Hanging up Halloween costumes did not sound that bad. At the farm we were working like dogs. Tommy agreed on what Miss Barks said about Creaky’s being an emergency type of foster where nobody stayed too long. He said after the farm work slacks off in winter, the old man wouldn’t want us around. Nothing to me of course, I would be back in my own bed before snow fell. But that farm was starting to feel like my life. Cold mornings, a kitchen filling up with smoke while we stuffed newspapers in the stove to get it lit. Manwich suppers or shoe-leather steaks, not tender ones from the grocery but field beef. All meat we ate was previously known to us as Angus aka get your ass in the paddock. We were fed, but never quite enough, nor was our work ever quite done, nor our feet quite warm. We’d get up cold, go to bed cold, throw our filthy clothes in the machine in the basement and forget them down there for days. Even now, the smell of clothes gone rank in the washer takes me right back. That smell was our whole life.

  We stayed alive for Friday nights, to pile in Creaky’s truck and drive to the Five Star Stadium, home of the Lee High Generals. To wait in the stands, along with everybody else in the county, for our team to roar out of the Red Rage field house. Girls screaming their heads off, grown men right there with them. Creaky would let us buy chili dogs from concessions and we’d sit high in the bleachers to watch Fast Forward being freaking amazing. Yelling our lungs out for our own brother and the other Generals to murder the bastards from Union or Patrick Henry, first and ten, do it again! Knowing that we and nobody else, after it was over, would sleep under the same roof as QB1.

  Seeing him in his white uniform with the giant shoulders and thin, fast legs, I got new aspects on how to draw Fast Man. And other designs in my head. Fast Forward thought I had good coordination. Possibly just compared to Tommy and Swap-Out, which God knows is no fair fight. But if he wasn’t busy he’d show me things. Firing and receiving passes. Keeping a center of gravity. Down behind the barn where Creaky wouldn’t see us slacking off, Tommy and Swap-Out would sit on grain buckets and watch, with manure-sogged jeans and stars in their eyes. I wasn’t much to start with, being raised around old people and a mom that thought getting her empty pop can into the trash was a sport. But the shine I got from Fast Forward decided my future. One day I would be that guy, in that uniform, with those shoulders. Those cheerleaders.

  Farms or anything else in the big world, I’d not seen much of back then. Or now either, to be honest. On TV I’d seen fields like great green oceans with men sailing through them on tractors and combines the size of the AT walkers in Star Wars. I never knew those were real, I thought it was make-believe. Because Lee County isn’t flat like those ocean farms, not anywhere, not even a little. Here every place is steep, and everything rolls downhill. If you plowed up all your land, the most of it would end up down in the creek by year’s end, and then you’re done growing anything.

  What farmers can do with a mountainside is what Creaky did, let God grow grass on it, and run cattle on it to eat God’s grass. Then send them out west to be finished, because feedlots for turning cattle into burgers and making money are all out there. Not here. We just raise them big enough to sell for what Creaky called one kick in the ass per head. A few hundred dollars.

  His only land flat enough for plowing was three acres, low in the valley. That’s about average size for a tobacco bottom, lying alongside of the lane we walked out on to get the bus. The first day I came to that farm, passing that field, maybe I thought, there’s some nice tobacco. More likely I gave no notice at all. Never will that happen again, any more than I’d fail to notice an alligator by the side of the road, or a bear. What a pretty sight, you’d say, if you’re an ignorant son of a bitch. Instead of: There lies a field that eats men and children alive.

  August they call the dog days, due to animals losing their minds in the heat. But the real dog days if you are a kid on a farm are in September and October. Tobacco work: suckering, topping, cutting, hanging, stripping. All my life I’d heard farm kids talking about this, even in the lower grades, missing school at cutting time. Some got to work on farms other than their own, and get paid for it. I envied them. The boy version I guess of how little girls are jealous of their big sisters for getting pregnant, with all the attention. I’d only ever known childish things, screwing around in the woods or Game Boy. Now I would be one of the working kids.

  I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.

  Topping starts in August. You have to break off the tops of all the thousands of plants that are head high or higher to a fifth grader. Walk down the rows reaching up, snapping off the big stalk of pink flowers on top, freeing up the plant for its last growth spurt. Those plants will be over all our heads before the season ends, and still yet we will have to be their masters.

  My first day of topping was stinking hot. Creaky told us to keep our shirts on and wear the big, nasty leather gloves he gave us, but we shed our shirts the minute he was out of sight. I didn’t want to wear the gloves, but Tommy said do it or I’d be sorry. Creaky set us all to topping our own rows, and moved faster than you’d think the old guy had in him. He and Fast Forward got out ahead of us. I worked hard and stayed close behind them, with Tommy and Swap-Out bringing up the rear. The reaching up made your arms ache. The sap ran sticky all over everything, the sun was a fireball on your head, and pity to you if you tried to wipe the sweat off your face with that gummy glove. I tried to use my left hand for topping, being a lefty, and right for sweat-wiping. Then the one arm gave out so I had to use the other, and let the sweat go on and burn my eyes out. All the while thinking, Man, tobacco is hard work. I’d seen nothing yet.

  At some point I went back to look for Tommy and Swap-Out because they were nowhere. Way back yonder I found them, and was like, Y’all, what the hell? Tommy was gathering up all the pink flowers that you were supposed to throw on the ground and walk on. Going back down his row, gathering up these flowers and carrying them in his arms like a freaking bride. Jesus, Tommy, I said. Your ass will be grass. He told me not to worry, he was almost done.

