Farmer’s Son

Excerpt

From underneath the planter where he lay flat on his back, Bobby Rowan McAllister heard the roar of the Chevy’s engine as soon as his father’s truck cleared the top of the hill. Even from that distance, the pickup’s old motor gunned so loud the twitching finches on the power line above him stopped chattering. Even Will, the gray-haired hired man who knelt next to Bobby, handing him tools, shut up the moment he heard it and cocked his head like the birds to follow the sound.

The old red truck spun off clods of dirt and yellow dust as it charged toward the tiny brick farmhouse and the gravel yard on the uphill side of it where the teenager and the hired hand were working. Sweating and crammed in tight under a metal seed tube, Bobby could hear but he couldn’t see beyond the mechanism that hung almost to the ground next to his cramping left shoulder.

Will was already standing by the time Bobby threw down his wrench and scuttled out crablike from the twelve inches of space he had between the metal parts and the rubber wheel. There were five tires in all, alternating with the six row units attached to the planter’s long metal arm. Bobby had spent the morning inching himself between them, working on the steel mechanisms, and he was hungry.

He had barely straightened up when the Chevy careened, braking hard around the corner, and jerked his father to a cloudy stop, nose-in less than a foot from the side of the shoebox house. Bobby squared his shoulders and planted his feet apart as his father had taught him, then gripped both his freckled hands behind his back. He took in his breath.

“Jesus Christ!” Garrett McAllister shouted as he climbed down from the pickup and slammed the door, clunking metal against metal. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

“You said it was too wet.”

“The hell I did!”

“This morning, you –”

“I told you to come out and see what was going on!” Garrett rolled his shoulders and strode toward him across the gravel. Bobby saw the harm in his eyes.

“You told me to fix the seed tubes, Dad, and that’s –”

“Don’t you ever use your head?” Garrett kept coming but pumped his arm out, pointing to his right but not looking as he stepped onto the high spring grass that Will hadn’t mown yet. “You’re eighteen goddamn years old. Don’t you see it?”

Bobby followed the finger to his left, then swung his whole body, searching.

“Over there!” Garrett stopped in front of Bobby. “Jesus!” A spray of spittle wet Bobby’s face.

Bobby scanned the hill on the other side of the machine shed. “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t see –” He twisted around the other way to find Will, but the hired man had slunk back into the shadow of the open barn. Bobby caught a glimpse of thin bars of sunlight streaking the sags of his face.

“Don’t look at him, Bobby! He’s just as ignorant as you are. Bertram’s running. Can’t you see it?”

A few dark birds circled low beyond the machine shed that blocked Bobby’s view. Stretching even taller than his six feet, he squinted above it to see the small specks reeling and turning in the sky. “I swear, he wasn’t running when I came in. And I went all over the county like you said, to see what everybody else was doing before I –”

Garrett’s finger jabbed him the chest. Bobby looked down at it. “Do I have to be here all the time? Bertram’s the dumbest farmer in this state. He doesn’t even get his beans in until after the Fourth of July. But there he is, while you two just sit here with your thumbs up your asses.”

“But Dad –”

“You’ve already cost us half a day! I want you down there on the other side of that ditch. You hear me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Garrett leaned in so close tuna salad filled Bobby’s nose. “What did you say?”

The boy blinked. “I said yes.”

Garrett stepped the hard toes of his hard boots over top of Bobby’s own. He stared up at Bobby towering above him. “What did you say?”

The air around them stopped moving. The trees and even the grass stopped waving. There was nothing but sun and the heat in his father’s eyes.

“Yessir.”

Garrett pressed down on Bobby’s toes.

He said it like his father had taught him. “Sir. Yes, sir.”

Garrett raised his eyebrows. His feet didn’t move.

“You’re the boss. I’ll do whatever you say.”

Garrett grinned wide, blasting his small sharp teeth. “You’re damn right you will.” He spun around and headed for his truck again, his narrow shoulders rolling. “I’ll be back in an hour. One hour. You hear me? Will!” he shouted. “You’re a coward. You know that?”

Garrett opened the driver’s door and turned. “And Bobby, don’t you dare plant too shallow. That seed cost me a fortune. It’s dry. You take it all the way down to proper depth.”

A moment later, the truck backed up eating yellow dust again, then turned and charged up the gravel road. Bobby didn’t move until the spinning swirl behind it had disappeared long after the bright red had crested the hill. The finches twitched once the sound was gone, as Will re-emerged blinking into the bright, hot sunlight.

He still held the tools he had been handing Bobby. “Your father’s full of crap,” he said. “It’s not gonna be dry enough to plant for at least another day.”

Bobby waited, but Will said nothing more. “So what do you want to do?”

“I told you. I’d leave it another day.”

