Farm Life Chapter 4

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Family life on the farm amid cultural and economic change. While struggling to make the land produce life is cheapened in this environment. Death is something not discussed and sex is avoided by a modern married couple.

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Jody could see it in the mirror before he noticed the dashboard light was on. If he had been paying more attention to his dashboard display of red, green and amber lights he would have noticed the unplanted row before then but it had been that kind of a morning which was stretching into that kind of an afternoon. Mistakes made at planting become costly at harvest, Jody heard in his mind one of those maxims he was raised on and could see dissatisfaction on his father’s face if he knew. The dashboard diagnostic display told him exactly where the problem was and Jody climbed out of the bubble down the side of the tractor and crawled under the planter to inspect. There was a long crack in one of the plastic cups that fed the tubes which filled the aluminum wheels that dropped the individual seed into the chiseled trench in the ground. The soil as black as tar was clinging all over the undercarriage and as he crawled out it was on him too. Cleaning himself with a rag from the toolbox his stomach quiver with every word his father seemed to be saying. “Plastic parts are always the first to break. Every foot of the unplanted row has a cash value.” Jody climbed back into the bubble, he picked up the phone and pushed the button that would dial Green‘s, the tractor dealer. “Phones worked better back when they were cellular. Before the war we used to get excellent reception everywhere on the farm.” The father image in Jody’s mind chattered on. When things went smoothly it was a companion voice like the radio that could be ignored or turned down but at times like this his critical and unloving father was extremely annoying and out of control. “The measure of a man is how he acts in a crisis.” His father was always right with his unsolicited advice. The phone in the tractor was dead, he had to listen closely to even hear the buzz. Jody drove the tractor off the field to make a call from the tractor barn. Like these new strains of corn, the kernels are so big the equipment was

always getting jammed at planting time. And the harvests were so big the silos were bursting. If he had a son like he had been a son that skipped row would be planted already. When he was a boy he proudly displayed his blistered hands from a day’s work. His son John complained if he was not driven to the school bus stop at the end of the driveway. All weather annoyed him. Jody now had a choice, he fingered a screw driver, he could clean trash from some of the chisels while he waited for the phone to be answered or he could relax in the air conditioned cab and admire the view. Suddenly their was a voice, Jody spoke alone in the empty cab. He was lucky enough to find the part in stock at the dealer but the truck had a lot of stops that afternoon. The part would be in his hands sooner if the dealer’s driver dropped it off at the Co-Op where someone might be headed in Jody’s direction and could leave it with another farmer or by a certain telephone pole for Jody to pick up. A three person relay in a tradition going back to pioneer days when settlers first had to accommodate themselves to great distances. A remnant of the timeless tradition of farmers helping each other. There might be a week of work done by two men or one farmer might lend another his son. Often that was how parents arranged marriages back then. He read off his GPS location and told Phil, the desk man at the Co-Op, what the plan was then waited. Winter maintenance could not cover everything, he saw the broken part in his mind many times before that day. In his imagination he saw everything mechanical broken at one time or another. Money was made in those fleeting years between when the equipment was paid off and before it became completely broke down and had to be replaced. It was nice to make money but the big planting tractor was only one or two more seasons from being traded in. They made it so that a farmer could get a better loan for an entire machine even though only half of it needed replacing. It was a bind. Today Jody did not know a moment of peace, “I’ll tell

you what a bind is. When you are eight years old and you can not reach the shut off and your father has his arms caught in the corn chopper. I saw the blades dripping with his blood. He tried to look like he was having fun. I can still hear the crunching. You don’t know what it’s like to be in a bind. How could you?” “No trucks going your way, sorry Jody.” That meant the rest of the day was lost. “Don’t close ’til I get there.” Bouncing down the state highway he picked up the microphone the car CB and home base were working. “Hello.” It was a pleasure to hear her voice. “I got to go to town.” “I’ll have the plate when you get home. What time?” “Around 9.” “Drive carefully, I love you.” “I love you too.” Jody enjoyed the married couple’s shorthand. With that brief exchange he knew when he got back to the farm Martha would meet him in the tractor barn with a warm plate wrapped in plastic and kitchen towels, his dinner of steak and potatoes along with a thermos of special blend coffee. Why? Because they could say to each other those three words. Words neither had ever heard in their parents’ homes. Like unobtainable necessities, the nutrients for a healthy life that could only be found in one place, one with the other, in Iowa. Driving Jody thought how the car should have a GPS like the tractor which kept perfect row distance and could control the car on the highway. Then he had a dangerous thought, ‘So I could take a nap’ and a full body yawn overtook him. He jumped to artificial wakefulness, turned on the radio and softly slapped himself. When he turned at the cross road the sun slid past his eyes on the horizon. The cinderblock Farmers’ Co-Operative Store was visible for several minutes in cones of white light against a dark red sky. They were still busy filling seed and chemical orders but as Jody’s headlight beams bounced up and down

