Like the saying goes: They passed out the brains, he thought they said trains and he missed his. That was Swap-Out. Tommy, though. Smart as
hell, he could think himself out of any hole, but then would crawl back into it and sit there. It was like he chose the shit end of the stick, so nobody else would get it. A hard thing to watch.
The day we had no water, for an example. This was a Sunday. We got up, flushed, nothing. Empty pipes howling. Bathroom sink, nothing. Kitchen, ditto. The guys said bad news, the well got drained. It would recover in a day or two, in the meantime look out. Sure enough, Creaky called us in the kitchen for his lecture on how farming is a war. All your livelong days, it’s you and your livestock and machinery against the bank that wants to
foreclose on you. If you waste one thing, that’s a win for the bank. So, you do not waste one thing. Not food, not an ounce of grain, not water. I’m trying to be Christian here, he says, taking in orphan boys, and what does one of the damn idjits do but go and waste a whole goddamn well full of water.
I wanted to tell him I was no orphan, plus, if he was so Christian we’d all be in church right then discussing certain rules like, don’t be pimping onto others as you wouldn’t want to get pimped on yourself. But I was not the damn idjit of Creaky’s concern.
The natural suspect was Tommy, because of how we divided up barn chores: Swap-Out was shovel, I was feed, Tommy was water. I grained and got the calves in the paddocks with their right mothers, Tommy hosed out buckets and filled the barn troughs. There was this blue-handled spigot thing called a hydrant you had to open up to let the water in the barn, and
that same line ran out to fill all the troughs on thirty-some acres. If you went back to the house without remembering to yank the hydrant handle back down, the water ran on and on, overfilling the troughs all night, as long as there’s water in the well. Not a minute more. It’s the easiest thing in the world to turn off the hose and go on your way, forgetting to shut down
the hydrant.
Tommy didn’t make that mistake. He’d done it once, and got leathered for it. After that he kept a clothespin on the hydrant handle. The brain of Tommy, as mentioned. He’d pinch the clothespin on his shirt whenever he turned the hydrant on. Finished, back it went on the handle. If he got to the house and somebody noticed a clothespin dangling on his shirt like an extra nipple, shit! Run back to the barn, it’s all good.
Here’s who had sucked the well dry: Fast Forward. Long after we’d finished chores, he was out there hosing off his Lariat, leaving no speck of mud on the chassis or whitewall tires, because Saturday nights were for cruising. Meaning every person in Lee County between the ages of sixteen and married drives up and down main street to see and get seen. Fast Forward had washed his truck and gone cruising and left the well to run dry.
So Fast Forward would tell Creaky that’s what happened. I was sure of it. He knew how the damn hydrant worked, he’d been there longer than any of us. And Creaky wouldn’t punish him, because as far as Creaky was concerned, Fast Forward’s shit smelled like hand lotion. The old man would figure some way this water was a necessary sacrifice working to the benefit of America and Lee County football. So confess and get on with it, I’m thinking. Creaky is asking Tommy what a stupid wasteful boy has to say for himself, and Fast Forward is over by the stove getting his coffee. I’m staring. Catching Fast Forward’s eye as he turns around. Thinking, Squad master, yo. What in the hell?
Not a word. Creaky goes outside and fetches a piece of dirty old broken hose, like this is justice for a water-related crime, and makes us watch while he thrashes Tommy twenty licks on his sad big bottom. Fast Forward leaves the house. Tommy takes it for the team. He’s bent over hanging on the counter, trying not to cry, but most of all he is not ratting out Fast Forward. I was amazed, honestly. I’m just not that good of a person. Not that brave.
