DETASSELING | Fiction by Walker Minot

The three boys would remember riding in the John Deere carrier as the sun rose, cruising amidst motor noise through fields of green, black, and gold, to detassel eight-foot stalks of corn. They would remember the daily aube—the first light to emerge on the horizon, pinpricks gathering into fractions of a circle—faint, then big and solid enough to make them squint, then finally something upon which they could not gaze without pain. They would remember the silence of the farmer during sunrise; he who in faded denim overalls and flannel through all weather paid them 5 bucks an hour, plus lunch.

Tyler would remember that getting jobs detasseling corn the summer after graduating high school was his idea. John would remember it as a stupid idea. Mark wouldn’t remember whose idea it was at all, but that he was the one who read the Wikipedia on why detasseling was still done by hand in this 21^st century of exponentially expanding machines.

“Detasseling controls the pollination,” they would remember Mark saying. “A cornfield grows better if you pluck the seeds from the tassels of some stalks, but not others. And no machine can do that. Machines are all or nothing. And if you let corn grow wild, it grows every which way. Each stalk takes up more space. More space per stalk yields less corn. Detasseled, a field grows taller, more even, fuller.”

They would remember the friction burns on their hands from plucking the tassels as they passed, burns which reached a debilitating state after the first four days, until the farmer gave them each gloves. One pair was his son’s batting gloves. An all-state lefthanded hitter, the farmer’s son had nearly surpassed his father at taking care of the farm by the time the farmer last saw him, hanging from the rafters after a derecho crushed a silo and the second 100-year flood in 13 years drowned the family farm in generational debt.

John would remember the gloves as evidence the farmer was a jerk—he could have given them the gloves the first morning; Tyler would remember the lesson learned, and wonder why he hadn’t thought of it; Mark wouldn’t remember it at all but would go on to tell others the story about the summer he hardened his hands detasseling corn, sometimes letting the audience feel his ‘callused palms.’

They would remember their bodies each workday’s end, to move felt like lifting weights. They would remember seeing the few rows they’d finished under the midday sun, always so small against all that was still left to do. Mark and Tyler would remember that the farmer provided good lunch—pork, tomato and basil from the garden inside slices of good bread, fresh milk—but John would remember the hunger. They would remember carpooling back together, Tyler driving them from the farm in his used RAV4 back to their high school’s parking lot from which they went their separate ways.

They wouldn’t remember much of those long summer afternoons after returning home from the fields, they mostly slept. Tyler would remember evenings with his family—his two moms and two young sisters—wearing marching band t-shirts, their stick-on graphics crackling, as he cherished the last days of his soon-to-be former life before going to college. John would remember going to parties every night that summer, though the parties were really a few nights a week and, most nights, he would be shut in his room playing video games, hoping not to hear his parents yelling. Mark would remember evenings cruising around town in his blue Volvo sedan with his Hawaiian shirt thrift store finds, catching last glimpses of his home in the setting sun before he too moved on and, occasionally, ending up at the same parties as John in his real-life dinner jacket where they’d share a warm greeting before submerging into the revelry, drinking Everclear and PBRs, smoking weed from passed pipes of colorful swirled glass, and sometimes doing ‘schrooms in the parlors and fields of another kind of farmhouse. And they would remember how it felt to wake up early, early those next mornings, their bodies almost dead until they went back out in the fields on the carrier to work and see the aube, the light rising, and do it all again.

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