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.