Return and Trial Planting of Pueblo Corn Seeds

The return of Pueblo corn seeds gives Ish’s community a chance to recover a crop it had failed to preserve, but the discovery is not a simple solution: Ish must teach its meaning, test the kernels, and confront the limits of both the season and his own farming knowledge. The episode turns a small box of seeds into a meeting point between an eastern community’s agricultural inheritance and the uncertain future of life near San Francisco Bay.

The Seeds Return

The seeds come back with the boys from their journey east. Their account has introduced Ish to a small community whose way of life centers on growing corn and beans in the manner of Pueblo communities. The travelers brought a little cardboard box from a tiny community near the Rio Grande; amid the rapid events following their return, Ish has known what it contains but has not yet found the time or peace of mind to examine it.

When he opens the box, the kernels surprise him. They are small, pointed, and red and black, unlike the broad yellow or white corn he expected. Ish recognizes that he had mistaken the highly developed, perhaps hybridized corn of the Old Times for the older kind. These smaller kernels are the more primitive variety traditionally raised by Pueblo farmers. The difference is practical as well as historical: the box holds seed adapted to a long-established way of growing food, not a guaranteed replacement for the vanished crops Ish remembers.

The discovery matters because Ish’s own community had delayed trying to raise corn until he could no longer find any living seed. The seeds carried back by the expedition therefore offer another chance, not the continuation of a local practice. Their arrival makes the lost opportunity visible even as it partially reverses it: the community has not recovered its old agricultural knowledge, but it has something living with which to begin again.

A Lesson Shared with Joey

Ish handles the kernels repeatedly, letting them run through his fingers. As he does so, the expedition’s find brings him a measure of peace. The seeds embody a future beyond the immediate crisis, and he invites Joey, who watches him with characteristic curiosity, to come closer. Ish explains what the corn is and why it matters, turning the returned box into a lesson rather than keeping its significance to himself.

He then takes Joey to the kitchen, where they light a burner on the gasoline stove and parch a carefully limited amount in a frying pan. They use only two dozen kernels. Ish knows that using any of the seed this way risks wasting material that might be needed for planting, but he is moved by the chance to demonstrate the process at once and persuades himself that the lesson is worth the cost.

The trial is modest and imperfect: the corn does not parch well and is barely edible, and neither Ish nor Joey likes it much. Ish nevertheless explains that parched corn had once been a regular frontier food, on which his ancestors may have depended heavily. Joey listens, his bright eyes showing his interest. The demonstration thus has two outcomes: the kernels provide little immediate pleasure or nourishment, but the story attaches a human practice and a history to the unfamiliar seed.

Ish also hopes the encounter will strengthen Joey. He wishes the boy could grow stronger and become someone more dependable, and regrets having spent two dozen kernels. Yet he finds consolation in the possibility that the lesson has planted something more important in Joey’s mind. The passage makes the metaphor concrete: a portion of the crop is consumed in order to pass on knowledge about the crop and the people who once lived by it.

The Delayed Planting

The returned seed cannot be put in the ground immediately. Ish concludes that the season is already too far advanced; cold weather would arrive before the corn had grown beyond its earliest sprouting. He decides that they will try the following year. The pause is not a lack of interest but a recognition that the biological calendar sets limits the community cannot negotiate away.

In the following days, Ish scouts the surrounding area with Joey to look for a suitable corn patch. They discuss exposure, soil, and how to keep wild cattle out. The work gives Joey a role in considering the practical conditions of cultivation, while revealing how much remains uncertain. Ish judges that their region may be among the worst in the United States for growing corn: a variety suited to the hot, dry Rio Grande valley might fail to mature in the cool, fog-shrouded summers near San Francisco Bay.

Ish’s own qualifications are another obstacle. He is not a farmer and has never had a gift for gardening. Most of what he knows about plants and soils comes from geography: he remembers how podzols and chernozems form and thinks he might recognize them, but theoretical knowledge does not make him an experienced cultivator. Maurine grew up on a farm, but no one in the community has established a reliable practice of raising corn. The return of seed therefore begins an experiment whose result depends on climate, land, protection from animals, timing, and skills the group does not yet possess.

Seed, Time, and Inherited Practice

The episode belongs to a larger struggle over how knowledge and continuity survive the disaster. Ish has come to see the keeping of time as fundamental: time carries history, history becomes tradition, and tradition is part of civilization. His community’s annual marking of the years gives that conviction a material form. At the end of its first full cycle of the sun, he cuts a numeral into a smooth rock with hammer and chisel; the practice makes a shared event legible to those who will come after. The corn seeds pose a parallel question in agricultural form: what living inheritance can be carried forward, and what must be learned anew?

The landscape itself contains evidence of earlier subsistence. Near Ish’s home, holes in a smooth rock surface mark where people in much older times pounded acorns into mash. That trace of food-making history stands beside the present community’s dependence on hunting, gathering, and recovered knowledge. The returned kernels are not simply remnants of the Old Times; they belong to a crop and a cultivation tradition that survived elsewhere and now has to be tested in a different place.

The community’s year-naming custom shows how practical experience can also become collective memory. In one year, children name the period for fishing after discovering abundant striped bass in the Bay; the fish add variety to the diet and enjoyment to daily life. Much later, at the gathering where the twenty-second year is marked on the rock, the whole community assembles for the ritual. Against that continuing practice of recording and naming shared years, Ish’s decision to postpone sowing is not a failure of the seed’s promise. It is a recognition that the promise must wait for the right season—and that preserving a future requires both living materials and the knowledge to use them.