What fool would want to put himself through all that, you’re going to ask. For a crop that addicts people and tars their lungs and busts the grower’s ass. Mind you, the government used to pay a man to grow it, with laws about how much he could grow, and where, with price supports to make sure there was plenty and also just exactly enough. The world needed our burley tobacco and wanted it bad. Philip Morris and those guys got their product, got the kids hooked, made their fortunes, and we all lived happily ever after, for a hundred years or something. Until people caught on to the downside of smoking and sued the hell out of somebody. And the government said, Well, never mind on that, and phased out the price supports.
I had only a kid’s idea of anything at Creaky Farm, but losing those market guarantees was all men talked about. Getting their farms foreclosed, moving in with their kids or maiden aunts, going on disability because their piece of American pie went rotten. Only some few with superhero strength stayed out there trying to put in more acreage, busting their backs to break even. They said the most of our tobacco now was getting sold to China. Meaning I guess we were helping to kill the communists, so. God bless America and all that.
Why does a man keep trying? On long, cold days in the stripping house I’ve spent many an hour listening to guys chew over that question. So yes, stripping green leaves would be my problem, in years to come. Used to be, the stripping house was a place to hear the best stories in the world. Guys saved them up all year. Now it’s mostly just the saddest story ever told: where the world has left us. A farmer has his land, and nothing else. He’s more than married to it, he’s on life support. If he puts his acreage in corn or soy, he might net seven hundred dollars an acre. Which is fine and good for the hundred-acre guys, Star Wars farmers.
But what if he’s us, with only three that can be plowed? In the little piece of hell that God made special for growing burley tobacco, farmers always got seven thousand an acre. A three-acre field is no fortune, but it kept him alive. No other crop known to man that’s legal will give him that kind of return on these croplands, precious and small that they are. The rules are made by soil and rain and slope. Leaving your family’s land would be like moving out of your own body. That land is alive, a body itself, with its own talents and, I guess you could say, addictions. If you farm on the back of these mountains, your choice is to grow tobacco, or try something else—anything else, it turns out—and lose everything. While somebody, someplace, is laughing at your failure, thinking you got what you deserved.
Around the time I topped and cut my first tobacco, we noticed the cigarette ads stopped playing. No idea why. If we’d known it was people thinking tobacco was dangerous for kids even to see on TV, with their eyes, we’d have found that dead hilarious. Our schools had smoking barrels. Teachers smoked on their breaks, kids at recess. The buyers were telling us the cancer thing was a scare, not proven. Another case of city people trash-talking us and our hard work, like anything else we did to feed ourselves: raising calves for slaughter, mining our coal, shooting Bambi with our hunting rifles. Now these people that would not know a tobacco plant if they saw one were calling it the devil.
If Philip Morris and them knew the devil had real teeth, they sat harder on that secret than you’d believe. Grow it with pride
and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school, free
for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell, and a carton got such taxes on it, we were
smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with “Proud Tobacco Farmer” stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded
along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place
to stand, God almighty how you fight.
15
November 19. A birthday never to forget.
I expected it to be a big nothing, since nobody knew. Mom would, obviously, but she hadn’t scheduled any visit as far as I knew. Maybe trying to get off work that Saturday. Meantime I didn’t plan on telling anybody, especially not Creaky, because he would hold it against me. Like, just from getting born I was expecting too much.
But the night before, lined up for squad inspection in our room, I blurted it out: tomorrow I’m turning eleven. This can be a monster thing for a kid to keep inside. And Fast Forward was a true brother. He’d thought I was already older than that, due to being tall for my age. He said it was too bad I didn’t give him more warning because he would have organized something. But he would still try. Another pharm party was my guess, or the special girlfriend cookies. Life wasn’t giving me a lot to go on right then. Regular cookies would have totally made my day.
I hung on to that thought, something good coming my way. Woke up, got dressed, waited on the bus with Tommy and Swap-Out in total and complete darkness because it’s way down in the fall by now, and I’m thinking the whole time: Hang on Demon, today’s the day.
Mrs. Peggot had to know, being the only person that had ever baked me a cake, but I saw Maggot at school and he had no clue. I didn’t tell him either, because why make your best friend feel bad. Mr. Goins took attendance, and the announcements came over the intercom. And then they called my name, Damon Fields to the office. Yes! Somebody knew. My first thought was that Mom got permission to come take me out of school. Or maybe Mrs. Peggot had brought me something. Food, I hoped.
I got to the office and saw it was Miss Barks. Okay, she could bring me a package, no law against that. She looked upset though, and told me to come into the attendance office. She closed the door and sat down. I looked all around. If she’d brought me anything, I wasn’t seeing it. I was still happy though. Obviously something was up. I sat down and looked at her across the big desk.
“Damon,” she said, and then nothing. It was utterly weird. She did not look so good.
“I know,” I finally told her, starting to get it. “It’s okay.”
She stared at me. “What’s okay?”
“That Mom forgot my birthday.”
