The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

Rudy and the end rows

Rudy Lantz has rented our twenty acres since before Grandpa died. He is fifty-eight, runs about four hundred acres and a pen of feeder steers, and says maybe twenty words on a talkative day. Grandpa trusted him, and Grandpa did not trust many people.

I caught him in the church parking lot Sunday after the service.

The sun was out and it had warmed up some, and he was standing by his pickup with his wife’s casserole dish under his arm.

“Rudy,” I said. “When are you shelling my twenty?”

“Tuesday, if the weather holds,” he said. “Corn’s down to about eighteen. Good enough.”

“Would you leave me the end rows? Twenty-four rows on each end. I want to pick them by hand for the stove. Take whatever they’re worth off the rent check.”

He looked at me for a long second. Two acres of corn is a strange thing to ask for when you have a crib full, and Rudy knew I had a crib full, because everybody along our road watched the elevator truck fill it in September.

He did not ask why. That is Rudy. He just nodded once and said, “I’ll leave you the end rows. We’ll talk about the rent in the spring.”

I did not tell him about Vernon. I did not tell anybody.

You do not air family business in a church parking lot, and I had decided I was going to fix this with my own two hands or not at all.

The arithmetic was simple and a little frightening. Our field is about a quarter mile long and a little over six hundred feet wide.

Twenty-four rows at thirty inches is sixty feet on each end. That came to close to two acres of corn.

Rudy’s corn had run around 180 bushels an acre on that ground for years.

If we picked it clean, those end rows would give us somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty bushels. Enough for a winter, barely, if nothing went wrong.

What Grandpa left in the cellar

Sunday afternoon I went down the cellar steps with a flashlight and found what I was looking for under a feed sack in the corner.

Grandpa’s hand sheller, cast iron, bolted to a wooden box, with a crank and a flywheel.

He used it to shell seed corn and chicken corn when I was a girl.

You feed the ear into the throat, turn the crank, and the teeth strip the kernels off and spit the cob out the side. One ear at a time.

Asa helped me carry it up the steps. It weighed more than Maisy.

We set it on the back step and I oiled it with the can from the stove shed, and Asa cranked it empty to hear it spin.

It made a sound I had not heard in twenty-five years, a dry iron chatter.

I had to stand very still for a minute and look at the field so the kids would not see my face.

Then I went back down for the other thing. It was on a nail by the cellar door, right where he always hung it.

Grandpa’s husking peg, a short steel hook riveted to a strip of old leather with a loop for your fingers.

He had picked his end rows by hand with that peg every fall of his life, until he was past eighty.

He said a combine missed the best ears on the ends and he was too stubborn to let them go to the deer.