  I followed him to the edge of the field, and out there by the lane were these two small dirt mounds, the size of bushel baskets dumped over. Side by side. I’d never noticed them before. Tommy put down his armload of flowers on the two little mounds, divided up between them. Saying nothing about it. Then he went back to work. I didn’t ask.

  But that night after we were in bed, he told me what it was for. His parents were buried out in eastern Virginia someplace, so he’d never gotten to see the graves, just like I hadn’t ever seen my dad’s. I would never have thought to do what Tommy did, though. He just made them up. Eight different homes he’d been in so far, that he could remember. In every one of them he’d left behind a little set of graves.

  14

  Cutting tobacco starts around a month after topping. Cutting is the bastard of all bastards. If you’ve not done it, here’s how it goes. First, the lamest worker on your crew (Tommy) walks ahead, throwing down the tobacco laths between the rows. Laths are wooden sticks, three feet long, like a kid would use for a sword fight. Which every kid up home has done, because a million of them are piled in barns waiting to get used in the fall. You come along after him and pick up the first stick, stab it in the ground so it’s standing up. Jam a sharp metal cap called a spear on the end of it. If you fall, that thing will run you through, so don’t. Next, with a hatchet you chop a tobacco plant off at the base. It’s like cutting down a six-foot-tall tobacco tree. Pick it up and slam its trunk down on the stick so it gets speared. Chop another plant, slam it on. You’ll get six plants pierced on that stick so it looks like a pole holding up a leaf tent. Then pull off the little metal spear point and move on. Jam the next stick in the ground, do it all again.

  After the speared plants have stood in the sun and got three days’ dews on them to heal the sunburn, you load them on the flatbed and haul them to the barn. Then carry them up into the rafters and hang them on rails to cure. Every stick gets laid up sideways with its six plants hanging down, like pants on a clothesline. They’ll stay up there till all the plants are dry and brown. Only then will they get taken down, leaves stripped from the stalks, baled, and sold.

  Climbing forty feet up into the barn rails to hang tobacco is a job for a monkey basically. Or the superhero that looks out for farms, instead of cities. Which, in case you didn’t notice, there isn’t a single one. So it’s the typical thing of jobs that can kill you, this gets to be a contest among guys, how fast and reckless can you be with tobacco hanging. Everybody knows somebody, the near misses, the shocking falls, the guy in a wheelchair to this day. I can name names. No machine exists for any of this, the work gets done by children and men. Your chance to become a cripple or a legend. Fast Forward was excellent. But Swap-Out, holy Christ. He was a spectacle. Like they say, no child born without his gifts.

  It’s a full season of work to get a tobacco crop planted and set, weeded, suckered, sprayed to keep off the frogeye and blue mold. If it rains so much you can’t get the highboy in there, you slog around trying to spray by hand. And it all counts for nothing unless you can get it harvested before frost. So in October you’re in the field all day every day, cutting for the life of you. Picking up the next stick, stabbing the ground. Chopping a plant, lifting, slamming it on. Stab-chop-lift-slam times six, and move on, forever amen and God help you. One loaded stick of plants weighs thirty or forty pounds, and you’ll lift hundreds of them before a day is done. You do the math, because I’ve already done the job. What it adds up to is, everything hurts.

  But you keep on, sunup to sundown in any weather, because if a farmer fails to get his crop in, he’s lost it all. Land, livestock, the roof over his head. For some, a lousy day’s work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it’s live or die. A tour of tobacco duty can feel like a season in hell, and you come back from it feeling like an army vet: proud, used up, messed up, wishing to be appreciated. And invisible. You’ll go back to school and get treated as another dumbass in history that doesn’t know the difference between a state and a commonwealth.

  Creaky kept us out of school most of October. Even as a kid, I’d never spent such long hours in the sun. I’d look in the mirror, shocked to see my pond-water eyes looking out of a face the color of walnuts. But we had to get that tobacco in the barn before month’s end, or we’d be stripping green leaves in February. He threatened us like that was the fate worse than death. I would be so long gone by then, green leaves in February were nothing to me. But for now I was still in hell. Every day I thought: This has to be the end of it. Or the end of me. I thought: School was a better deal than I ever knew. Tobacco is its own education. How to get yourself out there again with everything already hurting, your back and sun-cooked ears and your goddamn teeth.

  About a week in, midday, I discovered things could get worse. I started feeling sick, like a bad carpet-cleaner high. This was after a couple hours already of the meanest headache I’d ever had. Everything buzzing, like cicadas had gone in my ears and set up shop. I made myself keep working because I didn’t want to be a wuss or let the guys down or any of those things. But I was starting to have crazy thoughts. Like, if I just lie down here in between the tall tobacco plants, nobody will know. Then I doubled over and puked oatmeal on my shoes.

  I still had to keep up, because getting thrashed in that condition was unthinkable. But I must have been off my ball because Tommy found me and started yelling shit, like where were my gloves, oh crap, didn’t he tell me to use the gloves? Oh crap, now I had the sickness and he had to go get Fast Forward. I told him not to, but off he ran. Then I don’t remember a lot. Fast Forward and Creaky getting me in the house, making me lie down, drinking a bunch of water that I threw up, more water until I kept it down. Creaky was pissed, obviously. But since this was my first time, he said to learn my lesson from now on and wear the goddamn gloves.

  Those things were so big and stiff, it was like trying to use tools while wearing baseball mitts. I’d seen Fast Forward working without his. So it wasn’t my first day of going bare-handed, but that was the day it caught up to me, because it builds up in your system. Green tobacco sickness is what it’s called. Nicotine poisoning. Kids get it all the time, more than adults, which is why Fast Forward could get by without gloves. If you’re older and you’ve smoked more, your body gets used to the poison and takes everything better in stride.

  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.