on the building he could see what he had grown to accept. The windows were empty and what was a fascinating store when he was a boy stocked with hand tools, guns, fishing rods, wheel barrows and between Thanksgiving and Christmas they stocked sleds, bicycles, toy tractors, fishing poles and fire trucks, today the empty glass reflected headlights. During the simpler time when the Co-Op was no more than a buying club for member farmers it was able to survive and thrive. Like most people farmers are also driven consumers who spent freely during the good times. Good farmers became solid consumers and the farmers who were less able, lazy ones, and those not smart enough to stay up to date and driven to remain competitive, or the plain unlucky who lacked either farm or business skills, they eventually went out of the business. But from California came agricultural giants who having devoured the fruit and vegetable growers on the west coast arrived in the corn belt with so much surplus cash they were able to compete unfairly. They ran farms like bankers with so much money they did not have to run an optimal farm just enough to show a positive return on the investment. Large food processing companies began moving in with their own markets. They flattened the prices for grains by filling their own huge demands first. In turn that lowered incomes of the family farmers who supported the Co-Op. The plate glass window of the Co-Op now reflected back darkly except for paper placards, Danger Explosives! Danger Chemicals! Pelagro! Just like the lives of many farmers the Co-Op only handled necessities and fewer of them because there were fewer independent farmers. Farmers who had surrendered to Agri-Corp were supplied by Agri-Corp. “Can I help you, young man?” Old Phil had been ringing up sales at the Co-Op since Jody was a boy. He was surely eighty now, he must have been sixty then. Just as Jody was a young man when he started farming he remained so no matter how long he farmed because most of the other

farmers were his father’s age. In the same way by both logic and magic Phil was always the oldest man anyone seemed to know. He could see the box behind the counter with his name on it. No time for talking, “You have a box for me. Jody Miller.” Even the chairs for retirees were empty, the checkers could not come out yet. Planting time and everyone had to be useful or out of the way. The box felt empty but echoed the insignificant sound of plastic against cardboard. The little parcel kept grabbing his attention as it slid on the bench seat with each bump and bend in the road. A multimillion dollar farm stopped for that little part. It gave him a chill. “Don’t think about it, Jody. It’s only money.” His father’s words as he and Mom sat in the chairs near the wooden railing inside the carpeted area of the bank. “You can die owing it to them,” dad added for moral support on the big day when Jody and Martha became financial partners with his parents for the family farm. The effort not to think about it had haunted him for the twenty years since he signed for his first production loan and every year it grew stronger, a nausea brought on by thoughts of death and money. When a man’s life is his farm then who ever holds paper on the land also has a hold on that man’s life. Martha was totally supportive because she believed Jody was a good farmer who had learned from a good farmer. There was something Martha did not know, as open as the family was about finances, there was no false expectation about high living or getting rich. And with every record carefully stored and available since Jody’s family began farming this land, the type of seed planted, yields per acre, rainfall, fertilizer rates and fugicides, insecticides and herbicide plus other the other chemicals to keep equipment running. There was something unwritten that he had overheard many years ago which would have driven them all to their knees, made them curse the land and seen them all working for someone else in a city. Or so it was in Jody’s mind.

