Surprise Corn Patch
by Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
Beyond our backyard fence stands a surprise patch of corn. Like a Jack in the Box, out pop deer, rabbits, raccoons, turkeys, and hogs locally known as razorbacks or pineywoods rooters. These hogs are rawboned with bristles along the spine like porcupine quills and snouts out to here. It’s as if this corn patch has attracted all the various life forms native to these fringes of the Okefenokee Swamp.
I’ve been watching since end of last winter when the patch was a square of plowed furrows, like a clean sheet of lined paper for the keepers of our poorman’s plantation in Southeast Georgia to write a message to the aircraft from Moody Airforce base—COW CREEK: NO FLY ZONE. Or like a blank canvas for painting a picture. My husband painted corn.
Come spring, the corn started pegging, creating a cube of jade green, promise of what looks like the sweetest grass for our cattle to graze. Within weeks it grew from knee-deep, to hip-deep, to shoulder-high; I could almost hear it growing. Every breeze brought a new scent, first green, then ripe, then parched. Every rain heightened the scents.
First tasseling, the animals started to come—sneaky little varmints. Now you see them, now you don’t. Doves with squeaky wingbeats scouted out the corn for future feeding, then lit in the nearby pines and cooed till sunset. Hawks worked the fields, crying, chasing our songbirds from the yard to the woods along the Alapaha River. In the afterlight of sundown Martens swooped low over the corn patch, snapping up insects rising like dust motes.
By summer’s peak the corn was head-high, a thicket of crickety heat with mosquito hawks and butterflies hovering in the sun shimmer. A deer would step out, switching its white tail and looking around, exposed to light like a groundmole, then bolt into the pines. Turkeys appeared, one by one, clucking and wandering up the pond road and out into the briars for a dessert of blackberries.