If July came in hot, every stalk out there was going to be fighting its neighbor for a drink of water.
I wasn’t there for what happened next.
Butch told me his side of it later. And Phil told me his. The two of them matched, which is how I know it’s true.
It was a Thursday evening, the eleventh of June.
Phil had driven out from Omaha after work. He’d been doing that every week. Sleeping in his old bedroom. Walking fields he didn’t know how to read.
He was standing at the end rows of the pivot quarter in a pair of work boots that still had the yellow in the laces.
Butch pulled his pickup over on the shoulder, got out, and leaned on the line fence. He didn’t say hello. He just looked at that corn for most of a minute.
