Heritage and Harvestors

Heritage and Harvesters

by Andy Hayes

A car horn shouts its owner’s rude obscenities, and I know what it means even before the slick looking sports car’s owner flips me the bird. My old John Deere tractor is leading a long line of commuters into town like ducklings in tow. I wave people around when I can, but the outflow of traffic was nearly as busy as the pied piper lane I had created. I see the barn over the next hill and I was glad that I would be able to duck out of the way of the collective ire soon.

The barn was once painted a deep, traditional, red, but it has since chipped and faded into a less proud spotted pink. We had to move it closer to the house when we sold our first plot of land, and then had to move it again when we sold our second. The barn and the house could now be caught in the same sad photograph, and many have. Our house was once a majestic white, and had a long, well-kept wrap around porch and a swing seat that my mother once sung to us from. Now it was a shade of beige and the wrap around porch was a mismatching set of warped boards that made it treacherous to maneuver anywhere besides to the front door. The swing seat was taken down right after my mother’s death.

The tractor spits and complains as I pull the left hand turn into our barn’s open doors. I hopped out of the seat and disengaged the plowing equipment I had set on it. The worn runners of the big barn doors squealed as I slid them shut, and the lock barely fit over the rust build up. I wipe the day’s sweat off my brow. I take my muddy boots off and place them together next to my father’s kicked off pair. He’s in the kitchen looking over the map of our land with a pencil in one hand and a balled up hard candy wrapper in his other.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to sell off another plot,” he says.

“We haven’t planted yet. This harvest could be better,”

“Harvest will be the same as last year’s, and the year before that,”

“Corn will go up to account for the increasing biofuel craze,”

“If we don’t have to claim most of our crop,” he says.

The pencil is restless in his hands. He taps it in different sectors of the map. Two large plots are already covered in a big red X. The barn has been sketched in by the same red pen next to our house. The map is covered with coffee stains and cigarette ash. There hasn’t been a cigarette near this house in five years. I go to the fridge and grab the carton of orange juice and take a swing. I look over the map with my father and talk about which section of our land would be the least crippling to part with. On the map our land is bordered by green spaces and little illustrations of trees. Today our land is enveloped by housing developments named things like “The Greens” and “Oak Wood”.

I check the time, and swallow the last of my orange juice. The bus would be here in a couple of minutes. I rummage through bulk sized bags of hard candies until I find a jar of peanut butter. I grab a half of a loaf of bread from the refrigerator and put on my sneakers. I kick my father’s wandering left boot back onto the mat with its partner and head to the bus stop.

The bell rings for first period class and it’s like the ringing in of the first round of a boxing match. Other kids are drawing lewd things in the margins of their notes. I fill mine with more notes, notes about my notes, meta notes. Biology is done in a sprint, and with it goes Math and English. The bell rings again and it’s lunch time. I find my normal seat in the corner and pull out my loaf of bread and peanut butter.

I hear them making fun of me while scarfing down their pizza that they paid three dollars for. I hear the condescending tones in their voices. I see the way their eyes gleam and glisten because they weren’t up at 4 a.m. I eat in silence and wait for the bell to ring to get back into class. I move through the rest of the day without a thought about the farm, the fields, selling land, or my father.

I spend the bus ride back looking out across freshly plowed fields ready for planting. Markers of the fields intended seed strains mark the side of the road like political signs. Each field has a different combination of letters and numbers to mark just what kind of soy or feed corn they plan on growing. No seed company allows for the farmers to replant their seeds, so each season you pick a different strain or a different breed of plant so that you can’t ever reseed with whatever you grew last season.

The seed bill is on the kitchen counter, and it’s a staggering amount. A necessary expense of course, but money from now is not always money for later in this lifestyle.

“These biofuels are taking from both sides I think,” my father says walking into the kitchen.

“Yeah, but money now will be money later,” I reply.

“Not always,” he states.

We share a pot of spaghetti with red sauce for dinner. We use whats left of the loaf of bread that I brought to school to make toast. My father sprinkles some garlic salt on it and makes a joke about it being a true Italian dinner now. I laugh, and he laughs. We fill the empty house with our laughter.

“Got a letter from your brother up in the city,” he says.

I know that my brother would have much preferred an email, but he knows that my father would never get it.

