The first of May came. Then the fifth.
I drove the tender past the home place twice a day on the county road. Both fields just sat there in last year’s stalks, with nothing moving in them but blackbirds.
The phone didn’t ring.
On the ninth of May, it rained two inches.
On the twelfth, a Tuesday, I came over the hill with eight tons of dry fertilizer behind me. And there was a sixteen-row planter in the pivot quarter. Behind a tractor I didn’t know. With a pickup and a seed trailer parked at the end rows.
The pickup had Kansas plates.
Three days after two inches of rain. On that ground.
I slowed down.
I could see the shine in the tracks behind the planter, where the wheels were smearing the soil instead of crumbling it. I could see mud packing up on the gauge wheels. They were mudding it in.
Any man raised on that quarter could have told them to wait until Friday.
I could have turned in at the lane. I had my hand on the blinker.
Then I thought: he hired them.
He went looking for somebody to plant our father’s ground. And he looked right past me. All the way to Kansas.
I took my hand off the blinker.
I drove on to the Rasmussen place and unloaded.
I’m not proud of that. I’m telling it because it’s what I did.
That night I didn’t eat supper.
Theresa found me out in the feed truck, sitting in the dark with the driver’s door open.
“They put it in wet,” I said.
“Can it be fixed?”
“Some. Not by them.”
She stepped up on the running board and put her arm around my neck. We stayed like that a long time, with the yard light buzzing over us.
“He would hate this,” she said quietly. “Your dad. Not the corn. You two.”
“He’s the one that did it, Theresa.”
“I know he is. I still think he’d hate it.”
By the middle of June, that field was telling the whole story to anybody who drove past. And in our country, everybody drives past.
Corn planted right comes up like a church choir. Everybody the same height. Standing in straight rows.
This came up like a school picture. Knee high in one spot, four inches tall the next. Skips in the row as long as a man lying down. Then three plants crowded together in a clump. Yellow streaks where the roots couldn’t break out of a seed trench that had baked hard as a clay pot.
Nobody had put down a weed killer ahead of it, either. The waterhemp was coming up in a green haze between the rows.
And the pivot hadn’t turned once. It sat at the exact angle it had been parked at last September. With a flat tire on the fifth tower.
On the east eighty, they’d planted dryland corn at an irrigated population. Thirty-two thousand seeds to the acre, on ground that’ll only carry twenty-four thousand in a good year.
If July came in hot, every stalk out there was going to be fighting its neighbor for a drink of water.
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