He stalled when he came around the corner, eyes dropping to the shirt of his I was wearing.
“We’re smoking the fields today,” I said, before he could get out whatever he was thinking. “All of them. We’ll cut and clear as we go. Re-dig the ditches that need it.”
“What are you doing? Where’s Annie?”
“I had Margaret take her to Esther’s. She’s staying there tonight, too, in case we have to work late.”
Something passed over his face that I couldn’t read, and it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t want to stay here alone with me. Annie’s presence in the house was like a safety net between us in more ways than one.
“June—”
“Look, I know you don’t want my help. But we both know you need it if you’re going to keep from losing that crop.” I met his eyes.
His jaw clenched, and we stood there staring each other down until his gaze fell to the coffee. He picked it up, taking a sip. That was all the answer I’d get out of him, but he wasn’t arguing. That was good enough for me.
I headed for the back door with my own coffee in hand. The sweet smell of honeysuckle stirred in the air as the sun warmed the wind. The soil was turned out in the rows where Eamon had already torn up the infected tobacco, and if we were going to get every single plant treated by nightfall, we had to start working.
Callie stamped her hooves excitedly behind the fence when I made it to the barn, mane flicking as she shook her head.
“Hi, Callie.” I caught her nose with my hand as I passed, stroking along her chin before I opened the door.
Eamon was behind me a moment later, hanging a bucket of oats for her on his way to the barn. He got straight to work, fetching two chains from where they were hung on the post. I took another long drink of my coffee before I set it down and rolled up my sleeves.
“Okay. Tell me what to do,” I said.
For a second, I thought I saw the shadow of a grin at the corner of Eamon’s mouth, but he turned away from me, crossing the barn to the racks that were stored on the opposite wall.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ve just never known you to take orders.”
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.”