When he was in high school Jody had learned about the time in national history the teacher labeled on the whiteboard as ‘The Farm Crisis,’ Jody and a few others perked up in the normally sleepy classroom. Only three or four in the class still lived on a farm although almost everyone was dependant on farm production for employment and the town’s existence. Jody’s focus zoomed in on the teachers mouth because every word was so familiar that somehow it seemed Jody himself had lived it and the teacher had spied in on Jody’s family’s life. ‘Tight Money’ the squeak of a marker on the board, “This should be in your notes, people.” The teacher said out of habit as he wrote, ‘ 22% Interest. Crop Failure. Bankruptcy.’ The teacher turned from the board and continued speaking in the same disinterested monotone but it was for Jody an electric moment. Something elicited a childhood memory and would forever after ring in Jody’s ears. “Farmers could not compete with urban and suburban home owners for the tight money. In a financial crisis farmers walked off their farms, sold the land when they could, some even committed suicide.” The moment world history touches family history. The first Millers were recruited from a line of German speaking people who loved parades, uniforms, precision marching and as a result could be ordered into the roaring mouths of cannons and rifles, could march upon order into barbed wire or bayonets. It was no coincidence that when his father’s father was killed by machinery the interest rates were at the same number as on the whiteboard. Jody ducked his head but he knew the teacher was looking right at him. It was something his father said with regularity. It was murky, without detail, the emotional memory his father shared freely and obsessively. “Farming this land killed my father. I watched my father die.” Jody heard those words before his father meant for him to hear them. It was a surprise as he blew out his birthday

candles, “I watched my father die when I was eight.” To which there was no response, Jody had the mental barriers in place against his father’s frequent harsh words and hurt look. From earliest childhood the tension and the enigma was disguised and buried by his mind. Sense could not be forced out of the words until he was in a high school history class and the context of the past became clear. He could not question it as a kid, it was too frightening and other adults never discussed it. The words, conversation enders and the irrational hung around the house and farm. As soon as Jody could walk he tagged around the big people, he knew the entire farm operation by the time he was five like other kids know all the cartoon characters. The towering tractors were the first things but he watched, the amazing emergence of the crop and the hypnotic growth like green swords forming a maze which to a small boy could swallow the sun, clouds and all of the sky then the harvest going by combine tractor and trucks into processing and storage. His father’s son, Jody knew what different buttons did even though most of them were out of his reach. “Be careful. Don’t touch that.” He was warned endless times in those early years as his interest expanded to the processing of the crop and the turning blades and numerous knives that chopped the giant corn plants. It was a small room with a small door. All the switches had to be shut before the door could be open. Jody’s father instructed him, “This is the room where it happened. This machine and these blades.” Today’s Amazonian corn yields required new, larger and stronger silos for storage. Even the old building were insufficient for the gigantic equipment. Jody was too busy to reflect but it would have been easy to view the farmer as shrinking while everything around him had grown. Everything except him. It was the harvest and everyone was busy, Ed easily

snuck away to follow his pa. He wanted to tell his pa to shut the switches before he opened the door. But Ed wasn’t supposed to be there so he did not speak. He could hear pa making odd quiet sounds and watched as the chopper played tug of war with his fathers arms but it was his pa, it had to be all right the boy thought until blood was spraying out of the box. Ed’s mother kept the farm, Ed’s uncle’s split the work and helped raise their fatherless nephew. There was never a decision made as he got older Ed simply continued in the way of his family. Eleven months of the year his guts twisted slowly until the harvest was in, even if the harvest was low he at least knew where he stood. Cornered but in control. Jody knew all of his life that he would be a farmer. It was too late when he realized the price his family already paid and he was an adult when he discovered the same feelings in himself. The life insurance his grandfather carried freed his children and grandchildren from the kind of money worries that might cost them the farm but every year a battle had to be fought and won. Problems at planting time were the worst because those problems had to be dealt with twice, once during planting when time is critical and again at harvest when the crop is measured. He shared his fears once with Martha, not the part about Grandpa, only his anxiety when it came to making only one paycheck a year. “If it ever came to that,” she told him, “my family would help us.” Jody saw that as adding to the humiliation, “You were never like that before. You always wanted no part of their money, their yachts and tennis clubs.” “It’s family, you made me see the importance of family. Family money is my money too.” Having seen what a bad harvest and being at the mercy of bankers had already done to his family once it seemed money from Martha’s family would not be intolerable. He would do the same for them if their fortunes