“Yeah? I think we should go see him one of these days. I heard he just got a pool table,”

“Then we’d have to visit your sister too, and you know how that goes,”

    We finish dinner and do the dishes together. I place the hand-washed plates and cups back into the cupboard. The cupboards are filled with nice china and ornamental serving dishes, and they each boast their own coat of dust five years thick. We go upstairs and pull on our matching heavy sweatshirts and go back downstairs. I sit and tie my boots as my dad hitches the planting equipment to the tractors in his socks. The planting equipment is locked up next to the fertilizer spreading truck. They each look like horrible, malicious pieces of technology, more prone to dismember than to sustain. I throw him his boots as he climbs into the tractor I was driving this morning. I find the seat of the older one in the dark and settle in for a long night of planting.
    The sun’s probing rays find their way between my window’s shades too late. I swear at my alarm clock which is blinking 12:00 innocently back at me. By the time I get downstairs my father is already back inside, showered and bootless. He’s drinking coffee and looking at the map again. He slides me a mug of steaming coffee, and shrugs off any apology I could have given. He has the red pen in his hand, and is looking with great intent on one of the plots we have yet to plant. In front of him is a pile of hard candy wrappers glistening in the sun like a mound of precious gems.
    “Shoot Dad, you’re holding that pen awfully tight,”
    He ignores my quip and continues pouring over the map. His tongue swirls around a hard candy in his mouth. The clatter against his teeth makes me cringe. The bus would be here soon, so I grab a couple bagels from the pantry and head out. I look out the window of the bus at the rippled field of browns. There’s so much hope, so much potential.
    When I get home I notice that my father’s boots are not by the door. The kitchen is silent, and my Dad doesn’t answer when I call for him. I hear the sound of a phone that’s been off the hook for far too long. It cries out for someone to return it home. I place it back in its cradle, and see that it’s not the only thing that’s been disturbed. The living room is in shambles, fist sized holes dot the walls. The family portrait, the one with everyone in it, is broken on the floor. Mom’s old reading lamp is leaning, bent, against the wall like a man after a long night out.
    “They refuse to pay what they offered,” I hear from behind me.
    “Dad...it’s okay. We still have this harvest. This harvest will be a good one,”
    “We’d have to sell two plots to cover the loans we took out, and with two plots gone next year we’d have no hope of keeping those housing vultures away,”
    “We’ve got this, we’ve made it years past and we’ll make it now,”
    “We? We don’t have anything, you’re just going through the motions before you go to college. Just like your brother and just like your sister,”
    “This isn’t the time for this talk Dad. Calm down, take a walk,”
    He shoves by me and heads out the front door. The screen door waves back and forth; its hinges wailing with every movement. I dip my head and go to my room. My hands move through my homework while my mind is out in the fields. I check the status of my college applications; all pending review. I don’t hear my father get in before I fall asleep.
    My alarm sounds from my new alarm clock and I rise without hitting snooze. It’s still dark as I prepare a pot of coffee and I go to the shed to see that my father’s boots and one of the tractors were gone. I curse myself for making him work alone again, and I hurry to set out.
    Planting seed is just about as mindless as it seems. Tractor basically drives itself, and I just sit there listening to the large wheels churn out little seeds that we will water with our life. College would take me from this life, and it would take me from this horrible way of living. My brother is living as a consultant for some networking technology company. He’s got a wife and a kid on the way, and my Dad swears that we’ll go up once we get a break.

We never get a break. The hands we hire are seasonal, and most of the planting and fertilizing we do on our own. We sold our third tractor, my Mom’s tractor, to pay for a new dry fertilizer spreader after the old one burned out. My father didn’t trust that new liquid stuff, and insisted that we use the pellets. He would drive at full speed with the spreader on the highest setting. The slotted wheel below the hopper would spin at a blurring speed and would sling little green and white balls a hundred feet from the truck. We’d take turns jumping on the top of the hopper trying to push down the stuff as fast as it was being spread. That was always my brother’s favorite part.

