The Fifth of July

114 The Fifth of July Nat Akin 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.” 115 “Coming, Dad.” My father looked tired as he picked up the corn buckets growing heavy at his sides. A cloud passed high overhead and he studied it, waiting for some answer, as if continuing to do what my grandfather asked might be some kind of conspiracy. I did not know a place to take in this, had not known any right space to occupy myself with that whole day, so I sat under the carport in a lawn chair and watched them, and stayed quiet. Dad shushed through the stalks and followed Papaw back toward the house. I turned in the chair as they came, and saw the figures of my two great-aunts, lighter shadows on the dark blacktopped drive running up from the highway. Their houses stood down to the east of the field, one next to the other where my grandfather had built them. Montine, Papaw’s older sister who had never married, lived in the closer of the two. She had taught school for forty years but now gave her time over to a garden, sealing things tight in jars and stacking them with dates in masking tape in palsied Magic Marker. Gertrude was younger than both of them, had a family of her own, but looked nearly as old under her stooped back, grown by helping Uncle Louis pick decades of cotton. I saw she had a plastic E. W. James grocery bag on her arm with snap beans jutting from the edges. “Well, Nathe, we saw you and Paul pickin’ up here, and ‘Tine and me thought we’d come on up,” Aunt Gertrude said. “Okay.” Papaw took a clod of keys from his pocket and found one by fingering across the top of them; he unlocked the office door at the back of the carport and took down two yellowed Tupperware bowls from a high shelf and handed one to Auntie, one to Gertrude. “Dad,” my father said, “don’t you think this can wait? It’s late.” He set the two buckets on the...