ever went down. Jody told himself that but it was a plan that could not hold up under realistic conditions. If for one of many reasons the farm was to fail, lack of rain, too much rain at the wrong time, insects, fungus, fuel shortage then Martha’s people could rescue them, they had many holdings beside the tobacco and horse farms they owned. Land investments for housing, resource holdings, coal, oil, shipping and money in the bank that was not at risk and the ownership of banks which made money upon money upon money. So that if the folks back east were to founder in the slightest then Iowa would have long since turned belly up because like a river money only flowed one way. But the thought of mutual beneficence, generosity and plane family was a shallow comfort for Jody. He slipped the washer over the shaft as Martha came into the garage with his supper. “I just got to tighten it up.” Jody called out to make the small job seem bigger than it was. He looked about and saw no wrench. “Supper is going to get cold.” Her clear gentle tone of one who was gentle, patient, educated and wise always rang like a bell in his ear. “This can wait.” He said like a confession and wiped his hands on a dirty rag. He sat on a low metal stool. She unwrapped the plate and handed it to him. Steak, baked potato and string beans. Out of the big old freezer almost a year in deep freeze and she transformed it, he did not know how hungry he was until he started when he was done he held his plate up, inspecting the bottom. “No more?” Martha laughed. “How’s our boy taking his punishment?” “I know this is a bad time …” “I’m coming home. I’ll talk to him. I’m bushed. I can drive the tractor all day but two hours on the highway gets to me.” “I think they said morning showers.” Martha had learned to be a weather addict.

“Did they say are ‘calling for’, or ‘there is a chance’?” Jody questioned her carefully. “Which channel did you see it?” Talking about the weather among farmers was an important first item of conversation and not a desperate final gambit. Talking about weather did not have the connotations that it had in every other segment of the population. With that Jody questioned her for the specifics of the report although he would momentarily be in the house watching the Weather Channels, all three of them. Jody got his father on the phone. At times Martha could be so vague and wrapped in her own world he did not want to interrupt her making muffins, post industrial wife filling the home freezer with muffins. Only another life long farmer could share in the grousing, spitting and kicking unyielding objects since it would be foolish to get all wet kicking the rain. Few farmers were left who he could call and usually there was only one with whom he cared to speak. “I finished planting my acreage around six, I could have loaned you my equipment. You had enough seed. Right?” The phone had separated and connected Jody and his Dad and through the years the message did not change, he wanted to know he still had his father‘s respect although they went separate ways as farmers. It was not the same as talking in the flesh but their homes were separated by a drenched half mile. If he had not made the call he would not hear his father criticizing him for not using his head. Star Trek the ancient television show his father had watched since youth was loud in the phone and in his mind could see his father in the recliner Jody and Martha gave him when he turned sixty. Dad relaxed in his bedroom and Mom in the living room. “All right. Thanks Dad.” Thanks signaled he wanted to cut the conversation short. “All right boy. Pick me up tomorrow and we’ll check the levee.” “Good night Dad.” The levee was a wall of dirt covered in plastic and clay that formed a gentle U on the far side of the road bordering

the west side of the farm. It was placed against the almost imperceptible tilt of the land toward the river system that eventually fed the Mississippi Sea. The wall was almost a mile long and at the ends, at right angles to the wall stood concrete pillars, hinged to the pillars an iron gate allowed the water level to be adjusted. Jody had been a boy on a bulldozer when he helped his father build the levee. That spring Iowa was part of the Great Lakes, it was a dream project for a kid, after Army men laid it out trucks dumped gravel and clay. He did not then understand how close the family had come to washing away and losing everything. As impressed as Jody was with himself that year for operating the dozer the image of the fields under water made him wonder about rice farming. He thought of himself as a young steward of the land and pestered his father with what he thought were important questions about rice. He still believed then that his father and the state of Iowa could grow anything. He did not understand the place his father was in as he listened with feigned interest to Jody’s information on rice cultivation. Iowa, Jody discovered as he did more research, is just too cold. His father had been filling out forms for farm assistance that year while people in town worked and spent cash. Jody’s mother that year was shopping with food stamps. The next day Jody picked up his father at first light, it was still raining with a strange persistence. Didn’t the rain know it won? Did it have some point to make beside the giver of life can also take life? It was no longer rain, Jody feared, if he tasted it it might be tears from an offended sky, a furious nature and a broken system. His pickup was a 4X4 yet it skated sideways through the water washing over the road behind their farm. The trench ten feet wide and six deep between the levee and the road overflowed to cover the road and deposit a residue of slick wet leaves and trash, the water behind the levee had lapping waves spilling over to fill a mile long basin that glistened in the shadows of early morning like the skin of a snake.

