Sailors Without Water

She hears that Midwestern men make the best sailors, because the sea’s horizon that drives their comrades to gnaw at the railing is just another field to them. When she imagines her father captaining a ship, she sees him in blue jeans, the deck piled with dirt, his crew picking at their fingernails the way men do when they’re waiting for the harvest. He’s never seen the ocean, has never been farther than Indiana. The only boots he has are for trekking over the soil. She cleans the mud from their soles with cornhusks, proud of the battered but clean results. She knows nothing of shoeshine.

In the afternoons she walks through the cornfields, looking for the golf balls her father hits far into the stalks. He never goes in after the corn grows shoulder-high, remembering the time he got lost and had to sleep in the dirt, but she loves the feeling of being swept up in the green. She picks ears of corn and brings them back to the house, piling them in the backyard. Her father yells at her when the raccoons come to eat them, tells her those goddamn pirates will bring disease to the house and steal everything that shines. After that, she stops picking up the golf balls, or throws them farther into the endless fields along with the half-eaten corn. She fills her pockets with pennies and scatters them like seeds, until the ground glistens like water.

Her father doesn’t want to buy new golf balls, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he starts hurtling his clubs into the field. After the clubs are gone, he throws the patio furniture, parts from the grill, wood from her old playhouse. He runs to the edge of the field, stopping at the first ear like it’s an electric fence. He crumples to the ground, swearing and clinging to the stalks like jail bars. She watches silently, then slips into her littered field. A few rows in, she finds a dead raccoon with its head bashed in. She buries it, along with the clubs and the grill, imagining she’s returning an albacore to the sea and saving the desperate sailor from his own cannons.