The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [74]
Even scarier were the fields of corn that pressed in on all sides. Corn doesn’t grow as tall as it used to because it’s been hybridized into a more compact perfection, but it shot up like bamboo when I was young, reaching heights of eight feet or more and filling 56,290 square miles of Iowa countryside with a spooky, threatening rustle by the dryish late end of summer. There is no more anonymous, mazelike, unsettling environment, especially to a dim, smallish human, than a field of infinitely identical rows of tall corn, each—including the diagonals—presenting a prospect of endless vegetative hostility. Just standing on the edge and peering in, you knew that if you ventured more than a few feet into a cornfield you would never come out. If a ball you were playing with dropped into a cornfield, you just left it, wrote it off, and went inside to watch TV.
So I didn’t play alone much at Winfield. Instead I spent a lot of time following my grandfather around. He seemed to like the company. We got along very well. My grandfather was a quiet man, but always happy to explain what he was doing and glad to have someone who could pass him an oil can or a screwdriver. His name was Pitt Foss Bryson, which I thought was the best name ever. He was the nicest man in the world after Ernie Banks.
He was always rebuilding something—a lawn mower or washing machine; something with fan belts and blades and lots of swiftly whirring parts—and always cutting himself fairly spectacularly. At some point, he would fire the thing up, reach in to make an adjustment, and almost immediately go, “Dang!” and pull out a bloody, slightly shredded hand. He would hold it up before him for some time, wiggling the fingers, as if he didn’t quite recognize it.
“I can’t see without my glasses,” he would say to me at length. “How many fingers have I got here?”
“Five, Grandpa.”
“Well, that’s good,” he’d say. “Thought I might have lost one.” Then he’d go off to find a bandage or piece of rag.
At some point in the afternoon, my grandmother would put her head out the back door and say, “Dad, I need you to go uptown and get me some rutabaga.” She always called him Dad, even though he had a wonderful name and he wasn’t her father. I could never understand that. She always needed him to get rutabaga. I never understood that either since I don’t remember any of us ever being served it. Maybe it was a code word for prophylactics or something.
Going uptown was a treat. It was only a quarter of a mile or so, but we always drove, sitting on the high bench seat of my grandfather’s Chevy, which made you feel slightly regal. Uptown in Winfield meant Main Street, a two-block stretch of retail tranquillity sporting a post office, two banks, a couple of filling stations, a tavern, a newspaper office, two small grocers, a pool hall, and a variety store.
The last stop on every shopping trip was a corner grocer’s called Benteco’s, where they had a screen door that kerboinged and bammed in a deeply satisfying manner, and made every entrance a kind of occasion. At Benteco’s I was always allowed to select two bottles of Nehi brand pop—one for dinner, one for afterward when we were playing cards or watching Bilko*12 or Jack Benny on TV. Nehi was the pop of small towns—I don’t know why—and it had the intensest flavor and most vivid colors of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavors—grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never “lemon-lime”), and root beer—but each was so potently flavorful that it made your eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful.
The Nehi at Benteco’s was kept in a large, blue, very chilly cooler, like a chest freezer, in which the bottles hung by their necks in rows. To get to a particular bottle usually required a great deal of complicated maneuvering, transferring bottles out