But you keep on, sunup to sundown in any weather, because if a farmer fails to get his crop in, he’s lost it all. Land, livestock, the roof over his head. For some, a lousy day’s work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it’s live or die. A tour of tobacco duty can feel like a season in hell, and you come back from it feeling like an army vet: proud, used up, messed up, wishing to be appreciated. And invisible. You’ll go back to school and get treated as another dumbass in history that doesn’t know the difference between a state and a commonwealth.
Creaky kept us out of school most of October. Even as a kid, I’d never spent such long hours in the sun. I’d look in the mirror, shocked to see my pond-water eyes looking out of a face the color of walnuts. But we had to get that tobacco in the barn before month’s end, or we’d be stripping green leaves in February. He threatened us like that was the fate worse than death. I would be so long gone by then, green leaves in February were nothing to me. But for now I was still in hell. Every day I thought: This has to be the end of it. Or the end of me. I thought: School was a better deal than I ever knew. Tobacco is its own education. How to get yourself out there again with everything already hurting, your back and sun-cooked ears and your goddamn teeth.
About a week in, midday, I discovered things could get worse. I started feeling sick, like a bad carpet-cleaner high. This was after a couple hours already of the meanest headache I’d ever had. Everything buzzing, like cicadas had gone in my ears and set up shop. I made myself keep working because I didn’t want to be a wuss or let the guys down or any of those things. But I was starting to have crazy thoughts. Like, if I just lie down here in between the tall tobacco plants, nobody will know. Then I doubled over and puked oatmeal on my shoes.
I still had to keep up, because getting thrashed in that condition was unthinkable. But I must have been off my ball because Tommy found me and started yelling shit, like where were my gloves, oh crap, didn’t he tell me to use the gloves? Oh crap, now I had the sickness and he had to go get Fast Forward. I told him not to, but off he ran. Then I don’t remember a lot. Fast Forward and Creaky getting me in the house, making me lie down, drinking a bunch of water that I threw up, more water until I kept it down. Creaky was pissed, obviously. But since this was my first time, he said to learn my lesson from now on and wear the goddamn gloves.
Those things were so big and stiff, it was like trying to use tools while wearing baseball mitts. I’d seen Fast Forward working without his. So it wasn’t my first day of going bare-handed, but that was the day it caught up to me, because it builds up in your system. Green tobacco sickness is what it’s called. Nicotine poisoning. Kids get it all the time, more than adults, which is why Fast Forward could get by without gloves. If you’re older and you’ve smoked more, your body gets used to the poison and takes everything better in stride.
What fool would want to put himself through all that, you’re going to ask. For a crop that addicts people and tars their lungs and busts the grower’s ass. Mind you, the government used to pay a man to grow it, with laws about how much he could grow, and where, with price supports to make sure there was plenty and also just exactly enough. The world needed our burley tobacco and wanted it bad. Philip Morris and those guys got their product, got the kids hooked, made their fortunes, and we all lived happily ever after, for a hundred years or something. Until people caught on to the downside of smoking and sued the hell out of somebody. And the government said, Well, never mind on that, and phased out the price supports.
I had only a kid’s idea of anything at Creaky Farm, but losing those market guarantees was all men talked about. Getting their farms foreclosed, moving in with their kids or maiden aunts, going on disability because their piece of American pie went rotten. Only some few with superhero strength stayed out there trying to put in more acreage, busting their backs to break even. They said the most of our tobacco now was getting sold to China. Meaning I guess we were helping to kill the communists, so. God bless America and all that.
Why does a man keep trying? On long, cold days in the stripping house I’ve spent many an hour listening to guys chew over that question. So yes, stripping green leaves would be my problem, in years to come. Used to be, the stripping house was a place to hear the best stories in the world. Guys saved them up all year. Now it’s mostly just the saddest story ever told: where the world has left us. A farmer has his land, and nothing else. He’s more than married to it, he’s on life support. If he puts his acreage in corn or soy, he might net seven hundred dollars an acre. Which is fine and good for the hundred-acre guys, Star Wars farmers.
But what if he’s us, with only three that can be plowed? In the little piece of hell that God made special for growing burley tobacco, farmers always got seven thousand an acre. A three-acre field is no fortune, but it kept him alive. No other crop known to man that’s legal will give him that kind of return on these croplands, precious and small that they are. The rules are made by soil and rain and slope. Leaving your family’s land would be like moving out of your own body. That land is alive, a body itself, with its own talents and, I guess you could say, addictions. If you farm on the back of these mountains, your choice is to grow tobacco, or try something else—anything else, it turns out—and lose everything. While somebody, someplace, is laughing at your failure, thinking you got what you deserved.
Around the time I topped and cut my first tobacco, we noticed the cigarette ads stopped playing. No idea why. If we’d known it was people thinking tobacco was dangerous for kids even to see on TV, with their eyes, we’d have found that dead hilarious. Our schools had smoking barrels. Teachers smoked on their breaks, kids at recess. The buyers were telling us the cancer thing was a scare, not proven. Another case of city people trash-talking us and our hard work, like anything else we did to feed ourselves: raising calves for slaughter, mining our coal, shooting Bambi with our hunting rifles. Now these people that would not know a tobacco plant if they saw one were calling it the devil.
If Philip Morris and them knew the devil had real teeth, they sat harder on that secret than you’d believe. Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school, free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell, and a carton got such taxes on it, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with “Proud Tobacco Farmer” stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.
15
November 19. A birthday never to forget.
I expected it to be a big nothing, since nobody knew. Mom would, obviously, but she hadn’t scheduled any visit as far as I knew. Maybe trying to get off work that Saturday. Meantime I didn’t plan on telling anybody, especially not Creaky, because he would hold it against me. Like, just from getting born I was expecting too much.
But the night before, lined up for squad inspection in our room, I blurted it out: tomorrow I’m turning eleven. This can be a monster thing for a kid to keep inside. And Fast Forward was a true brother. He’d thought I was already older than that, due to being tall for my age. He said it was too bad I didn’t give him more warning because he would have organized something. But he would still try. Another pharm party was my guess, or the special girlfriend cookies. Life wasn’t giving me a lot to go on right then. Regular cookies would have totally made my day.