Darla's Story by Mike Mullin Read Free Book Online

way offended your sensibilities by stating too baldly what
any reasonable person would find obvious.”
    “Darla!”
    “May I be excused, please? I need to try to
harvest some corn. Unless you’re both planning to eat picture
frames?”
    “We will talk about this later, young woman,”
Mom said. She made a shooing motion with her hands and turned back
to Ruth. “I do apologize for my daughter’s rudeness.”
    “Why, Rachel is only four and she would never
. . .”
    I closed the mudroom door so I wouldn’t have
to hear whatever else our addlepated guest said.
     

Chapter 10
     
    The ash scraper on my tractor worked okay. It
took some getting used to; I could only drive about twenty feet
before the ash overloaded it, and I had to stop and pry it up,
leaving a ridge of ash behind. And it took two passes to clear a
section. Still, it was way more efficient than digging up the corn
by hand. Within two hours, I’d hung six gunnysacks stuffed with
corn ears off the side of the tractor.
    I drove back to the house and shut down the
tractor. The cloth covering the extra air filter was almost
completely jammed with ash, so I took it to the pump to rinse it.
Then I hauled all six bags of corn into the mudroom. By the time I
got cleaned up, Mom had set up a mortar and pestle—unfortunately a
small one, designed for grinding spices, not corn—two plastic
laundry baskets for the husks and silks, and pans for the kernels
and meal.
    “Can I help?” Ruth asked.
    “You’re our guest,” Mom said.
    “Sure, you can help,” I said. “I’ll husk the
corn, you get the kernels off, then Mom can grind it. Sometimes you
can just twist the ears in your hands, or you might have to use a
knife.” I thought about the fact that Ruth had dragged electric
picture frames along on her trek from Champaign, so I added, “Make
sure you don’t hold on to the sharp end of the knife, okay?”
    Mom silenced me with a glare. And maybe I was
being a bit unfair. I didn’t hate Ruth—she was just so . . .
impractical.
    The operation went fine—better than I
expected. I’d shucked all six bags of corn before Ruth had finished
removing the kernels from the first bag’s worth. Grinding was going
even more slowly. We needed more mortars and pestles, or better
yet, a real grinder with a stone. The finished product was a little
mushy—we’d have to dry the cornmeal to preserve it.
    “I’m going to head out to the barn,” I said.
“See if I can improvise some kind of gristmill.”
    “Thank goodness,” Mom said. “I don’t know how
much more of this my hands can take.”
    “Would you like to trade for a while?” Ruth
asked.
    “Yes, thank you.”
    I slogged out to the barn, thinking about
grinders. Maybe I could hook one to my bicycle? And I thought I
might be able to make the grinding stones with the bags of Redi-Mix
concrete I kept on hand for fixing fence posts.
    I spent Friday afternoon sketching out a plan
for a bicycle-powered grinder and building forms for the concrete.
I had to make two stones, a base and a runner. The runner stone
needed a feed hole for the corn kernels and some way to attach it
to the bicycle chain.
    Making a circular concrete form is tricky.
The only time I could recall Dad and I doing it, we’d run to the
hardware store in Dyersville and bought a heavy cardboard cylinder
the right size. That wasn’t an option, of course, so I figured I’d
need to make some kind of template. I struggled for more than an
hour to cut a misshapen, sort-of-circular chunk of plywood with an
old coping saw.
    While staring at the useless lump of plywood
I’d cut, I had an epiphany. I wet down my breathing rag, tied it
around my face, and trooped back to the house.
    Mom and Ruth were barely a quarter of the way
through the pile of corn ears on the kitchen table. As I came back
through the kitchen, carrying one of our round end tables, Mom
asked, “Do I want to know what you’re doing with that?”
    “Probably not,” I replied.
    I