The Detasseling Bonus My Daughter Earned

Field 31

I woke her at 4:30 and told her the truth in two sentences, and I watched her face go through three things in a row.

Confusion, then suspicion, then something I had not seen on her since the lot. Hope, careful as a hand held out to a strange cat.

“We’re going to walk it ourselves,” I said. “Just us. And Marcy signs it at nine.”

“Mom, Curt will lose it.” “Curt will not know until Friday.”

My father pulled tassels in these fields in 1968, when he was fourteen, the same age Piper is.

He kept the gloves his whole life. Brown cowhide, stiff at the knuckles, split along the left thumb where he had mended it once with fishing line.

After he died, my mother gave them to me, and I hung them on a nail by the back door, where they have been for nine years.

I put them on at the kitchen counter. They were too big. I wore them anyway.

Piper came down the hall with her water jug and stopped when she saw my hands. “Those are Grandpa’s,” she said. “They are.”

We drove out in the dark with the windows down and the radio off, and I could smell the corn before we reached it.

Field 31 sat behind the Ostrander windbreak, eleven acres of corn that had come on a week late and looked it. The rows ran north and south.

At the south end the leaves reached my chin. At the north end, where the planter must have gone in early, they stood a foot over my head.

“How many rows?” Piper said. “I counted on the way. About three hundred sixty.”

“Mom.” “I know.” “That’s a lot of rows.”

“It is. But there are two of us, and one of us is you.” We went in at six.

We took a pair of rows each and walked them north, the way the crews do, reaching up with both hands, pulling straight up, dropping the tassels at our feet.

Every few rows I looked for the flag of one I had missed, one of those slender ones that hide in the whorl behind a leaf.

I was slow. I will say that. Piper is fast, with a rhythm like someone playing a piano scale.

Reach, pull, drop, step.

Reach, pull, drop, step.

The dew soaked us to the knees by the third pass. By seven the sun was on the tops of the corn, and the smell of the leaves went from green to hot.

Mosquitoes rose off the rows in clouds. My arms, bare at the wrists where the cuffs gave out, began to burn with the cuts you do not feel until later.

“Mom,” she said, around the third hour, “you don’t have to do this.”