Despite what he saw the happy memory from childhood of helping to build this put a redeeming light on the moment. “Remember when we worked together on this, Dad?” Jody asked. That was what made it special like only a few of the days as a boy when he actual worked with his father and not merely like his father in his private quarter of land on his own tractor. There he grew a variety of grains for the livestock. Now dad farmed the smaller plot. Dad recalled, “Every morning I would come out here to straighten the mess you made. Remember what I told you back then?” His father plunged a knife in, “I told you it must have settled overnight.” and he twisted it. Jody brooded. “I got called in to the principal yesterday about your grandson.” Jody had not intended to share that but it was his way of spitting in his father‘s face, to say, You had it easy, old man, I was a good kid. “She babied him, when she had her woman parts removed she started to baby him.” “It’s temperament.” Jody stated as a counter argument but without expanding. Jody believed that temperament skipped a generation or was comparable to a recessive or double recessive gene. In any event he did not want to fire up his father or else talk would inevitably turn to Grandpa’s accident. Neither man would be able to convince the other of anything. Sometimes one did not have to travel deep to reach that place in his father that loathed the farm and when every memory reconnected him with memory of that day. Like his grandfather Jody knew he too had the strength to take the pain of being sliced and chopped to death in silence and also shared the weakness which led his grandfather to kill himself over money. But his weakness was not money. On the field across from the levee where corn plants should have been sprouting by now water gathered irregularly wherever the land dipped. It was the depth of the

rich top soil that could grow corn thirty feet tall which did not allow the excess moisture to sink in, poorer soils would have less water collecting on the surface. “It’s starting to look like a rice paddy again.” Jody made his long standing observation. Other less fertile soils, even a rice field, would be passable before this deep fertile soil dried from a condition of muck. Having been geared up for the work and long hours of planting the rain delay got on Jody’s nerves. Martha who often planned winter projects around the house for Jody had to usher him out of the house since his fretting was getting on her nerves. In the winter he could spend long hours reading while peddling the stationary bicycle but now he stared into the sky trying to determine the depth of the clouds as he paced beneath the overhang of the tractor barn on the dry side of a continuous sheet of water. It was a warm tropical rain, Jody felt what the Weather Channel confirmed. While the Amazon basin continued in a drought the flow of moisture shifted. The concept of a weather pattern was thrown out and replaced by the word Freakish. Freak was an exclamation but other words were frequently used like unusual, inexplicable, and benign freaks were described as ‘sights never seen before’ and ‘once in a lifetime, and oddities. One could almost hear the collective consciousness begging for a reliable pattern, anything that could be depended on and planned for. This decade had hosted three 100 year storms and one 500 year event. The rain eventually stopped and the warm temperatures allowed Jody’s fathers corn to germinate and if things continued drying that crop would get it’s weed and fertilizer spray on time. The calculator in Jody’s head went to work, he recalculated with each day of delay. First a worst case scenario was figured, half of the farm’s income with all of its expenses, he dwelt on that number and hoped it would not come to pass. The crows told Jody the condition of his planting. The black birds seemed to be celebrating their good fortune with leaps into the air and free form glides back to earth as they

gorged on deposits of especially savory and tender corn sprouts now on the surface of the field in the low spots they formed man size swirl patterns after soaking long enough for the chemical bird repellant to wash off. He had to get more seed, the urgency for that kept his mind off the long term implications. He called Martha to let her know. He opened the utility box in the back of the truck to make sure the tarp was there. The tarp since the day he bought it had never been more than five feet from the truck yet he habitually checked for it whenever he thought he might need it. It made him feel he was prepared at those times when he was least prepared. Now especially was one of those times. Only once before had he seen the crop washed out of the ground. Jody had to park his truck on the side of the road and walk past other trucks some with names painted on the doors that were not familiar to him and he past old men he had never seen or not seen in many years. He saw trucks from Nebraska with men sleeping in them as he got closer to the Co-Op building. Not one to talk with strangers unless they spoke first, Jody passed men his father’s age and others who were strange to him before he came upon Billy, someone he knew from high school. His truck was in the parking lot, he must have arrived hours before the others, he was sitting on the tailgate. He had a large lunch pail by his side. Like Jody Billy’s family had been generations on the farm but Billy had to take over the entire operation during high school when his father died. His father worked himself to death on poor soil. Billy did not have to buy in to the family operation like Jody did, instead Billy inherited a stack of bills and the option of trying to keep up with them or selling the farm and finding a new place for himself, his mother and the younger kids. He was probably too young back then to make the right decision. “What’s going on?” Jody asked. “We’re waiting for seed.” Billy said in a dragged out voice filled with irony and sarcasm, telling Jody it was a wait

