The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

Friday

Friday afternoon Rudy pulled up at the north end rows in his pickup while we were picking.

He got out with his moisture tester and a coffee can, and he walked down the row and shelled a few ears off into the can.

“Eighteen and a half,” he said, reading it. “Leave them in that fence two weeks in this wind and you’ll be under fifteen. Your rings are good, Hollie. Your grandpa would’ve built them the same.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We’ll be done tomorrow, I think.”

He looked down the row at Asa, who was husking without looking, the way I taught him, and at Maisy, sitting on an overturned bucket working an ear with the peg.

He looked at the blue pickup. He looked at my taped hands.

“I always figured you had a crib full,” he said, carefully. “Elevator truck filled it in September.”

I did not answer. I did not have to. Asa stood up in the row with an ear in his hand.

“Uncle Vernon sold it,” Asa said. “The morning of the frost. A man came with a grain truck and augered it all out and Uncle Vernon said Mom owed him rent. I told them it was ours. They didn’t listen.”

I could have stopped him. I had kept my mouth shut for two weeks so nobody would think I was running my uncle down.

But Asa had earned the right to say it. It had been his corn too.

Rudy stood very still. Something went out of his face, and then something else came into it.

He looked at the crib across the yard with the padlock on it, and I watched him put it together.

“The morning of the frost,” he said. “Saturday the twenty-fourth.”

“Yes,” I said.

He did not say anything else. He put the tester in the coffee can and walked back to his pickup and drove off faster than I had ever seen Rudy Lantz drive.

That night I asked Asa if he was sorry he had said it. He thought about it, the way he thinks about things now.

“No,” he said. “It was the truth, and Mr. Lantz asked.”

Saturday

The second Saturday, the seventh of November, we were in the row at seven again.

It was bright and cold, no wind yet, frost going off the husks as the sun came over the tree line. We had about fifty bushels left to pick on the south end.

A little before nine I heard a tractor gearing down out on the county road.

I straightened up and pushed my ponytail back and looked toward the corner, a hundred yards up from our lane, where our gravel road meets the blacktop at a stop sign.

Vernon’s pickup was sitting at that stop sign. Not pulling out. Just sitting there, the way he sat at the end of our lane every day.

Coming up the blacktop toward him was Rudy’s big tractor, pulling his old gravity wagon. I knew that wagon.

It holds about three hundred and fifty bushels, and the corn was heaped in it so high I could see the gold of it over the side boards from where I stood.

Rudy did not turn toward town. He turned onto our gravel road, right past Vernon’s driver’s side window, close enough to touch, and he lifted one finger off the wheel at him the way country men do.

Then he turned in at our lane.

Maisy stood up in the row with an ear in her hand. Asa stopped husking. Nobody said anything.

We stood there in the end rows and watched Rudy pull that wagon through our yard and swing it around and back it up square to the stove shed, as easy as backing a truck into a garage.

He climbed down off the tractor. He looked up the road at Vernon’s pickup, which still had not moved. Then he walked down the field lane to us, pulling off his gloves.

“Hollie,” he said. “Where do you want it?”

“Rudy,” I said. “What is that?”

He did not look away from me. That is one of the things I will always remember about him.

He was a man who did a wrong thing without knowing it, and when he found out, he looked right at it.

“That’s your corn,” he said. “Vernon called me the day before the frost and said he had some corn in his crib to move, said he’d bought it for hogs and got rid of the hogs. He wanted three-twenty a bushel. I needed it for my steers after Thanksgiving, so I sent my boy with the truck.”

He stopped. He swallowed.

“I never unloaded it,” he said. “It’s been sitting in that wagon in my shed. It’s the same corn, Hollie. Every kernel you paid for. I am sorry. I should have asked whose it was. I knew whose place that crib sat on.”

“You didn’t know,” I said. “How could you know?”

“I could’ve asked,” he said again. “Grandpa would’ve asked.”