm. Dad had stopped twice to sit on the tractor seat for five minutes and drink water.

Opal came back out at six with more tea and a plate of ham sandwiches. This time she brought two folding chairs and made Dad sit in one. He did, for about ten minutes, which was a record.

Around seven, a man I did not know pulled onto the shoulder in a feed truck, got out, looked at the field, and asked if we needed another hand. Dad thanked him and said we were close.

We were not close. But Dad has his pride, and I let him have it.

Late June in northeast Iowa, the sun does not go down until almost nine. That was the only reason it was possible. By eight thirty the light had turned gold again, the way it had been that morning, and the shadows of the three of us were stretched halfway across the field.

Colby jabbed the last hill in the last row with the sun a hand’s width above the Drees grove.

He did not say anything. He closed the planter, stood up, and looked back across the field. Two acres of bare dirt, pocked with a hundred little rows of planter holes, and not one green thing showing.

My dad walked over and put his hand on the back of Colby’s neck. He has big hands, my dad, and they are rough as a cob.

“That’s a good day’s work,” he said.

That is the most my father has ever said to anyone about anything. Colby put his head down and cried, finally, and my dad stood there with his hand on his neck and let him.

I walked to the house so they could have it to themselves.

Summer

It rained on Thursday. Not much, three-quarters of an inch, but enough. By the following Monday there were little green spears coming up in the rows, as straight as a ruler. Not every hill. Maybe nine out of ten. Colby walked it every evening after supper and counted.

We disked the rest of the dead corn under that week. Dad came out every other day to check on it. He never said much. He would walk the rows with his hands in his back pockets and come back and say, “It’s coming,” and get back in his pickup.

Colby restrung the electric fence in August when the ears started forming. He put up an old radio on a post at the corner and left it on a talk station all night, because a raccoon will not come into a field where somebody is talking. My grandpa had done that too.

His father did not call. Not about the corn, not about anything. Colby was supposed to spend every other weekend at Shane’s under the new order, and the first two weekends he did not go, and Shane did not push it.

I did not push it either. That was between the two of them.

Nobody in the county said anything to me about it directly. But I knew it had gotten around. The man at the elevator knew. The pastor’s wife knew. Opal had told somebody, who told somebody, and by the Fourth of July I knew from the way people looked at me in the grocery store that everybody had heard.

That is what a small town does. It does not say anything to your face. It just knows.