based on an empty promise. Billy’s intonation was not a regional accent but rather the way his entire generation spoke, a generation who expected to be lied to in any business situation and by anyone in politics. “How long have you been waiting?” Jody settled in taking a seat next to his friend on the tailgate. “My place dried out two days ago so I came down yesterday and came back six this morning.” “Where’s the seed? I see farmers here from all over.” “Independent farmers aren’t the only ones who got washed out.” There might be a day of waiting ahead so Jody took his time responding. “Agri-Corp’s farmers don’t buy their seed at the Co-Op.” “But they control the market because they are so big. Phil at the desk said he got a call from a lawyer and after that he called Central. The Agri-Corp farms get the seed first,” Bill paused to let that sink in, ”if or when it arrives. Then they release the seed to the open market but … ” he paused again to get Jody’s full attention, “Agri-Corp won’t release their rights to hold back seeds until the weather settles down.” “How can they do that?” “It’s easy, last year at harvest they paid for this year’s seed plus the extra ten percent. Aren’t you glad you stayed independent? The ten percent we put in our pockets they risked because they’re run by investment bankers and we’re farmers who only have a Co-Op.” “But they don’t use the same seed.” Jody observed. “Oh, this is deep,” Billy said, “Phil tried to explain it to us before this mob of Agri-Corp’s people arrived. Do they look like farmers to you?” He gave Jody a moment to look around at the unfamiliar faces. Jody held off judgment. “It‘s like this,” Billy resumed, “They buy the seed plus ten percent then never pick up the seed and have the payment refunded. It’s been going on for years. The Co-Op took the ten percent just to stay in business. But to them it

was insurance that they would get served first at times like these. It was all done with paper and phone calls and agreed to by our own lawyer for the Co-Op, not farmer. It went right past our own Board of Directors. You can‘t speculate with seeds, seeds mature in the ground not in a bank.” “So we sold through the Co-Op but they are keeping us from buying back part of our own crop.” Jody said hoping that summarized the essence. “Hold on sod buster, that would be true if it was your corn. The seed the Co-Op sells is an old Agri-Corp patent from years ago and they have the right to buy it back. That was supposed to protect farmers in the old days who were afraid of genetically altered seed.” “I guess they really did have some lawyer in on this one. It’s like we screwed ourselves. Some of the folks say never do business with Agri-Corp, they‘ll pin your ears to a wall.“ Seeing Jody understood the situation Bill answered with more dripping sweet sarcasm, “That’s right. Maybe this year all we’ll get to grow is hay. Then we won’t break even. Or we would if we didn’t have families to feed and bills to pay. A couple of years of that and we won’t be joining Ag Corp, they will be buying our farms for themselves from the bank and their own people will run them.” “I’m not going to grow hay this year.” Jody did not have to run the calculator in his head, there was no money in hay. “Are you looking for some calves?” Bill asked after a while. “No.” Jody said thinking that was the reason Bill got him all wound up about a seed shortage, just to sell calves that could be raised for meat. Jody did not keep livestock, not even chickens for eggs. He and Martha liked to occasionally take days away from the farm and there would be no one to care for the animals. Certainly not John. The crowd began to stir, old Phil stood on the concrete pier where trucks waited to be loaded, his hands cupped around his mouth a trickle of indistinct words could be heard. Then a buzz filled the air, he said “We have silage