We went on with our day the best we could, waterless, and later I found Tommy in the barn. There were nooks and crannies between the stacked hay bales, and he was curled up in one of those with his head hanging,
doodling on an old paper grain bag. He always carried a pencil just in case, the way another person would carry Band-Aids or their heart pills. I sat down with him, wanting to ask why. But not really. I got it. Where in some universes you get reward chips for going X many days without drinking, in ours you got chips for getting through a day unhated. Creaky hating you
was just background noise. But Fast Forward hating you would actually mean something. Anyway, the deal was done, with Tommy now going for the Guinness record of most skeletons ever drawn on a grain bag.
I watched him draw for a long while. “So, are you like a Goth kid?”
He looked surprised. He always did, of course, given the standing-up hair. But I don’t think he knew what I was talking about. “Skulls and
death,” I said. “Usually isn’t that a Goth thing?” We had this one girl in our grade that wore black lipstick and showed people where she’d cut herself, even back then in the nineties. Way ahead of her time.
Tommy said he drew skeletons because they were easy. He wasn’t a talented person like me that could do faces and expressions, arms with
muscles and all like that, so he stuck to skeletons. Whenever he wanted to see them, there they were, he said. His little buddies.
Mom was doing her recovering but none too cheerful about it. We had
visits once a week, on a weekend if she could swing it but she had to work crappy hours. She was lucky and got her job back but had to start at the bottom again on taking the shifts nobody else wanted. Stoner made himself scarce whenever I came around, fine by me and Mom. She wanted to gripe about him. Stoner was not being all that supportive, babywise, saying it was her nickel if she wanted to do this. He didn’t want to hear about her long
days on her feet restocking Halloween costumes and candy, just wishing she could sit in one of the marked-down lawn chairs and go to sleep. Or throw up. She was doing a lot of that. She said don’t ever be pregnant
during the lead-up to Halloween because it will put you off candy corn for life. I told her thanks for the advice.
Hanging up Halloween costumes did not sound that bad. At the farm we were working like dogs. Tommy agreed on what Miss Barks said about Creaky’s being an emergency type of foster where nobody stayed too long. He said after the farm work slacks off in winter, the old man wouldn’t want us around. Nothing to me of course, I would be back in my own bed before snow fell. But that farm was starting to feel like my life. Cold mornings, a
kitchen filling up with smoke while we stuffed newspapers in the stove to get it lit. Manwich suppers or shoe-leather steaks, not tender ones from the grocery but field beef. All meat we ate was previously known to us as
Angus aka get your ass in the paddock. We were fed, but never quite enough, nor was our work ever quite done, nor our feet quite warm. We’d get up cold, go to bed cold, throw our filthy clothes in the machine in the basement and forget them down there for days. Even now, the smell of
clothes gone rank in the washer takes me right back. That smell was our whole life.
We stayed alive for Friday nights, to pile in Creaky’s truck and drive to the Five Star Stadium, home of the Lee High Generals. To wait in the stands, along with everybody else in the county, for our team to roar out of
the Red Rage field house. Girls screaming their heads off, grown men right there with them. Creaky would let us buy chili dogs from concessions and we’d sit high in the bleachers to watch Fast Forward being freaking amazing. Yelling our lungs out for our own brother and the other Generals to murder the bastards from Union or Patrick Henry, first and ten, do it again! Knowing that we and nobody else, after it was over, would sleep under the same roof as QB1.
Seeing him in his white uniform with the giant shoulders and thin, fast legs, I got new aspects on how to draw Fast Man. And other designs in my head. Fast Forward thought I had good coordination. Possibly just compared to Tommy and Swap-Out, which God knows is no fair fight. But if he wasn’t busy he’d show me things. Firing and receiving passes.
Keeping a center of gravity. Down behind the barn where Creaky wouldn’t see us slacking off, Tommy and Swap-Out would sit on grain buckets and watch, with manure-sogged jeans and stars in their eyes. I wasn’t much to start with, being raised around old people and a mom that thought getting her empty pop can into the trash was a sport. But the shine I got from Fast Forward decided my future. One day I would be that guy, in that uniform, with those shoulders. Those cheerleaders.
