The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

Uncle Vernon was snapping a new padlock onto Grandpa’s corn crib when I pulled in from my shift.

It was twenty to four on a Saturday, the day of the first hard frost, and the crib door stood open behind him.

I could see the bare plywood of the back wall from the open door. That wall should have been buried.

It should have been full to the plywood with shelled corn, about 350 bushels, gold and dry and paid for.

I set my lunch bag on the hood of the truck and walked over in my scrubs.

My feet were tired from eight hours on the floor at the hospital in Winchester, and for a second I thought I had the wrong building.

“Vernon,” I said. “Where is my corn?”

He tugged the lock to make sure it caught. He is sixty-four, my father’s older brother, a big man with Grandpa’s shoulders and none of Grandpa’s patience. He did not turn around right away.

“Sold it this morning,” he said. “Man came with a truck and augered it out. Paid cash.”

“That was my corn. I paid fourteen hundred dollars for that corn in September. You watched the elevator truck put it in there.”

“You owed me rent on the space,” he said, and now he turned. “Three winters you’ve used my crib for free. I figure it comes out about even.”

I want to tell you I said something sharp. I did not.

I stood there in the cold with my hands in my scrub pockets and did the arithmetic I always do, because arithmetic is what I have instead of money.

Our house has no furnace that anybody would trust. It has a corn stove in the front room, a good one Grandpa bought the year before he died, and once it turns cold it burns between one and two bushels of shelled corn a day.

That crib was our winter. Three hundred and fifty bushels gets a house like ours from the end of October to the middle of April if you keep the back bedroom shut and wear socks. I had it planned to the week.

“Asa came out,” Vernon said, like he was reporting the weather. “Told the driver it was his mom’s corn. I sent him back in the house. That boy needs to learn whose place this is.”

That was the part that put the heat in my face. My son is thirteen.

He had stood out here by himself, in front of a stranger and his own great-uncle, and tried to save our winter, and he had been sent indoors like a dog off the porch.

“He was right,” I said quietly. “It was his mom’s corn.”

Vernon climbed into his pickup and backed it around. He rolled the window down halfway. “There’s a lot of empty houses in this county with furnaces in them, Hollie. You could always rent one.”

Then he drove the mile back to his own place, and I stood alone in front of a locked, empty crib with the frost still white on the north side of every post.