mix, and bags of rye, clover, and some alfalfa. If anybody wants.” The farmers answered with boos and jeers. Behind Phil his teenage helper emerged driving a forklift carry pallets of burlap bags, hay seeds. “No corn,” the words that filled the air next. Phil, the counterman at the Co-Op for as long as anyone could remember was esteemed for his accuracy, honesty and impartiality. His life was simple despite the complexity of his job, he figured the best delivery routes and helped farmers calculate pounds of seed per farm and complex mixing directions for the array of chemicals the CoOp sold. He had no idea the effect of what he had to say next. He said it because he had an ethic not to lie or hide the truth the Co-Op was a special place, the farmers in front of him were his customers and employer. “Only Agri-Corp farmers will be able to sign for corn.” The fighting started when a few hotheaded local farmers saw the smug look on a stranger’s face. Rioting came over them like a natural urge. Farmers struggling against constantly worsening conditions had the sellouts among them who had turned their back on the proud tradition of integrity, independence and sharing the risk for lower pay and intangible security. Hardship. Worry and looming bankruptcy for a moment had the face of strangers and the farmers lusted to punch those faces. Phil did not get to say his next sentence, it might have saved his life, ‘The corn hasn’t yet been delivered.’ Family farmers and Agri-Corp men both decided to search the building. Good but unwanted seed showered like a dry rain as men set upon the burlap bags on the dock. There was even laughter but old Phil was in terror. Instinctively he ran behind the counter that had always been a sacred place where only he could go. No one who knew what happened would say but Phil’s aged body and brittle bones did not survive an Agri-Corp man pulling him out from behind his counter. A calm and the knowledge that a man was dead radiated from the spot where he fell. The teenage helper got

the word out that a corn train was coming in the morning. Shamefaced farmers first drifted away but soon all were gone. It was unspeakable for such a thing to happen in their midst, this was Iowa. Everyone driving home that day who passed the tractor trailer in the center of an Agri-Corp security motorcade pointed an accusing finger. The AgriCorp farmers who remained they felt no shame and they would never know any. It was a knowledge which never had an application to them. They took their seed corn back to their Agri-Corp farm and left old Phil’s corpse for a receipt. When the train pulled in, fearing fro his own life, the helper quickly loaded the waiting trucks. Others who stumbled into the office told superiors who arrived with the shipment that they had found this man dead on the counter. His body waited behind the counter until the next afternoon when the State Troopers arrived. Jody sat in the bubble of his tractor having a lavish daydream about the ancient past, the natives and buffalo, the civil war, how land was the silent witness Jody had a clear vision from the soil’s point of view, perhaps brought on by a slight oxygen deprivation as the air in the bubble was being triple filtered while he was applying the first combination chemical spray. The corn speared through the soil on his father’s farm while here on his own acreage weeds were like cupped hands unaware of what fate awaited them. There might be a seed shortage but chemicals were still in abundance. He thought about the investment bankers who were professional money managers easily out maneuvering small farmers who liked to romantically think of themselves as gamblers. Jody knew he would be a lot more comfortable with some money in the bank but what he had instead was the skill to produce terrific yields almost every year. By the afternoon of the first day of spraying many of the weeds covered were already wilted and twisting in the sun. By the fact that corn is a form of grass they survived the special herbicide. Agri-Corp farmers had a better

chemical regimen however they used a seed with several additional genetic modifications not available to the average farmer. Again Jody was proud of his skill. Most farmers who went over to the big corporations were often already on the financial ropes because most of them were not good farmers. It might be easy for a money man to make a profit during years of bumper crops but during lean years it took the best farm managers to survive. After spraying the equipment had to be cleaned, the chemicals were highly corrosive to stainless steel and even some plastics. Jody dropped the sprayer on the apron of the tractor barn, parked the tractor then doffed his yellow rubber wear, a gas mask and elbow length rubber gloves. He used a high pressure tank and detergent first then followed by a double rinse with regular water. From the apron the rinse water and the foamy chemical detergent mixed together in long cyclonic arms filling a large dead drying area. A stray cat came up to the water and foam but turned away. Steward of the Land, the phrase turned over in his head. It was what those crazy organic farmers called themselves, Jody saw himself that way too but he could not see doing the things they did. He would feel foolish ordering through the mail wasp eggs to kill corn borers. Or planting buckwheat or millet with the corn to control weeds, no one else did it. He was careful not to step in the tan water standing in the driveway as he walked home. After a combination spray for fungus, insects and weeds he had to worry about the weather, if the stuff got washed off another spray would be expensive, like reseeding, an unplanned expense. Jody took his shoes off on the sun porch where Martha started the flowers she planted around the yard. Conscientious about his contact with the chemical Jody immediately took a shower. “Did you finish your planting yet?” Jody asked playfully seeing Martha at the kitchen sink washing the soil from her hands. Her hysterectomy had one advantage Jody thought. “Is