Farms or anything else in the big world, I’d not seen much of back then. Or now either, to be honest. On TV I’d seen fields like great green oceans with men sailing through them on tractors and combines the size of the AT
walkers in Star Wars. I never knew those were real, I thought it was make- believe. Because Lee County isn’t flat like those ocean farms, not
anywhere, not even a little. Here every place is steep, and everything rolls downhill. If you plowed up all your land, the most of it would end up down in the creek by year’s end, and then you’re done growing anything.
What farmers can do with a mountainside is what Creaky did, let God
grow grass on it, and run cattle on it to eat God’s grass. Then send them out west to be finished, because feedlots for turning cattle into burgers and making money are all out there. Not here. We just raise them big enough to sell for what Creaky called one kick in the ass per head. A few hundred dollars.
His only land flat enough for plowing was three acres, low in the valley. That’s about average size for a tobacco bottom, lying alongside of the lane we walked out on to get the bus. The first day I came to that farm, passing that field, maybe I thought, there’s some nice tobacco. More likely I gave no notice at all. Never will that happen again, any more than I’d fail to
notice an alligator by the side of the road, or a bear. What a pretty sight, you’d say, if you’re an ignorant son of a bitch. Instead of: There lies a field that eats men and children alive.
August they call the dog days, due to animals losing their minds in the heat. But the real dog days if you are a kid on a farm are in September and October. Tobacco work: suckering, topping, cutting, hanging, stripping. All my life I’d heard farm kids talking about this, even in the lower grades, missing school at cutting time. Some got to work on farms other than their own, and get paid for it. I envied them. The boy version I guess of how little girls are jealous of their big sisters for getting pregnant, with all the attention. I’d only ever known childish things, screwing around in the
woods or Game Boy. Now I would be one of the working kids.
I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.
Topping starts in August. You have to break off the tops of all the
thousands of plants that are head high or higher to a fifth grader. Walk down the rows reaching up, snapping off the big stalk of pink flowers on top, freeing up the plant for its last growth spurt. Those plants will be over all our heads before the season ends, and still yet we will have to be their masters.
My first day of topping was stinking hot. Creaky told us to keep our
shirts on and wear the big, nasty leather gloves he gave us, but we shed our shirts the minute he was out of sight. I didn’t want to wear the gloves, but Tommy said do it or I’d be sorry. Creaky set us all to topping our own rows, and moved faster than you’d think the old guy had in him. He and Fast Forward got out ahead of us. I worked hard and stayed close behind them, with Tommy and Swap-Out bringing up the rear. The reaching up made your arms ache. The sap ran sticky all over everything, the sun was a fireball on your head, and pity to you if you tried to wipe the sweat off your face with that gummy glove. I tried to use my left hand for topping, being a lefty, and right for sweat-wiping. Then the one arm gave out so I had to use the other, and let the sweat go on and burn my eyes out. All the while thinking, Man, tobacco is hard work. I’d seen nothing yet.
At some point I went back to look for Tommy and Swap-Out because they were nowhere. Way back yonder I found them, and was like, Y’all, what the hell? Tommy was gathering up all the pink flowers that you were supposed to throw on the ground and walk on. Going back down his row, gathering up these flowers and carrying them in his arms like a freaking bride. Jesus, Tommy, I said. Your ass will be grass. He told me not to worry, he was almost done.
I followed him to the edge of the field, and out there by the lane were
these two small dirt mounds, the size of bushel baskets dumped over. Side by side. I’d never noticed them before. Tommy put down his armload of
flowers on the two little mounds, divided up between them. Saying nothing about it. Then he went back to work. I didn’t ask.
But that night after we were in bed, he told me what it was for. His
parents were buried out in eastern Virginia someplace, so he’d never gotten to see the graves, just like I hadn’t ever seen my dad’s. I would never have thought to do what Tommy did, though. He just made them up. Eight different homes he’d been in so far, that he could remember. In every one of them he’d left behind a little set of graves.
