The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

Monday

The ground was firm and dry Monday after school. I came home at a quarter to four, changed out of my scrubs into jeans and my brown canvas chore coat and a pair of gray knit gloves, and backed the old blue pickup down to the end of the field.

The kids were waiting on the tailgate. Asa had his black hoodie pulled up.

Maisy had on her pink stocking cap and her puffy purple coat that was already too short in the sleeves, and she was swinging her legs.

“Okay,” I said. “Here is how Grandpa taught me. Watch my hands.”

I took hold of an ear with my left hand. With my right I caught the husk with the hook, ripped it down toward me, tore the rest back, and snapped the ear off the shank with a twist of my wrist.

I threw it over my shoulder into the truck bed without looking.

“You don’t look,” I said. “You throw and you reach for the next one. If you stop and look at every ear, we’ll be out here till Easter.”

Asa caught on in about twenty minutes. He is long and quick and has his great-grandpa’s hands.

He was clumsy at first, and then he wasn’t, and by the end of the evening he was husking almost as fast as me.

Maisy struggled. My gloves swallowed her hands, and the husks cut her fingers through her own thin ones.

She did not cry, but she got slower and slower, and I could see her chin starting to go.

So I knelt down in the row and took off her right glove and slid Grandpa’s husking peg onto her fingers.

I buckled the leather tight around her palm and showed her how the hook sat under her middle finger.

She held her hand up and stared at it like it was a ring.

“This was his?” she said.

“Every fall for sixty years,” I said. “He’d want it working, not hanging on a nail.”

She went back to the row without another word. She was not fast, and she never got fast, but from that minute she did not quit once.

We picked until the light went. I drove the truck up to the yard with the bed about two-thirds full, maybe twenty bushels, and my shoulders felt like somebody had hung buckets on them.

The snow fence

You cannot pour fresh-picked ears into a pile on the ground. They will heat and mold. They have to breathe. Grandpa’s crib was made for exactly that, and Grandpa’s crib had a padlock on it.

So Tuesday on my lunch break I drove to the farm store and bought two fifty-foot rolls of four-foot snow fence at eighty-four dollars apiece and a bundle of steel posts.

It was money I did not have, and I put it on the card anyway.

That evening after picking, Asa and I drove posts in the side yard and stood the snow fence up in two rings, each about fifteen feet across, wired at the seams.

Grandpa’s old neighbors used to keep corn that way after a big crop, when the cribs ran over.

We backed the truck up and shoveled the ears in with a scoop.

Maisy threw them in by hand, one at a time, until Asa told her that would take a hundred years, and then she used the scoop too.

That same Tuesday Rudy’s combine went through the field. I watched from the yard while it ate the middle of the twenty acres and turned at both ends without touching our end rows.

When he pulled out, sixty feet of standing corn waited for us on each end.

He lifted a hand from the cab as he went past. I lifted one back.