Cornfield Negotiations

Elisabeth found the sandwich at the bottom of the lunch pail, still wrapped in foil, still cold. She held it up like evidence.

"You didn't eat your sandwich," she said.

Anders shrugged and kept unlacing his boots. "I was too busy. That sow in farrowing crate four, she was acting funny all morning. I didn't want to leave her."

"You can't skip lunch. Your mama raised you better than that."

"She raised me to look after the pigs first," he said, and almost smiled.

It was Tuesday, the third week of September. Elisabeth was twenty-three and had been married two years exactly this past June. She set the sandwich on the counter and stood there with her hands on her hips, deciding whether to be annoyed or something else. She went with something else.

He was twenty-four now, her husband. He'd been running this farm since he was twenty-two, when his daddy's heart gave out in the truck on the county road. She'd watched him grow into the job the same way she'd watched the corn come up every summer, slow and then all at once, and somewhere in there she'd lost the thread of them. The county had had opinions when a Black girl from Rocky Mount married the white hog farmer's son, in the church pews and on the porches, but two years on the only opinion that mattered was whether her husband ever looked at her anymore.

* * *

In the morning she watched him work from the kitchen window. The thing about a hog farm in eastern North Carolina was that the house sat close enough to the barn that you could see everything and nobody saw you seeing it.

Anders worked the gates with two hands, always two, pulling the panels shut and dropping the pins without looking. His voice carried across the gravel when he called the hogs in, that low sing-song he did, a sound she used to hear through the bedroom wall on early mornings and love. The ventilation fans roared behind him. The corn stood tall past the fence line all the way to where you couldn't see anymore.

She used to know those hands. After supper, back when they were twenty-one and twenty-two and stupid about each other, those hands used to pull her in by the hips while the dishes were still sitting in the sink. She remembered the kitchen chair digging into her back and laughing about it. Now supper happened, and the dishes happened, and he went out to check the last feed line, and she went to bed first and heard the truck door at ten.

They weren't fighting. That was the strange part. Fighting would have been something. They just shared chores and a table and a bed and touched exactly none of each other, like two people running a business, which in a way they were.

She stood at the window with a dish towel in her hand and thought, well. Somebody in this marriage ought to do something about it. And it might as well be her.

* * *

The idea came to her while she was scraping plates, and it made her laugh right out loud in the empty kitchen. She looked around like someone might have heard.

She had a pad of paper in the junk drawer, the kind from the feed store. She wrote three tries before she got one she liked. The first was too mean. The second was too honest and scared her. The third one was perfect.

She waited until he'd gone into the barn for the morning rounds. He always left his thermos on the tailgate of the truck, always came back for it at lunch, always filled it himself before he went out. She took the thermos from the tailgate, unscrewed the lid, and dropped the folded note inside.

Midnight, barn aisle three. Bring nothing.

The whole note was that. She pressed the lid back on with both thumbs and her heart tripped, actually tripped, like a hen missing a step off the roost. She set the thermos back exactly where it had been and walked to the house without looking over her shoulder. There was nobody on this road for miles. Everybody in town knew the truck, and the truck knew where home was, and nobody had ever once driven past.

Here was her thinking, and she'd thought about it a good bit while the dishwater cooled. Her husband had stopped choosing her. That was how it felt. He was a good man, he worked himself half to death, he never said a cross word. But he also never looked at her across the table like she was the last cold drink in August. So she was going to make him look. She was going to be a stranger to him for one night, a woman who left notes in thermoses, a woman he had to come find in the dark.

Was it a little crazy? Sure. But crazy had gotten her married at twenty-one in the first place, so she figured it still had some use in it.

* * *

The morning went long. She washed laundry, hung it, pulled weeds along the walk until her knees ached. Samara came by at eleven with the inventory list for the feed order.

"You want the vitamin premix again this quarter?" Samara asked. She was twenty-eight, had been with them two years now, hired when Anders decided to expand the herd and found out quick that one man couldn't do it. She was good. She was better than good, honestly, she remembered numbers better than Anders did and she never once complained about the smell.

"Same as always," Elisabeth said. "And add a bag of the mineral for the sows."

"Will do. Hey, did Anders find that gasket for the fan housing?"

"He'll find it or he'll fashion one out of stubbornness. That's how he does everything."

Samara laughed and wrote it down. She drove the little quad back toward the barn, and Elisabeth watched her go, and felt the note sitting in that thermos as a lit match in her chest.

* * *

Lunch was half past twelve, the same as every day. Elisabeth washed up the sandwich plate and went back to the window with her coffee, which she knew was a bad habit and did anyway.

Anders sat on the tailgate with his thermos. He unscrewed the lid, tipped it, and stopped.

She saw the exact moment. His whole body went still, the way it did when a sow was coming and he didn't want to spook her. He tipped the thermos again, like maybe it would change. Then he shook the paper out into his palm.

He read it. He read it twice, she could tell, because his head went down and then came back up and then went down again. The gravel lot was quiet. A fan changed pitch somewhere in the barn.

And then he smiled. Slow, crooked, the smile from before, the one she hadn't seen pointed at her since June. He folded the note along its crease and tucked it into his shirt pocket, right over the left side, and patted it flat with two fingers as a man putting a bill of sale somewhere safe.

Elisabeth stood at the sink with her heart going hard and her coffee going cold, and thought, well now. That's more of a look than I've gotten in months.

She turned back to the dishes and caught herself grinning at the suds like a fool. Midnight was eleven and a half hours away and she already had nothing to wear, which meant she had everything to figure out, and had never in her life been so happy about laundry.

* * *

She should have gone to bed early. She knew that. If you were going to sneak out of your own house at midnight, you ought to bank some sleep first. But she lay beside Anders with her eyes open, listening to him breathe, and sleep would not come near her.

He'd come in at ten like always. She heard the truck door, the screen door, his boots on the mat. He'd said goodnight at the stove while she was drying a plate, and he'd looked at her a half second longer than he had in weeks, and she'd nearly dropped the plate. Then they'd gone up the stairs the way they did every night, two people who shared a bed like it was a bus stop.

And wasn't that the thing? They weren't strangers. They were married two years this past June. She'd stood in front of a preacher and promised things, and he had too, and now here they were, lying flat on their backs like two fence posts. Well. Tonight the fence posts were coming down, or one of them was, anyway.

At eleven forty she slid out of bed. He was asleep, or pretending to be, and either way was fine by her. She pulled on the sundress she'd worn the summer they met, the blue one, the one he'd once said was her color, and she'd laughed at him because men didn't talk like that. She left her feet bare. Shoes were too loud on the boards.

The house was dark and cool. The porch step groaned on the third board like it always did, and she skipped it, hopping down to the grass in one jump, and nearly went over into the flower bed. Wouldn't that be something? Face down in the zinnias before she even got started.

The yard was bright with a half moon. The corn stood tall on both