Circling Back: Chronicle of a Texas River Valley

3. Corn

3 Corn And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou? .. . . . Hast thou eaten ofthe tree, whereofI commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? .. Therefore the Lord God sent himfrom the garden ofEden, to till the ground. ... Genesis 3 :9, ll, 23 "I'll bet you can't find one with an odd number ofrows," Corbett said as we sat pulling the green shucks offthe "rostnears" ofcorn. I checked the rows ofkernels on each pearly white ear we dropped into the tub. By now I could count by twos. Sixteen. Fourteen. Eighteen . Sixteen. Nama Fannie seemed to know it was no use counting. She cut the corn two rows at a time. Holding an ear in her left hand, palm up, she used her right hand to pull a butcher knife with its cutting edge toward her from the far end ofthe ear to the near end. The moving knife sliced off the tips of the grains, while somehow always missing her thumb and fingers. Following each stroke, she shifted the ear slightly to bring the next two rows upward. I watched. The rows always came out even; there was never an odd row left to cut. After she had cut the grain tips off, she scraped the ear, again two rows at a time. Angling the knife blade almost perpendicular to the ear, she pushed it away from her, and the juicy cream flowed out the severed heads of the kernels and into the pan held in her lap. She scraped once around the cob, then reversed it and finished the job with another round of scraping. Near the end she wiped her knife against the cob every few strokes to clean off the last bits ofcorn. My mother silked the corn prior to the cutting and scraping operation . This required removing with a smaller knife the hairlike strands I later learned carried the pollen from the exposed patch of silk at the head of each ear down the cob to the kernels. On some ears, kernels clamped the silks very tightly between their rows ofgrains, and I could never clean them out as thoroughly as she could. The silks I left showed up later as brown threads in servings at the table. "You boys better get another load of corn," Corbett said as we neared the bottom of the shucking tub. My brother, Jack, and I took the number three metal washtub by the handles and trundled into the acre-sized garden behind the house. Corn took up half the space. We walked between the rows, fending away the leaves to keep the sharp edges off our faces. We looked for ears with the bottom half of the exposed silk pale and soft and the upper halfbrown and dried, peeling back the shuck now and then to see the kernels and check our assessment ofthe ear's readiness for harvest. Corbett had showed us how to pull the ears. Grip with your left hand the stalk at the bottom ofthe ear, then grab the top ofthe ear with 22 your right hand and yank outward and downward. Pop! Squeak of Corn shuck. Thump into the tub. Smell ofnewly picked corn. Corn worms lived in nearly every ear. They cut mealy trails among the kernels near the tip and lodgedjust below the thatch ofpartly dried silk. Green ones, brown ones, fat ones, and thin. I contested with Jack to find the biggest. We saved them to toss into the chicken yard and watch the rooster race to them and call the pullets with a cozy "puttputt ," which we translated roughly to mean, "Want some candy, girls?" One tub heaped with stripped cobs and another overflowing with shucks signaled a trip to the barnyard fence where the cows waited, drool stringing from their mouths. Before letting the cows eat the cobs, we had to chop the cobs into two-inch sections with the "hack knife," a stubby machete fashioned from a piece of a broken crosscut saw. If you failed to cut the chunks of cob short enough, one might lodge in Corn-shucking team. Corbett, Fannie, and their grandsons in the mid-1940s. the gullet ofa greedy cow, and that required reaching your hand past a raspy tongue and down a slimy throat to pull it out. That night we ate corn, cooked for an hour and stirred frequently to keep it...