“But –”

“Your dad’s a fool, Bobby. He doesn’t know the first thing about farming.”

“But you heard what Dad said.”

Will shrugged. “Then I guess you’ve got a choice.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because he’s talking to you, that’s why. He’s not talking to me anymore.” Will paused to manage the sound of his voice. “I’m sorry, but it has to be you now. So you can either tell him no, or you can do what he wants. Only he didn’t tell you what that was, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“What the hell is ‘proper depth’? An inch makes all the difference in whether you kill the seed or not. You plant it two inches down if the ground’s dry, and not just on the top here. It has to be dry all the way down to that little seed or it’ll drown in all that moisture and never come up. If it’s wet underground, like I know it is, you’ve got to plant shallow so the seed’ll survive. No deeper than an inch.”

Bobby looked at the ground by his feet.

“That’s not going to tell you anything. It looks dry on top. And you can’t dig down either. It might be dry in one place but wet as hell a few feet over. The only way to know is from experience, from looking at the whole field. And how much of that has your father got?”

“But he said –”

“Bobby, I’m telling you. If we do what he says and plant deep, you’re gonna have a cocked up planter gummed with mud you’re gonna have to fix. Again. But it’s up to you. Either way, we still have to get this last tube fixed.” Will threw down the tools as he crouched and turned, putting himself on his back with his knees bent and the soles of his boots flat. He began to wriggle under the low-hanging machinery, inching to get back under the same row unit where Bobby had been working.

“But what if he’s right?” Bobby said to Will’s jiggling paunch.

Will snorted.

Bobby brought his right hand to his mouth to bite his ragged thumbnail as his eyes found the dark birds again, circling low above the unseen Bertram. There were more of them now.

Will’s hand searched on the patchy grass for the pliers and found them.

“I’m gonna go see,” Bobby said. “Maybe it is dry. Maybe it’s drier there than it is here. Maybe Dad’s right.”

Will didn’t answer.

Bobby headed to his dirty Rambler, which he had parked early that morning next to the picnic table by the back door of the house. A few steps away, along the same narrow plateau that paused the steep slope to the bottom land, aqua blue bath towels swayed on two clotheslines strung between a pair of rusted Y-poles that faced each other across the green. One small hand towel had slid loose and fallen. Bobby picked it up and gently smoothed it over his left arm before putting it on the line again in its assigned spot next to its brothers.

The gravel road bordered the western edge of his father’s property. On the other side of it and up a hill, the neighboring farmer was planting corn as he sat high and proud on his shiny new red tractor. Bertram’s planter was new too, a clean eight-row he was pulling like a giant rake behind him, cutting the ground as it made eight furrows where seed tubes shot the corn in, then buried each kernel under a carefully measured layer of dirt.

“Damn,” Bobby said to himself as his stomach rumbled.

The black birds circled, screeching and diving for worms. From the car, Bobby watched Bertram get to the end of the long field, then turn the tractor and planter in a wide half-circle to head back in Bobby’s direction. He even waved at the boy when he spotted him. Bobby had no choice but to smile and wave back.

Bobby took the gravel road downhill, passing Will again on his back in the farmyard. At the bottom, Bobby crossed a cement bridge that spanned a deep drainage ditch cutting a wide gorge in the broad, fertile valley that stretched ten miles north to a smudged gray line of distant hills. Garrett’s land stopped at the dark trees half a mile away.

Bobby climbed out and started walking. As he entered his father’s fields, he breathed deep, filling his lungs with the moist rich smell. It relaxed him, easing the stiffness he had already begun to feel in his shoulders. He rubbed the base of his neck, which felt better already now that he was in the fields alone.

He raised his legs high above the rows of dead, long, veined leaves and corn stubble that snapped under his boots. Chopped off a foot from the ground by the slicing combine during the last harvest, the old brown corn stalks stuck straight up like the broken teeth of a comb. When he was a child, Bobby had walked the marching rows, crushing them, jumping on each little pole with both laughing feet.

Now, when he got to the middle of the field, he kicked the ground, digging in the toe of his boot. Dry topsoil flew up to powder the air. He followed the wind current and watched the weight of the dirt.

He squatted and laid one thin forearm on his knee, then picked up a clod with his bare hand and crumbled it. He tilted his head and looked west to where the fronts came. The sky there was clear and sparkling blue.

He put both his palms down and rubbed the ground. He dropped to both knees as he touched the dry chunks and stroked the new weeds that blasted happily through the stubble. He closed his eyes as he laid his hands on the willing earth and tried to divine without seeing it the state of the underground beneath his fingers.

“Dad was right!” Bobby yelled to Will as he jumped out of his car back at the farm three minutes later. “Bertram’s running and the ground down at the bottom’s dry. If we don’t get out there, he’s gonna kill us.”