    My sister she was an anomaly. Liberal Arts major, something with art or English or something along those lines. She went vegetarian, then vegan, then lesbian. She lives in the west somewhere and sends us condescending and preachy literature about the dangers of monoculture farming and unsustainable agriculture. My dad has a special place in the brush fire for them. We joke that we never hear from her because we can’t see smoke signals from this far away.
    I remember us, the whole family, planting one evening. It only took one evening with all of us there. My sister got stuck in an irrigation ditch because she took the one turn we ever have to take slightly too hard. She hopped out of the tractor’s cab in her overalls and starting kicking at the big back wheel. My mom stuffed out her cigarette and teased her for having zig-zagging rows. My brother joined in and was pelted with seed from the planter’s hopper. Dad wasn’t too happy about that so he nudged her with his tractor and she toppled into the irrigation ditch. My dad pushed his tractor a little too far and the tractor slid in too. My sister narrowly dodged it and started laughing uncontrollably through my father’s expletives. We all started laughing. We don’t own that plot anymore.
    The field is planted into neat, straight rows, and I watch as the sun is pulled below the horizon through the small green rear view mirror of my tractor. The shadows pool in the deep trenches between rows, and the cool evening air descends on me in a comforting blanket. I hear my father’s tractor start up in the distance, and his two cones of light shoot out in the distance. He was probably admiring the sunset as well.
    Back at the house we eat our tuna sandwiches in silence. Silence because of exhaustion not because of lack of things to say. The air is thick with doubt and uncertainty, and it pollutes every thread of conversation I can hope to weave. My father’s eyes are focused in a time and place far away, and his dirty hands clutch the sandwich like it’d try to escape if he let up the tiniest bit. I want to apologize for wanting to get out. I want to apologize for my siblings and for our shared desire to escape the days of sitting behind a tractor wheel. I want to apologize for Mom dying. I can’t. I finish my sandwich and say my good nights to my unresponsive father.
    My teacher announces in school that we’re to take a field trip to a sustainable development laboratory at the local university at the end of the week. A lot of the other seniors talk about a senior skip day interfering. Apparently “going big at Lake Big Crest” is more important to them than minimizing our carbon footprint. My teacher insists that the material covered in the tour will be imperative knowledge for the final. I text my sister about going, and she responds that maybe I could bring our father. I don’t send anything back.
    When I get home the fist-sized holes still dot the walls in the living room, but our family portrait has been mended. My mother’s reading lamp has been restored to its straight and upright position. The planting was over, and we had nothing to do but fertilize once every month; fertilize and hope. I’d now see my father pacing the floors and filling his time with little jobs that didn’t need to be done. He removed some of the obscenely warped boards on the porch, but never replaced them. He chipped off some of the barn’s old, weathered paint, but never repainted it. He cleaned out his side of the closet, but not hers. Hard candy wrappers were scattered about on tables, window sills, and chairs. Each one a vibrant color that grabbed your eye and screamed look at me.
    It was the end of the week and the date of the field trip and the first fertilization. My dad swears up and down that it’s fine that I go on to this university. “After all, it is the future,” he would say mockingly. I didn’t know if he was talking about the research or college, and I didn’t want clarification. My phone was turned off as per the guide’s request, and the class was pretty thin as it was, so I didn’t want to be that guy in the back with the cell phone in addition to that guy that eats loaves of bread with peanut butter.
    The college campus was a place of distinct polarity. We walked around while classes were in session and it was a ghost town. I had the feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, probably learning something. Even the rabbits and squirrels stopped and looked at us like we didn’t belong. Then I heard the rumblings of footsteps and doors opening. People pulling out phones and putting in ear buds. There were thousands around me all of a sudden. The squirrels and rabbits have vanished and in their place were people carrying on with recounting whatever crazy thing they had planned for the upcoming weekend. All certainly more exciting than “going big at Lake Big Crest” I’m sure.
    It’s dark by the time we get back into our town. I see blue and red lights reaching out into the darkness from down the road. A commuter got in a car accident I immediately think. I hope that they didn’t hit our barn. I see that the squad cars and ambulance are indeed in front of the barn, and I just know that if one of our tractors got damaged we’d be done for the year. The crack of radios cutting in and crack the silence as I approach. I overhear the word gruesome from several adjacent conversations.
    I’m informed of my father’s death by a polite police officer with a crooked nose and a cell phone that won’t stop ringing. He was found in the hopper of the fertilizer truck, well half of him was. The other half was “dismembered and thrown all over that field over there,” I was told. I don’t cry, I’ve somehow forgotten how. They say it was an accident, but I know my Dad had fertilized a thousand times, and never once lost his footing. My sister and brother have been informed, and were planning on coming back soon. I can’t say that I want them to.
    Curried mushroom casserole sits in front of me in a steaming pile. My sister’s life partner had just taken a vegan cooking class at the local community center, and she swears up and down that it has changed her life. My brother is busy tending to his very pregnant wife who has been struck by a crazy desire for a funnel cake. I’m sucking on a hard candy and trying to ignore the oncoming wave of immense pity. He wasn’t just my father you assholes, I’m just the one that is still here. I want to scream at them to all go back home. They can’t be sad, because they didn’t know him anymore. They didn’t wake up at 4a.m to plant feed corn; they didn’t struggle with decisions between selling land plots to housing developments; they didn’t remember our mother’s songs on the front porch. They could hum along, sure, but I was the only one who remembered the words.
    “What are we going to do with the farm?” my brother asks, with a weird doughnut thing in his hand. I guess it was the closest thing he could find to a funnel cake.
    “Finish the harvest,” I reply.
    “We could turn it into a community garden!” my sister squeals.
    “You’re so cliche,” I tell her.
    The funeral’s costs are split between my brother and my sister. Well, mostly my brother, but because my sister was living at some sustainable commune or something. He was cremated and placed into an urn usually used for “children, on account that we could only cremate half of him”. The debt of my father was inherited by all of us, but in his will he left me the farm, so it was decided by my brother to sell the farm in its entirety to pay off whatever debts were owed. I insist that we wait till the harvest.
    It’s weird and unnatural for other people to be in the house. Smells of roasting vegetables and sauteed tofu fill the air and tie a knot in my gut. My sister takes to baking pies and tarts from locally grown fruits that she picks up at the local farmers’ market. I stick to hard candy. Soon the refrigerator is full, and the freezer is shortly after. The china with the five years of dust is cleaned and used. My sister and her lover look fondly over the clothes in my mother’s closet. I see my brother sneak a smoke on the holy porch. He and his wife are the first to leave, and understandably so. He has a job and she is nearly bursting. My sister and her partner linger longer. I don’t know if it was because of maternal instincts or because of the free housing they were getting.