Her blue eyes went big and round. “Oh my God. Damon. When’s your birthday?”
“Today. But that’s fine, that you didn’t know. I’m used to it.”
Miss Barks looked horrified and started crying. I mean, boo-hoo, grabbing Kleenexes out of the box next to the pictures of the attendance officers’ kids. Nose blowing, black makeup running off her eyes. This was batshit.
“It’s really okay,” I told her. “I don’t even care. Okay?”
She kept shaking her head, blowing her nose. “No, Damon, I’m sorry. It’s not okay. I’m so, so sorry. It’s your mom.”
“What’s my mom?”
“It’s bad news.”
Of course this is the point where I just lose it, saying Goddamn it, I knew it, you don’t even have to tell me, she got drunk again or took pills and I won’t get to go home for Christmas because she is such a goddamn fucking fuckup!
I’m dropping f-bombs on Miss Barks left and right and she’s putting out her hand saying No, no. That I really don’t know. Listen.
Mom is dead.
No way to that, just, no.
I’ve got no more to say here, I’m getting up out of the chair to leave, like maybe I could go to the office and call Mom at work or I don’t know what, while Miss Barks keeps saying yes, she’s sorry but it’s true. She is so, so sorry. I told her I didn’t believe her, but if it was true, then what did she die of, and Miss Barks said oxy.
Believe it or not, I had to ask. What’s oxy?
16
Maybe life, or destiny, or Jesus if you really need to put somebody in charge of things, had finally flung down one too many rocks in Mom’s road and she called it a day. That’s option one. Or two, maybe she didn’t aim to die but miscalculated, to cap off her twenty-nine-year pileup of miscalculations, one of those of course being me. I could spend the rest of my life asking which it was, suicide or accident. No answer on that line.
I’ll grant it did not look random, her clocking in as my mom and then out again on the same date. To hit the mark like that would take some looking at the calendar and getting stuff together, you would think. And that’s the thing, Mom was not a planner. Plus I can’t be sure she even remembered it was my birthday. Anybody that knew her would agree on that.
But now they were all sure she’d mapped it out. The wake and funeral being throwdowns of shame for this girl that had gone and abandoned her child. Bring on the fake nose blows, the eye-rolling towards me and shutting up if I came close. The child mustn’t hear. Like I didn’t know whose fault this was. Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while. Nobody was hiding that from me, I knew shit. I was eleven now.
Everything about the funeral was wrong. First of all being in a church, which I guess is required, but church and Mom were not friends. This went back to her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and worse, his special recipe for punishing bad little girls. Moral of the story, Mom always saying she wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. And here she was, losing every battle right to the end, in a white casket from Walmart, the other place she most hated to be. Jesus looking down from his picture on the wall, probably thinking, I don’t believe we’ve met, and girl, where’d you get that dress? It was this ugly flowered one somebody put her in. She was getting seen by half the town and buried in a stupid dress she only ever wore to work on Manager Appreciation Day, as her personal joke. Now she’d be wearing it for the boss-appreciating days in heaven, so the joke goes on. She probably would have wanted the dress Stoner bought her in rehab, but knowing him he saved the receipt and took it back.
Oh, but he was all tore up, was Mr. Stoner. I almost didn’t recognize him in a tie, plus reflector sunglasses for the extra effect. People lined up to pay their respects, with Stoner standing at the casket so the ladies could hug him and tell him what a tragedy to see her taken so young, and him a widower. Then they’d walk away and say whatever shit they actually thought of Mom. I could see their faces change, heads leaning together, hustling back to the living.
The church was not one the Peggots or any of us had gone to, except for some of Stoner’s family. Sinking River Baptist. Maybe that made it Stoner’s home court, but I didn’t see how it was his place to be up there beside the casket. He’d barely known Mom a year. It was me that had mopped her vomit and got her to bed and hunted up her car keys and got her to work on time, year in, year out. I could have put her together one last time, but nobody was asking.
The Peggots did what they could. Came and got me from school, fetched my church clothes from over at the house, kept me over the weekend. Mr. Peggot got out his electric trimmers and gave me a haircut, which I was needing in the worst way. Maggot even more so, like years overdue, but out of respect they called a truce this once and didn’t have a hair war. Which just made me sadder. Like, what had the world come to if Maggot and his pappaw couldn’t fight over a haircut. Some cousins came in from Norton for the funeral, and normally with a full house there would be yelling over TV channels and the last chicken wing, a certain amount of soft objects thrown around. But they were weirdly quiet. Eyeing me like I’d turned into a strange being that might break if you made any noise. Mrs. Peggot for her part kept feeding me and telling me how Mom loved me more than anything in this world, which was nice of her to say, even if I was thinking at the time: Not really. She loved her dope buzz more.
I had roads to travel before I would know it’s not that simple, the dope versus the person you love. That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body’s strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down. That the longer you’ve gone hurting between fixes, the higher the odds that you’ll reach too hard for the stars next time. That first big rush of relief could be your last. In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.
