Farmer Boys

Artist: Kristine Perkins

Philip - 1982

            Philip flipped on the kitchen light, dumped his lunch pail by the sink, and caught the phone on the last ring.

            “Where’ve you been? I thought you’d be home by now,” his mom said, worry stretching through the cord. “Your father wanted me to tell you,” her voice broke. “We’re losing it—”

            “What?” he said.

            She almost shrieked, her voice cracking. “The farm. Everything.”

            Philip’s knees went weak. Too far away from a chair, he sat down on the linoleum. “Whaddya mean?”

            “Already tried everything. He didn’t want to tell you. He’s not taking it well,” she said. “They’re coming tomorrow.”

            Faintly, through the earpiece, Philip heard a gunshot. And then a clattering of his mother’s receiver and the front storm door banging open—the pneumatic closer hissing and slowly shutting out Lucky’s barks in the far-off distance.

            All the protests on the Capitol steps, pleas for help, and picketing were getting farmers nowhere. Debts were owed, interest rates were high, and the market for grain had virtually crashed since the embargo against the Soviet Union.

Danny - 1982

            Danny weaved in and out of traffic on I-35, shifting his ‘67 Chevelle hard each time. A semi honked as he raced by, not letting the big rig get over to allow a merge.

            “Jerk,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket and fishing out a pack of Marlboro reds. He rolled the window down.

            “She’s sleeping,” Connie whispered, turning in the passenger seat to look back at their baby girl.

            Danny gave his wife a stern look but rolled the window up. Stuck the pack under his thigh. He gripped the steering wheel, the wind whistling against the windshield.

            “You’re sure about this?” he asked.

            “That’s what I’m asking you,” she said, digging in her purse at her feet. She handed Danny a stick of Doublemint gum. He took it and held out his hand for another.

            “All gone,” she took his wrapper and stuffed it back in her purse for later when he wanted to spit it back out.

            “I just,” he looked out the window. “Didn’t think he’d kick the bucket so soon.” A hitchhiker stood on the side of an on-ramp. “What’s that idiot hippie doing?”

            “We knew it was coming,” Connie said. “He taught you everything you know. Everything you need to know. We’ll be fine.” Connie looked back at their daughter. “And it’ll be a life we can give her. Something to be proud of. We’ll tell her all about her farmer grandpa and who he was, and you’ll teach her how to drive a tractor, and she’ll be proud to call her daddy a farmer, too.” 

            Connie rubbed Danny’s thigh and looked out her window at the vast oil fields of Texas. The home they were leaving after seven years. Seven years of finishing college and figuring out what they wanted to do. Teaching kids and working construction and living in campgrounds and renting an apartment next to men who dressed up as women on the weekends. After seven years, they were headed home to Rolling Rock where they would take over the small family farm.

Philip - 1982

            The auction took all day. Every last bit was sold off to people Philip had known all his life. Nobody smiled. Philip’s mother stayed inside the house.

            “It was an embarrassment is what it was,” Philip said to his pregnant wife, Mary. She had stayed back at their place to start packing for their move to Des Moines. Philip knew since he didn’t have a home anymore, he needed to go where the action was to make a name for himself.

            Mary unfolded a stack of newspapers, preparing them to wrap breakables. “But, honey, we should think of this as a blessing. Can you imagine if you were responsible for this? It would break us. Your dad was smart. He protected us,” she paused and placed her hands on her belly and then reached for Philip’s hand.

He felt a kick and wrapped his arms around Mary. He pressed his own belly up against the baby. He sobbed into Mary’s neck, feeling the life they created knocking and reminding him that he was not alone.

Danny - 1984

Danny opened his bags of seed corn and loaded the planter, being careful not to touch the weathered fiberglass lids too much. Standing back as far as he could while he gently let the lid settle, wearing work gloves, of course. And by the time he had planted ten rows, working diagonally—most people thought farmers planted in straight rows—he felt the tractor slump to one side. Danny put it in neutral and got out into the spring wind. There in one of his big, expensive wheels was a deer antler, piercing the rubber.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, yanking it out.

“A man can’t win,” he told Connie as he forked a canned green bean. “One thing goes right and then four more things go wrong. And then you see on the news all them stories about the high cost of milk and why is meat getting so expensive and why is it that every time I turn on the news I can’t see straight. They don’t know how the hell their food is grown. No one understands anything!” His voice got louder after each sentence. He raised his arm and pointed his fork out the window. “Kids think corn comes from a can. Can you believe it? It’s all nonsense.”

