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.
14
Cutting tobacco starts around a month after topping. Cutting is the bastard of all bastards. If you’ve not done it, here’s how it goes. First, the lamest worker on your crew （Tommy） walks ahead, throwing down the tobacco laths between the rows. Laths are wooden sticks, three feet long, like a kid would use for a sword fight. Which every kid up home has done, because a million of them are piled in barns waiting to get used in the fall. You come along after him and pick up the first stick, stab it in the ground so it’s standing up. Jam a sharp metal cap called a spear on the end of it. If you fall, that thing will run you through, so don’t. Next, with a hatchet you chop a tobacco plant off at the base. It’s like cutting down a six-foot-tall tobacco tree. Pick it up and slam its trunk down on the stick so it gets speared. Chop another plant, slam it on. You’ll get six plants pierced on that stick so it looks like a pole holding up a leaf tent. Then pull off the little metal spear point and move on. Jam the next stick in the ground, do it all again.
After the speared plants have stood in the sun and got three days’ dews on them to heal the sunburn, you load them on the flatbed and haul them to the barn. Then carry them up into the rafters and hang them on rails to cure. Every stick gets laid up sideways with its six plants hanging down, like pants on a clothesline. They’ll stay up there till all the plants are dry and brown. Only then will they get taken down, leaves stripped from the stalks, baled, and sold.
Climbing forty feet up into the barn rails to hang tobacco is a job for a monkey basically. Or the superhero that looks out for farms, instead of cities. Which, in case you didn’t notice, there isn’t a single one. So it’s the typical thing of jobs that can kill you, this gets to be a contest among guys, how fast and reckless can you be with tobacco hanging. Everybody knows somebody, the near misses, the shocking falls, the guy in a wheelchair to this day. I can name names. No machine exists for any of this, the work gets done by children and men. Your chance to become a cripple or a legend. Fast Forward was excellent. But Swap-Out, holy Christ. He was a spectacle. Like they say, no child born without his gifts.
It’s a full season of work to get a tobacco crop planted and set, weeded, suckered, sprayed to keep off the frogeye and blue mold. If it rains so much you can’t get the highboy in there, you slog around trying to spray by hand. And it all counts for nothing unless you can get it harvested before frost. So in October you’re in the field all day every day, cutting for the life of you. Picking up the next stick, stabbing the ground. Chopping a plant, lifting, slamming it on. Stab-chop-lift-slam times six, and move on, forever amen and God help you. One loaded stick of plants weighs thirty or forty pounds, and you’ll lift hundreds of them before a day is done. You do the math, because I’ve already done the job. What it adds up to is, everything hurts.