On the day my grandmother was buried, my grandfather shucked corn. The thick sun of July had already begun its retreat; the drooping top leaves no longer bathed in yellow, the hot circle now leveled down toward the horizon at the end of the field across the highway.
Papaw made his way steadily through the narrow rows, the long stalks whispering as he pulled clear the fresh ears. “Another nub’n,” he would utter at intervals, casting away those abnormally small or underdeveloped. Even though his vision had declined over the past five years to where he could not drive or see to read, the field was Braille to him, a home to his hands.
My father followed my grandfather immediately behind, single file, carrying two large, white plastic, chemical buckets washed clean to hold this late harvest. Dad paused in the dirt, clenching the arced metal handles tight, then setting them to the earth with a full thud. A red-winged blackbird shot from the last row and pumped his wings, red there, then gone, toward a blackened line of trees along the field’s lower edge. Dad put a forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose and passed a strained sigh through his teeth. He stood very still and swiveled his head, white now at the temples, and watched the tops of the corn with a suspicious narrowing of his eyes. Following his father and performing this work of the field, the work he’d grown doing, did not seem to sit well with him, not today.
My grandfather noticed none of this. Feeling up the last stalk on the final row, his weathered hand hesitated, fondled the green upright as if to make his footing stable, then hooked its thumb onto the right pocket of his trouser. The other four fingers rubbed the pant leg, tapped lightly on the fabric, and then my grandfather looked down at his hand. He still wore his best dark gray suit pants from the funeral.
“We’d better get to shuckin’, Paul. Sun will be down not too long.”
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