Philip - 1984

            Philip sat down at his new desk with a filing cabinet standing next to the door. Fluorescent lights. The whole shebang. There was a space on the wall where he planned to hang a picture of the farm, but it was his first day. He’d bring it tomorrow. It was the last picture he ever took of the homeplace two weeks after the foreclosure. He had stood in the field, surrounded by corn that came up to his shoulders. The old house off in the distance where orange daylilies bloomed in the sunny corners and hostas preferred the shadows. The apple tree and clothesline where his mom hung their work pants and shirts. The window to his bedroom that before him was the guest room where his grandfather would stay. A traveling painter who “didn’t have a pot to piss in,” according to his dad.

            “Welcome to the Doe family. How’s it feel?” Mr. Sampson rapped his knuckles on the door.

            “Fits like a glove,” Philip stood to shake hands.

            “Good, good. Hey,” Mr. Sampson clapped Philip on the shoulder. “Lemme show you around. Copier, pisser. Then lunch. Just a simple sales meeting.”

            Philip closed the door behind him.

Danny - 1987

            Connie washed and dried an empty container of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and handed it to Danny.

“Here,” she said.

            Danny crossed the yard with his daughter at his heels.

“What’d you say you need it for?” he asked.

            Jennifer shrugged. “I don’t know. My teacher just asked if I could bring some to class for show and tell.”

            “I’ll be sending a bill,” he said as he opened the door to his one and only steel grain bin. He picked Jennifer up and set her on the metal step so she could peer in and see the sea of soybeans at the bottom, the stale air catching in her throat, creating a lump she couldn’t swallow. He had already taken most of the soybeans to the grain elevator, but there were still some at the bottom.

            “Can I jump in?” she asked, her voice echoing in the metal vortex. Flecks of dust hung in the air.

            “No,” Danny said. “There’s rats in there and could get your foot caught on the drier underneath. Men die in these all the time.”

            And with that, he scooped up the beans and filled the butter container. “Like that?” he held out the full tub.

            The next morning, Jennifer stood in front of her class and said, “My dad even let me swim in the beans.”

            The whole class said “Oooooh,” and one little boy said “He did not!”

            “Thank you for sharing, Jennifer,” Mrs. Johanssen said. “These will come in handy as we talk about the crops we raise and why it’s so important to the state that we live in, which is what?”

“Iowa,” the class said together. 

            As Jennifer headed back to her seat, her face beaming, heart full of pride, and a skip in her step, she said over her shoulder, “Dad’s sending a bill.”

Philip - 1988

            “Boys and girls,” Mrs. Tweedy stood at the front of the kindergarten class. “Emily volunteered to bring in some soybeans as we continue our lesson on crops. Emily, please join me.”

            From her desk, Emily pulled out a plastic bag of unroasted, shelled, raw soybeans that her mother had gotten at Walmart when Emily begged her to buy some.

            “The whole class is counting on me,” she told her mom. “Mrs. Tweedy asked for someone whose dad is a farmer to bring in some soybeans. So I told her I could.”

            “Your dad works for John Deere, but he’s not a farmer,” her mom said but bought them anyway. Mary had just suffered her third miscarriage and was not in the mood to argue with her kindergartener.

            Mrs. Tweedy took the bag from Emily and held them up. “Oh, this is a great lesson.”

            Emily beamed.

            “These are soybeans, but they’ve been processed and cleaned. These are the kind you eat. We’ll send these back home with Emily to enjoy, but we need someone who can get soybeans straight from the field. The kind we grow here that’s used to make gasoline, oils, and plastics.”

            Emily sat down at her desk and hid the bag away under her workbook and cried.

Danny - 1991

            Danny tapped the cab’s air conditioning vent in his tractor. The dial was turned all the way to the end of the blue “Cool,” but nothing was coming out. He undid the locks and opened both windows to get fresh air into the cab. He looked behind him to the plowing discs. The few crops that did grow—riddled with holey leaves and rotted roots—would never make it to market. In the heat of the summer, he couldn’t believe he was plowing under his crop.

***

            “She needs them for the concert,” Connie said that winter, stirring a pot of soup on the stove. She walked over to the table and started cutting a carrot, using a small paring knife they got for free from the local grain elevator and a porcelain dinner plate as a cutting board.

            “Hmpf,” Danny scooped some grape jelly from the jar and plopped it on his plate. “New shoes, huh?” He could barely afford a gallon of milk from the gas station.

            Jennifer walked in the kitchen.

            He said, “New shoes, huh?” with a mouthful of jelly.

            Jennifer looked at her mom and then back at her dad. “Yeah,” she shrugged and grabbed an apple.

            “Not before supper,” Connie gave Jennifer the eye. She put the apple back and said, “I don’t have any black shoes that’ll go with my outfit.”

            “How much would these shoes cost?” Danny asked.

            Jennifer looked at Connie who looked at Danny and then back at her daughter.