I wake up the morning after my sister hugged me and proclaimed that I was the strongest person she knew. I was 18 and legally an adult. The farm was mine by my father’s will, and I was alone in the kitchen studying the map of my inherited domain. The house was silent. Even mice and their mousers stood still in quiet contemplation. I reload the cleaned fertilizer truck with a new batch of pellets. I stop to take my boots off on the mat next to the door and see his boots laying there splayed out.

“Forgot your boots Dad,”

    I feel it coming and I can’t fight it. My chest is a black hole and is pulling the rest of me into it. I drop to my knees and tears gush from my eyes. Wave after wave of emotion pound my conscious being until I’m nothing more than a curled ball on our barn’s cold cement floor. It’s weird crying by yourself. I feel embarrassed for letting my interior break so far out of my exterior, and I have no cue to stop. I pick myself up and wipe off my face with a red handkerchief and find my place in my tractor’s seat whenever the knot in my stomach finally releases me. The fertilizer wheel spins and turns, and when it stops spitting out pellets I get on top and push them down.
    The longest drought since 1984 they say on the news. All of the farmers that are farther from town have already begun to start filling out the paper work to claim their crop as lost to the insurance companies. Some have already begun to mow their useless shriveled corn and soy down, but leaving one lone strip of crop to show the insurance companies that it was indeed the longest drought since 1984. Even walking was kicking up dust that seemed to hang in the air like a beige fog. That was, until you got to our fields. They thrive. The green of our corn is emerald and deep. The soy is thick and you could hardly see any brown between the rows. The companies that had sold us the seed had been out to investigate just how their strain was succeeding in our plots but failing so miserably everywhere else. And I hate it. If the crop had failed I could sell the farm without looking back. I could sell and comfortably say that this chapter in my life had come to a close. I could sell and go to college, get a job in consulting or vegan cooking and spend my days ignoring my family. But it’s winning, the farm, my father, my heritage is winning.

I missed most of the neighbors and corporate agriculture doorbell rings and letters because of college visits. Some in the North, some in the Midwest, some in the West proper. My calloused hands gripping brightly colored folders containing university information, potential for careers, diversity of study and of course the ever-expanding alumni association. My pockets are filled with hard candy and I pop one in right after the one before it disintegrates. My tongue hurts, but I can’t stop. Whenever I get home from these visits I stop to maintain the fields.

I hire hands personally when it comes time to harvest. I pick young men that don’t talk much, and don’t know what happened to my father. The harvest goes quick and I find comfort returning to our barn and seeing that the other tractor is gone. We fill the main silo fast, the second silo even faster, the third is filled the fastest. We stuff feed corn in sheds and the barn’s attic. When the time comes the hands and I load the large trucks that take away all they can carry and come back for more. I’m high, but my father’s debts run deeper. Just wait for another harvest, next one will put me in the green. I know it.

I pause as I walk through the kitchen. The map staring back at me with unblinking red Xs for eyes. The overhead light catches the vibrant colors of candy wrappers and college folders. I look back at the floor. I’m being followed by dark brown tracks. I had forgotten to take off my boots.