The Detasseling Bonus My Daughter Earned

The day she was sick

I am a vet tech, which means I spend my days with animals that cannot tell me where it hurts. I read gums and eyes and the way a belly moves. I know heat sickness when I see it.

Day eleven was a Monday in the third week of July, and the heat index that week had been up past a hundred every afternoon.

The kids got on the bus at 5:15 and they were in the rows by six.

You work while the dew is on the leaves, because the dew keeps the heat down, and by eleven the rows are an oven.

Corn sweats. A field of corn in July puts moisture into the air until you feel like you are working inside a wet towel.

At three in the morning I woke to the sound of her in the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the tub with a cool cloth on her neck. Her temperature was 100.9. She could not hold down so much as a sip.

I did what I would have done for a dog with a stomach going wrong. Small sips, every ten minutes. A cold rag. Watch the color of her gums.

By four she was asleep with her cheek on the bath mat, and I knew she was not going anywhere near a corn field for twenty-four hours, or I would be driving her to the emergency room by noon.

At 4:40 I texted Curt. I told him she had a fever and had been sick all night, that she would miss the day, and that I was sorry for the short notice.

He wrote back one word. “Noted.”

She went back on day twelve, pale, drinking from her jug every few minutes. She walked every field after that. She never missed another hour.

I picked her up at the church lot every afternoon, and every afternoon she climbed into the truck and put her head against the window and slept before we reached the county road.

Nineteen days of getting up at 4:30, eating a peanut butter sandwich in the truck, and coming home with her forearms scratched raw from the leaves.

You walk down a row of corn that stands taller than you and pull the tassel out of the top of every plant by hand, thousands of times a day, so the plant cannot pollinate itself.

My husband Brad was in Missouri. He is a lineman for the electric co-op, and a line of storms had gone through the southern part of the state, and his crew had been sent down for nine days to rebuild poles.

He called every night from a motel in a town I had never heard of. I did not tell him on Tuesday night. I told him on Wednesday, and by then I had already decided what to do.

But that Tuesday afternoon in the church lot, I had no plan. I had a daughter with her cap pulled down and a drive home with the windows open.