John out with his friends?” He asked as he approached her wearing only his towel. “Aren’t you hungry?” She asked. “Just like a woman always expecting a man to eat. Come on.” “Put that towel back on and get dressed. What are you going to say if our son walks in? Supper’s almost ready.” She was a slender woman, very back east looking, not one of these women to get hefty after marriage or the birth of a child. She’d just have a salad and a narrow slice of steak most nights but if she had been working outside as she had today she could pack it away better than the men. “I saw Billy I went to school with today, I felt sorry for him,” he did not want to share the disturbing news, instead Jody said, “Billy always talked about being a diversified farmer but he never got the economy or expertise of specializing so instead he stayed small and became inefficient and uneconomical raising hogs, calves, corn and wheat all at once.” Jody felt better telling that version of his day to Martha and he forgot the omen for all of them that he felt driving home. There was a puddle of condensation under his water glass. “I’m putting on the weather, call me when it’s on the table.” Jody went to the unused bedroom he called his office and studied the weather channel. The word from last week, ‘freak’ was now replaced by the word super cell. This was becoming the second consecutive occurrence of an almost identical pattern. Scientist now were looking at the jet stream for answers. The Polar Jet Stream was periodically disappearing and reforming, being replaced by the Subtropical Jets Stream bringing tropical rains to midland latitudes. It was a tropic stream that was not in the traditional tropics. It was a puzzling misnomer that Jody did not have time to think about. The weather map switched off to show a woman sitting on a beach towel in slacks and children in shorts playing volleyball in the sand, the announcer said the footage was from Greenland near the Arctic Circle. “Look at this, Martha.”

“You just keep your hands to yourself, Mister.” Jody heard a plate clatter and she stepped into the small room. “Sun bathers at the arctic circle.” He said absently his eyes switching involuntarily from the image to Martha’s butt. Jody got a new grip on himself and wondered, had he been jostled just the exact way in the tractor, was it the hum that made him vibrate or was it the oxygen deprivation that loosened the normal selfcontrol he had over his mind? He did not know. Suppressing his urges was always an easy thing for him, there was no sex in his home when he was a boy growing up. Sex, that uninvited guest who demanded too much attention, sex was for career women, chronic masturbators, the insane and losers. It must have been the fight at the CoOp, the chanting, even death. Sex is for making babies and now the awareness of a death, one less person in the world had roused some natural urge to spawn a replacement. When Martha turned his distraction was obvious, “What’s wrong?” The frustration welling up made him almost want to cry. He did not know what he was going to say until he spoke. “It’s the weather. The weather, it’s all this rain and bad timing. I worry about John. It’s everything.” He barely choked out his last words. “I know, sometimes I feel the same way but I don’t want to upset you. I’m so glad you said something because I have wanted to talk to you for a long time. It’s private here, sit down.” Martha had a growing concern about her parents, particularly her mother who were due to visit soon. It was easier for her to talk, Jody never forgot what a genuine friend she was but of course one could not have talks like these everyday. He struggled not to speak of the events in the afternoon but he instead kept linking that nagging sexual desire to the other social stereotype associated with sex. It seemed like a self fulfilling prophecy as he delved into the subject. The urge for sex was distracting him

because he was beginning to see himself as a loser. It was going to be a bad year financially with so much corn washed out, it did not just grieve him that his son was drifting away it was his obvious failure as a parent. Jody was also jealous of his son for the affection he received from his father. He knew they laughed at him behind his back because they laughed at him to his face. “Sex is not going to fix any of those things,” Martha said kindly. “There is nothing you can do about the weather. Is there anything you can do about the crop?” “Maybe hyper fertilize the hay.” An easy response for Jody since he thought about things like that all day long. “That sounds pretty good. And the other thing is you can go and talk to your father and your son to build a better relationship. That’s a lot easier for you to talk to them than for me to talk to my mother.” They laughed together and both stood uneasily, it felt like the aftermath of an intense workout. “Thank you, I really am feeling a little better now.” “Just a little?” She got closer and let him kiss her. They kissed together without embracing. They broke it off after that allotted time, a pattern they had developed when they were first dating. They learned over time how few couples who escaped the disabling ravages of the plague managed as they did to express loving feelings without having it overwhelmed by revulsion. “Go get dressed, dinner is waiting.” While getting dressed Jody felt relief like a weight lifting from him, as though the body of Phil was ascending and leaving both the earth and his consciousness needing never to be mentioned. Poor Phil. Phil D. Order, as the men called him when he was a boy. Jody did not even know his real name.

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