Sorgho '87

 

I’m young again, skinny and burnt. Acres of high summer in every direction and Mr. Buck, Buck Henderson, stands next to me. Soybean rows evenly spaced, off they go. Dusty green leaves fluttering towards a horizon vanishing point.

              A pickup parked on a strip of grass between fields. There’s a tree, a lone something (acorn? maple? elm?) and no other of its kind within sight.

              Gate of the pickup down, watercooler pulled to its lip. We wriggle paper snow cone cups from a plastic sleeve, fill them with inverted cones of water. The water’s stark cold. “Sip it,” Mr. Buck tells me. “Don’t guzzle or you’ll get yourself sick.”

              We take our paper bag lunches to the shade tree. Buck checks around the trunk for snakes. Already, two days ago, he’d chopped the head off a cottonmouth near a ditch. Hoe in hand, gutting weeds out the ground, short break in his rhythm to hack the snake headless, then back on that rhythm.

              This wasn’t before Round-Up, there were chemicals that could poison weeds in their infancy while sparing the crop in question, corn, wheat, soybean. But that cost money. The old way was cheaper. Send a pair of hands out in the heat for eight-plus hours, hustle along the rows weeding. Buck had done it nearly thirty summers and had the skin to show for it. In his mid-to-late 40s but scalded and cured and mummified with strange wrinkles about hands and neck and eyes and mouth and forehead and ears even. From a distance of twenty paces, for someone near-sighted in need of glasses, he resembled a starved grandmother. He was kind and laughed often.

              He instructed me in the ways of rhythm and technique. Hold the handle this way, hands a foot apart, back hand over, near hand under. Stab ground an inch out from the weed’s base, yank. Don’t yank too quickly or sharply or the roots will tear and stay. Leave them there and weeks later you’ll have to come back and hack them all over again.

              Speed and precision. Walk between rows in a sidelong gait. If a weed grows so close to a soybean shoot you can't chop it without damaging both, bend quick, coil the grass around a pointer finger, with other fingers pinch around the weed’s base then pull with even pressure and slowly. Check the base of the weed in hand, gauge the length of its roots. Did they tear? If so, get down on a knee and with a finger dig more out the hole. Drop the dead weed between rows, move on.

              Snakes, he warned. Watch you don’t stick a hand into the shade of those leaves before first testing them with the cutting edge of a hoe. What kind were native around these fields? Blue racers, cottonmouths, rat snakes. The first were fierce, tenacious, known to chase a running man. The second were poisonous. The last were good to have around a farm, kept the mice population manageable, essentially harmless. He smiled at the fear in my step, after that snake lecture. I moved like someone who’d never been bit. A city boy, a suburban creampuff. Whereas by the age of twelve he’d snatched his first by the tail, following his father’s example, lassoed it in circles overhead before cracking it like a whip. One snap of a snake like that, you’ll break its neck. Safe then to toss it to the dirt, deader than Jesus.

              It made me queasy even then hearing the man talk about women. Best to say he knew very few of them intimately so any commentary he might make regarding that lack of knowledge had a carnal edge to it. His wife, Missy, weighed over three hundred pounds, twice his weight at least. He never joked about her, she was holy ground. Behind his back the other hands and the manager would crack wicked about “the big old girl down the road.” She did all the eating he never got around to, they claimed. No one mentioned the childhoods that produced such people, a Buck or a Missy, or the sorts of deprivation that bring such people together. When their house burned down a decade prior, Missy having fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette, the farm manager and his sons, my grandfather and uncles, rushed over. One look at the smoking furniture Buck was dragging from the house, my grandfather told him forget it, let it burn. When the insurance money comes through, buy yourself something better.

              Working those rows, t-shirt, jeans sopped with sweat, boots cruddy with dried mud, he looked how I imagined him always, even now: a man walking burnt and smoking from the only house that would have him. A fried skeleton who’d often frighten children with his “teeth trick”. Long ago he’d had the remainder of his teeth pulled, took to wearing dentures. With these he’d flash a big grin, then kill it, raise a finger as it to say, “Watch, wait.” He’d work his jaw in an exaggerated manner, lips pursed, then open the mouth: ta-da, his own teeth balanced on his outstretched tongue. The children would scream, the screams fuel for showmanship. Tongue would retract, mouth would close, Buck would make hocus-pocus motions with his hands. When the mouth opened again, there it was, the smile his dentist had given him. That was what passed for magic then in West Kentucky.

              Past noon out in those fields, the heat would crest a hundred. With the heat index, a hundred ten. In the span of an afternoon a person could easily sweat their body weight. Mr. Buck would track the progress of my exhaustion, quick glances from beneath the bill of his ball cap. If the boy was panting or sluggish, he’d send him down the rows for a water break and, if he felt it was needed, some time in the shade. If he noticed the boy was pushing himself, straining to keep pace, he’d take a break himself to allow the boy to keep face, get a little rest without quitting. The boy would always stop if he stopped. I’d never admit exhaustion or ask to stop, badly as I wanted to impress him. There was something about the man in those moments, as if he pitied me for wanting so badly to impress. And him of all people.

              Three and a half decades pass, I’m no longer young, no longer skinny. Even without closing my eyes, I can picture the man, me standing next to him, the fields level for miles and all the more quiet for it. This is where I might mention how I felt, a year or so ago, when I heard word of his funeral. I might describe my shock the last time I saw him, at my grandfather's wake a decade ago. The casket was open. Figures from the hardened past were arriving, once young men now suddenly old, their bodies damaged beyond any religion’s capacity to repair. One man arrived with his grandsons, an aunt pointed him out to me. Heavyset, pale, awkward in tie and suit. That’s Mr. Buck, she said, believe it. He looked not in the least how I remembered him.

I walked over, introduced myself. He wasn’t as old as I’d assumed and looked at me with mock-folksy bewilderment. You're Henry’s eldest? I would’ve hardly recognized you. I laughed of course but would never risk offence, saying the same of him. In the small room chairs were arranged in two identical plots, in even rows, with an aisle running between. I pointed to them and asked whether he got flashbacks, thirty, forty, fifty harsh summers, looking at them. His laugh was polite and he told me, “Most surely.” He wasn’t missing any of that. What did he do with himself nowadays, besides being old? When he first retired, he took up hunting again. Hadn’t done that since we was a youngster. Nowadays, though. His heart wasn’t in a place to manage it, literally. It was weak and occasionally needed a jump start, so he had to take these nitroglycerin pills. From his jacket pocket he fished a small white bottle. Nitroglycerin? I asked. Isn’t that what dynamite’s made of? Same thing I asked my heart doctor, he said. Your grandfather and I used to fish with it: toss a couple sticks of dynamite in a pond, watch fish float to the surface belly up after they blew. We’d row out and pick them of the surface like flowers. What we did for fish back then, Dr. Haverton’s doing for my heart now. 

Those were the words he left me with. That and: I'll think I'll head over and pay respects to your grandfather. A boy took his arm, a grandkid I assumed, helped him along the short walk to the casket. His heart was failing him as my grandfather's had, as both of their fathers' had before them. He huffed as he stepped, three-legged with his cane. I'd never seen the man sit much less lay down, I realized. I'd never seen it so had no reference point for imagining it. He looked down at my grandfather and who knows what he felt, eyes dry and every bit of the face placid. Maybe it was the looking that mattered, not the feeling. Wherever you looked, the feeling followed, so careful what you keep watch over. Watch him nod, step away. Shake hands with the bereaved. Watch him leave on the arm of one who owes their life to his example.