            “Twenty bucks? Maybe?” Jennifer shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t found ‘em yet.”

            “Haven’t found ‘em yet?” Danny asked. “What about your mom’s shoes? She’s got black ones.”

Jennifer scoffed. “We’re not the same size, and I’m not wearing teacher shoes.”

“She’s right,” Connie gathered the carrots in a measuring cup and dumped them in the pot.

“Hmph,” Danny looked down at his plate, not knowing what else to say.

After dinner, he went to the basement for a smoke and then layered on his overalls, stocking hat, and boots. He grabbed leather gloves and a flashlight and trudged to the barn.

“Hey, girl,” he shined the light on his horse, Ring My Bell. Bell neighed and stuck her head over the fence. Danny gave her a coffee can of oats, two sections of hay, and filled her bucket with fresh water from the hose. While the snow fell, he leaned over the fence watching her eat and lit another cigarette.

“You don’t need new shoes, do ya?”

Bell looked up and then went back to tearing off bites of hay, moving the alfalfa around with her soft lips.

“The Old Lady says we need to sell you and bring back the pigs, but we won’t do that. I won’t let her. Pigs smell and they’re work. Jesus, when I was a kid, you wouldn’t believe the stuff we had to do to take care of ‘em.” Danny took a puff and blew out the smoke in little circles. Bell kept eating.

Philip - 2004

Philip threw a stack of dress shirts on their king-sized bed.

“Where are you going?” asked their second daughter Lisa, their miracle baby after five miscarriages. They had almost given up all hope of having another child.

Philip unzipped his suitcase and laid it flat.

“China,” he said.

“Aren’t we going, too?” Lisa threw a sock-ball into the suitcase.

“Not for another two months,” Philip said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re still in school, and we wanted you to finish out the year,” he said. 

Lisa shook her head and furiously threw all the sock balls at once into the bottom of the suitcase—fists of them.

“It means I’m going to miss you like crazy. And then,” he sat down beside her on the bed. Mary crawled up on the bed and hugged them both. “Before you know it, we’ll be together and away from friends for two years, and then we can come back, and I won’t ever leave you again.”

Philip jumped up. “Almost forgot.” He grabbed a box from the dresser and threw it to Lisa.

“Check this out,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked, turning the small computer screen over.

“GPS for the car. Mommy needs one because we all know how good her sense of direction is. Just sent them out to all our customers.”

“Big spenders,” Mary said, picking up the empty box and looking at the back.

“It’s all about the technology now,” Philip said.

***

Philip sipped his usual afternoon cup of coffee and listened to the John Doe China Investments Chief Financial Officer. Philip thought the bags under the CFO’s eyes seemed purple and perhaps his shirt more wrinkled than usual. Philip didn’t have the heart to tell him that his secretary already broke the bad news, just seconds before. So when Mr. Chao stopped talking and repeated, “Mr. Dalton, do you hear me?” Philip nodded.

 “You’re saying there’s a spy in our most recent acquisition, LabTronics, which could cost us between 40 and 50 percent once word gets out,” Philip said.

“Correct,” said the CFO.

Philip set his coffee down. Black squiggles flicked across his desk. He blinked several times to clear the floaters, but they only increased. Philip then fainted.

He came to lying in a hospital bed behind a white sheet. There was an oxygen tube in his nose. According to his wristwatch, it was half past seven.

He let his head fall back on the pillow. Emily’s big piano concert was long over. His job was potentially on the line. Maybe this is how dad felt, he wondered.

Danny - 2013

            Danny threw the Rolling Rock Register on the passenger seat, covering up the red leather rips where yellowed foam had browned, and fired up his old truck. He lit a Marlboro red and rolled down the window. He watched kids stand in a line waiting to load the bus. 

            Thomas hopped in, moving the paper and pushing his backpack to the floor. Silently, Danny put the truck in gear.

            “Hey, gramps,” Thomas said. 

            “I ever teach you how to tell when the beans are ready?” Danny asked. 

            “Nope.”

            “You bite ‘em, and you can tell their moisture level. When you can pick ‘em, ” Danny said. “Shouldn’t be too hard you can’t bite ‘em, but just chewy enough they snap clean in half.”

            “Cool,” Thomas said and looked out the window at the houses moving past as they made their way toward the edge of town. 

Without lifting his whole hand off the steering wheel, Danny farmer-waved with one finger to Norm who stood surveying his lawn, the last house on the edge of town. “That Farmall. Thought we could get that out, too. Tinker with it,” he said. 

            Thomas glanced at his grandpa. Wisps of grey hair that curled from under his hat. A starburst of deep worry wrinkles at the corner of his eye. Dirt under thick nails. 

“Yeah,” Thomas said.

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