The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

It began in March, on a Sunday, at my father’s old kitchen table that Randy had never replaced, with the same yellow oilcloth and the same sugar bowl with the chipped lid.

Helen Ostrander is eighty-one and a widow. Her husband, Gordon, had farmed a quarter section south of town, and after he passed she kept the home forty and rented out the rest on a handshake.

She told Trent at church, over coffee in the basement, that if he was serious she would let him have thirty acres at one seventy-five an acre, cash, and she would sooner it went to a boy than to a corporation out of Omaha.

Five thousand two hundred fifty dollars, paid in March. He wrote the check himself, and she wrote him a receipt on the back of a church bulletin because that was what she had in her purse.

He taped it into a notebook. I remember thinking that if my son ever had a bad year, he would have a good paper trail to show for it.

That Sunday, at my father’s table, he asked his uncle if he could store the crop in the two old bins on the home place. Randy had not used them in years.

He kept them for overflow, and mostly they held mice and a drift of old oat dust.

Randy put his coffee down and smiled. He was good at smiling then. “Sure, Trent. Plenty of room. And I’ll combine it for you when I do mine, save you renting a machine. We’ll figure it out in the fall.”

“I can pay you,” Trent said. “Whatever’s fair.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Randy said, and put out his hand, and my son shook it. I was standing at the sink. I remember the sound of the water running over the dishes.

I remember thinking that a handshake in this family had always been enough.

The corn grew. That is the part I want on the record.

He bought the seed himself. Twenty-four hundred dollars of it, in the bag, from the seed dealer in town.

He paid sixteen hundred fifty dollars for fertilizer and herbicide.

When it was added up on the back of an envelope at our kitchen table in September, rent included, it came to nine thousand three hundred dollars of his own money, every cent, and my husband Neil, who is not a man who gushes, looked at that envelope for a long while and then clapped our son on the back so hard that Trent nearly lost his coffee.

Neil drives a bucket truck for the public power district. He has been a lineman for twenty-two years, and he is gone a lot, because when a storm comes through anywhere in the Midwest they send the crews out.

In October a line of storms took down half the poles in southern Kansas, and the district sent him with the crew on the twelfth. He would not be home until the thirty-first of October.

Harvest started the first week of October. Randy ran his combine across Trent’s thirty acres on a Thursday afternoon with Trent riding along in the cab, taking notes.

That week Trent offered his uncle seventeen hundred dollars for the combining and the bin space. Randy waved him off. “We’ll settle up in the spring, kid.”