My lips twisted to hide my own smile. Were we joking now?
I watched closely as he assembled the rigging so that I could repeat the process if necessary. First he dumped the ash from the chambers, and then he refilled them with the contents of the metal containers I’d seen him open before.
“It’s chaff,” Eamon explained. “Burns for an hour, sometimes more, and that’s enough to cover about half an acre if you’re moving fast enough.”
“How many acres are there?”
“Twelve.”
I did the math in my head. That meant he was getting through about four or five acres a day. Between the two of us, we might be able to manage it all by sundown.
“How much have you lost?”
He set his hands on his hips, the number making his expression change before he said it out loud. “Almost two.”
So, he’d already taken a significant hit. I wondered if Esther knew the extent of it, or if he’d kept it from her.
“And how long until harvest?”
“I think I can start picking in another week. Maybe two.”
“All right,” I said, pushing away the next thought. I didn’t know if I’d still be there in a week. “Show me.”
He pulled two clean bandanas from his back pocket, handing me one, and we tied them around our necks. The process was a simple one, but it was tedious and time-consuming. Eamon filled the containers with chaff and lit them, and as soon as he closed the hatch, smoke began to spill from the holes punctured in the metal.
“You walk ahead of me, tear out anything sick. The bad ones need to be pulled up completely. At the end of each row, we switch.”
He said it like we’d done it before. We probably had.
We walked to the corner of the field, where the tobacco was most discolored, and I started up the row first, scanning the plants from bottom to top. It was only a few steps before I had to start cutting, gathering up the leaves in bunches before scraping them from the stalk.
Eamon followed at a slow pace, letting the smoke gather as he moved. It curled around the plants, between the rows before it drifted up into the air, hiding the blue sky. There was more sick tobacco than I expected, and I was tearing out plants more quickly than I wanted to, leaving holes in the field every ten to fifteen feet. Some of them had to come up completely, like Eamon said, and after the first several were pulled from the earth, I looked back at him, searching for any sign that he was anxious. But there was no point in dwelling on what was already done. The life of a farmer was a precarious one, every harvest season bringing with it its own challenges and losses. This one could sink him, but all he could do was get the job done. That was the only thing he had control over.
When we reached the end of the row, Eamon set the rig on my shoulders and gathered up the fallen crop, hauling it to the end so it could be burned. The weight of the dowel wasn’t extraordinarily heavy, but it was uncomfortable, and the balance was difficult. It took a few minutes for me to get the trick of it, and even then, one dip to the side almost sent the canisters crashing to the ground.
“You said your father taught you how to do this?” I asked.
The question caught him off guard. “Yeah.” He started down the row ahead of me and I followed, squinting through the sting of the smoke to keep him in sight. My eyes were already watering.
“Where are they? Your family?”
A pause. “This is my family.”
My steps faltered, and the smoke thickened around me as the canisters swung, making it harder to see him. It wasn’t cutting or meant to make me feel guilty. It was just a simple, honest answer. One that made that knife in my gut twist.
“We came from Ireland when I was a boy. Everyone went their own way, eventually.”
He said it with no emotion or regret. It was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t know what to make of it.
“You never understood that.” He added.
He knelt, cutting at the base of one of the plants and tossing the leaves to the ground. He didn’t ever talk about the “us” that existed before. In fact, he seemed to carefully avoid it.
“When I met you, you had Esther and Margaret, the women you grew up with. Mason.”
His voice changed just a little when he said Mason’s name.
“And here I was, alone in the world. You thought it was sad. But family for us, for me and my brothers, wasn’t what it is for yours. I didn’t really have a real family until . . .” He didn’t finish.
The knife twisted deeper.
Margaret was right that Eamon was a quiet creature. He spoke only when he had something to say, and he didn’t lace it in false meaning or palatable words. There was something so honest about him that it made me afraid of what else he might say now that he was talking. Like whatever judgment he might render me was bound to be true.
“And the farm?” I asked.
He smiled, but I could see only half of it with his face turned to the side. “Bought the land with money I saved working on the railroad, and the only reason I could afford it was because no one wanted it. The plot was rocky compared to the others in these mountains, but I’d grown up farming in Ireland, where the ground is more stone than earth. It took two years to get it cleared.”
That young Eamon from my memory came back to me, that shy smile he’d had when he appeared at the fence.
He walked ahead, cutting as he went, and we fell into a comfortable silence, working through the morning and then the afternoon with brief spells of conversation that were easier and easier to have. He told me about the first crop he ever harvested here, about building the barn and how he’d bought Callie half-starved at an auction in Asheville. They weren’t so much stories as they were excerpts from a kind of archive. One that made up his life. But when he finally quieted, taking longer to answer my questions, I found I didn’t have much to say. There wasn’t anything I could tell him that he didn’t already know.
The smoke billowed every time we refilled the canisters, and it darkened the air between the tall plants until it looked like dusk. Before I knew it, it was. The temperature cooled and we made it to the last field, my hands black with soot the way Eamon’s always were. My muscles screamed under the weight of the rigging, and when I made it to the end of the final row, Eamon was waiting for me.
I watched as he lifted the end of his shirt, wiping his face with it. Beneath was a plane of sun-gold skin that glistened over the muscles of his back. I could see the indented path I’d traced with the tips of my fingers at the Midsummer Faire.