D (14:11)
This is a story from my youth, a long time before I began my transition. And so it's going to be told from the perspective of who I was then. A young man growing up in the Midwest. I was raised on a small farm. And one of the things you learn early on from that experience is you can never do it all by yourself. You always need help. That's because on a farm there's just never enough hours in the day. Nor are there enough days from April to October to do all the things that have to be done. And so out of necessity, you find yourself calling upon your neighbors to lend you a hand. And they in turn look to you to do the same for them. There's that old saying, many hands lighten the load. Well, nowhere is that more true than on a farm. Now, our little farm, it was surrounded by four other neighboring farm families. North of us was Paul's place. Paul was my father's cousin. He was a crusty old guy, but underneath that coarse exterior, he was a real soft touch. Paul was married to Blanche, a fiery redhead with a foul mouth and an uncanny knack to antagonize any person that crossed her path. We put up with her. We had to. She was family. South of us was Leonard's place. Now, Leonard's last name was Bird and so everybody called him Chick. That's wry Midwestern humor for you there. Chick was a tough as nails kind of guy. Wiry, you'd never see him without a half smoked cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth. Chick was married to Helen, a beautiful, fragile woman who always had a kind word for everyone. East of us was Tom's place. Now, Tom was Paul and Blanche's son. He was long and lanky. Also had a foul mouth, which we all assumed he inherited from his mother. Tom had a long succession of wives, so many I could never remember all their names. But it does help to explain his nickname, which was Tom Catton. And then there was Glenn's place, which was west of us. Glenn was a big lump of a man married to Lois, a big lump of a woman. They had six kids, each and every one of them a big lump. Anyway, these five families, we would work together all summer long, from planting to cultivation to harvest. Some of the work we took on would take every spare hand we had, like balin hay. My father, Dale, he'd drive the tractor that pulled the baler. Chick would stand on the Front edge of the wagon, behind the baler. He'd pull the bales out as they came out, throw them back to me in the back of the wagon. I'd stack them up five or six high. It'd take us 30 minutes to fill a wagon. And then Paul would drive out on a tractor with an empty wagon. We'd swap them out. He'd take the full wagon back to the barn where he and Tom would offload the bales onto the elevator up into the hayloft where Glenn and his sons would stack them up. We'd work straight through to mid afternoon. Then we'd take a break. And then all the women would come out. My mother, Helen, Lois, Blanche, whoever the hell Tom was married to. Then they'd bring us lunch. Iced tea, ham salad sandwiches, sweet apple pie. We'd find a shady spot beneath the hay wagon to sit and eat and talk. And then after the women left, the men would break out the smokes and the beers. And we'd talk some more. And then we'd go back to work. And we'd keep working until it was too dark to see. The next morning, we'd get up and do it all over again. This was the important thing. Nobody ever kept track of who did what. There just wasn't any need. Without saying a word, everybody knew exactly what needed to be done. Everyone did their fair share. One summer, I'd come back from college to help out. We were shorthanded. In the spring, Chick had gotten real sick, put him in the hospital. Turns out it was the cancer. And so all summer long, the four families, we would work our crops and we would tend to our chores. And then we'd go over to Chick's place and we'd work his crops and tend to his chores. Most evenings, we'd wind up at the hospital, sitting around Chick's room, talking. Now, nobody ever wanted to talk about the challenges Chick was facing. That was going to be way too hard. So instead, we would talk about easy things. The weather, the price of corn. Maybe how the high school football team might do in the coming fall. It was on one of those evenings, late in the growing season. Chick was sitting up in bed, and he looks over at my father and he says, how them crops look, Dale? And my father said, well, they look good, Chick. The crops look real good. And Chick says, yeah, I figured that. I'd just like to see it for myself. And my father says, well, you will, Chick. You're going to get better. And you will see them crops. And right then, Chick, who was already pale and drawn, turned ash. And he looked around the room at everyone there and back at my father. And in a voice just barely louder than a whisper, he said, dale, I ain't getting better. I ain't ever getting better. And so right then, without saying a word, everyone in the room knew exactly what needed to be done. And so we unplugged Chick from the tubes and wires that had him hogtied. We slid him into a wheelchair and slipped him out the back door of the hospital when no one was looking, put him in a pickup, and we drove out to his cornfield, out to his farm and parked alongside his cornfield just as the sun was setting. Now, Paul, crusty guy, he had big, powerful forearms. He pulls Chick out of the pickup and slings him over his shoulder like Chick was a sack of potatoes and carries him out into the middle of the field, sets him down between two rows of corn, growing up straight and tall. The rest of us gathered round. Glen plucked a stem of brome grass to chew on and then plucked another one, handed it to Chick. And then we just sat there for a long time, not saying anything, just looking at the crop. After a good long while, Chick says to my father, you was right, Dale. Crop looks good. Looks real good. And my father says, don't it? Don't it, though? It was way past dark before we got checked back to the hospital. Head nurse stormed in, gave us all hell. Tom told her to shut the fuck up. We turned and walked out. Two days later, Chick died. That fall, the four families would harvest Chick's crop. They made sure all the proceeds got directly to Helen, plus a little bit more, because that's what you do for a neighbor out on a farm. They buried Chick up on a hillside overlooking a cornfield so that for all of eternity he could look out and see for himself how them crops was doing.
