I woke up in time for breakfast the next morning. Darla, Mrs. Edmunds, and I sat down together to eat corn pone. Darla ate mechanically, forcing down her food with a grimace. It tasted wonderful to me.
As we finished breakfast, Darla announced, “I’m going to spend the day digging corn. You going to care for the invalid, Mom?”
“You could take a day off,” Mrs. Edmunds said. “How many sacks of cornmeal do we have now? Four or five-”
“Six,” Darla said.
“It’s enough. Rest for a day.”
“How do you know it’s enough? How long will it be before we can grow anything? Before any help comes from outside? A year? Three? How long will the corn keep, buried in that ash?”
“I’ll help.” It seemed like a perfect opportunity to try to pay back some of their generosity. I’d be dead now if they had rolled me back out into the ash instead of taking me in and stitching up my side. “I don’t know exactly what you mean by digging corn, but I’m feeling better-”
“Yeah, so we’re going to drag the invalid out to the field where he’ll rip my stitches open and have to be dragged-”
“Darla! He’s a guest, not ‘the invalid.’ And normally I don’t hold with putting guests to work, but things are a little different now. Some exercise probably won’t hurt him, so long as he doesn’t overdo it.” Mrs. Edmunds stared at me expectantly.
“No, ma’am, I won’t overdo it.”
“That settles it, then, we’ll all go dig.”
Soon I found myself carrying three empty feed sacks up a nearby hill. Darla and her mom each carried a shovel. The day was brighter than any I’d seen-nothing approaching normal, though. The sky looked sort of like a faded yellow twilight; not a hint of blue or cloud was visible, only a stifling blanket of yellow haze. No ash fell, but every time the wind gusted, it kicked up great plumes of the stuff. All three of us wore wet dishtowels around our faces.
It was so cold outside that I could see my breath in the air. I’d lost track of the date, but it must still have been September. Definitely way too cold for September in Iowa, whatever the date was. How cold would it get? And if winter was starting in September, how long would it last?
At the top of the ridge a huge rectangle was marked out with four bamboo poles. “That’s the spot we’ve already dug,” Darla said. “We’ll work from this edge, throwing the ash into the marked area.”
“We’re digging for corn?” I asked.
Darla gave me that look I used to get from teachers when I asked a stupid question. “Yeah, you’ll see.” She started digging beside one of the bamboo poles, scooping up the ash and tossing it aside. Her mom moved about ten feet off and began digging as well.
Plumes of ash trailed in the wind as they worked. Darla shoveled maniacally, ramming in her spade and hurling each scoop away. Her mom kept up a measured pace, without any wasted effort. Soon they were both sweating and coated with clumps of white-gray ash. I stood watching them for a few minutes, at a loss for what to do. They’d only brought two shovels.
Darla motioned me over. She’d cleared most of the ash from a thin strip of ground. Stalks of corn, squashed under the ashfall, were visible here and there. They were a kind of sickly looking yellow, like grass that’s been covered with something for a while. The ash layer was only five or six inches deep.
“Why’s the ash so thin here?” I asked Darla. “It was almost two feet deep in Cedar Falls.”
“Top of the ridge. Wind’s been blowing it away like snow. It’s about twelve inches on the lee sides of the hills, deeper in the valleys.”
“Huh.”
“Okay, so here’s what you do. Come behind me and Mom and pull up each stalk of corn, like this.” She grabbed a stalk and pulled it free of the remaining ash. She stripped the ears of corn off the stalk and tossed them into a feed sack. “Easy, right?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“Make sure you don’t miss any ears. Too much damn work unburying them.”
So I spent the day stooped over, picking corn. I tried shoveling for a while, spelling Mrs. Edmunds-Darla flatly refused to give up her shovel-but it put too much strain on my side. I couldn’t shovel nearly as fast as Mrs. Edmunds, let alone match Darla’s frenetic pace. It was frustrating being so weak, unable to contribute my fair share of work. I’ve never been the biggest guy or the strongest, but I’ve always made up for it with effort. Yeah, I might have blown off stuff Mom forced me to do, but if I’m into something, like taekwondo or WoW, I work like crazy at it.
We dragged three sacks of corn to the barn at lunchtime. Mrs. Edmunds made cornmeal mush for lunch-for variety, she said, laughing. And after lunch we did it all again, shoveling ash and picking corn until I was so stiff and sore that I could barely move.
By late afternoon we’d filled three more feed stacks. After we took them to the barn, Mrs. Edmunds returned to the house. Darla walked through an interior doorway, to a part of the barn I hadn’t been in yet. I hesitated a moment, unsure which way to go, then followed Darla.