Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life. Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back o...

It was a Wednesday this all happened, which supposedly is the bad one. Full of woe etc. Add to that, coming out still inside the fetus ziplock. But. According to Mrs. Peggot there is one good piece of luck that comes with the baggie birth: it’s this promise from God that you’ll never drown. Specifically. You could still OD, or get pinned to the wheel and charbroiled in your driver’s seat, or for that matter blow your own brains out, but the one place where you will not suck your last breath is underwater. Thank you, Jesus. I don’t know if this is at all related, but I always had a thing for the ocean. Usually kids will get fixated on naming every make and model of dinosaur or what have you. With me it was whales and sharks. Even now I probably think more than the normal about water, floating in it, just the color blue itself and how for the fish, that blue is the whole deal. Air and noise and people and our all-important hectic nonsense, a minor irritant if even that. I’ve not seen the real thing, just pictures, and this hypnotizing screen saver of waves rearing up and spilling over on a library computer. So what do I know about ocean, still yet to stand on its sandy beard and look it in the eye? Still waiting to meet the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.

I wasted more hours up in those woods than you’d want to count, alongside of a boy named Maggot, wading the creek and turning over big rocks and being mighty. I could go different ways but definitely a Marvel hero as preferable to DC, Wolverine being a favorite. Whereas Maggot tended to choose Storm, which is a girl. (Excellent powers, and a mutant, but still.)

She was the reason Maggot and I got to be next-door-neighbor wild boys for a time, but first he’d need to get born, a little out ahead of me, plus getting pawned off on her while his mom took the extended vacay in Goochland Women’s Prison. We’ve got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.

Famously, this place where we lived was known to be crawling with copperheads. People think they know a lot of things. Here’s what I know. In the years I spent climbing around rocks in all the places a snake likes to lie, not one copperhead did we see. Snakes, yes, all the time. But snakes come in kinds. For one, a common spotty kind called a Water Devil that’s easily pissed off and will strike fast if you make that mistake, but it’s less of a bite than a dog deals out, or a bee sting. Whenever a water snake gets you, you yell all the curse words you’ve got stored up in your little skull closet. Then wipe off the blood, pick up your stick, and go on being an Adaptoid, thrashing on the mossy stump of evil. Where, if a copperhead gets you, that’s the end of whatever you planned on doing that day, and maybe with that part of your hand or foot, period. So it matters a lot, what you’re looking at.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.

guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice. He wore it long and shiny as a penny, said my mother, who clearly had a bad case. A snake tattoo coiled around his right arm where he’d been bit twice: first in church, as a kid trying for manhood among his family’s snake-handling men. Second time, later on, far from the sight of God. Mom said he didn’t need the tattoo for a reminder, that arm aggravated him to the end. He died the summer before I was born. My messed-up birthday surprised enough people to get the ambulance called and then the monster-truck mud rally of child services. But I doubt anybody was surprised to see me grow up with these eyes, this hair. I might as well have been born with the ink.

Mom had her own version of the day I was born, which I never believed, considering she was passed out for the event. Not that I’m any witness, being a newborn infant plus inside a bag. But I knew Mrs. Peggot’s story. And if you’d spent even a day in the company of her and my mom, you would know which of those two lotto tickets was going to pay out.

She was nobody Mom had ever met nor wanted to, given what she’d heard about that family. Snake-handling Baptist was not the half of it. These were said to be individuals that beat the tar out of each other, husbands belting wives, mothers beating kids with whatever object fell to hand, the Holy Bible itself not out of the question. I took Mom’s word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there’s no liquor to be found. Southwest Virginia, we’re one damn thing after another.

Mom always swore that was the train I barely missed: getting whisked off to join some savage Holy Roller brood in Open Ass, Tennessee. Place name, my own touch. Mom refused to discuss my father’s family at all, or even what killed him. Only that it was a bad accident at a place I was never to go called Devil’s Bathtub. Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them, and these grew in my tiny head into grislier deaths than any I was supposed to be seeing on TV at that age. To the extent of me being terrified of bathtubs, which luckily we didn’t have. The Peggots did, and I steered clear. But Mom stuck to her guns. All she would ever say about Mother Copperhead was that she was a gray-headed old hag, Betsy by name. I was disappointed, wishing for a Black Widow head of kick-ass red hair, at the least. This being the only kin of my father’s we were likely to see. When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

The other part, a small thing, is that in this story Mom never spoke my father’s name. The woman is “the Woodall witch,” that being my dad’s last name, with no mention of the man that got her into the baby fix. She found plenty to say about him at other times, whenever love and all that was her last stop on the second six-pack. The adventures of him and her. But in this tale as regards my existence, he is only the bad choice.

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy. I remember I always liked looking at things more than talking about them. I did have questions. My problem was people. Thinking kids are not enough full-fledge humans to give them straight answers. For instance. The Peggots next door in their yard had a birdhouse on a pole that was a big mess of dangling gourds, with holes drilled for the bird doors. It was the bird version of these trailer pileups you’ll see, where some couple got a family going and nobody, not kids nor grandkids, ever moved out. They’re just going to keep shacking up and hauling in another mobile home to set on blocks, keeping it one big family with their junkass porches and raggedy flag over the original unit. One Nation Under Employed. The Peggot birdhouse was that, a bird-trailer clusterfuck. But no birds lived in it, ever. There were bird nests galore in the trees behind the house, or they’d build one in some random place like under the hood of Mr. Peggot’s truck. Why not move into a house already built, free of charge? Mr. Peggot said birds were like anybody, they like living their own way. He said he’d known government housing that didn’t cost...

In fall time he’d take us to the woods to hunt ginseng or dig sassafras because those can’t outrun you.

The empty dog pen stood between our trailer and the Peggot house. Maggot and I would put a tarp over it and sleep out there, usually if falling trees someplace took out the lines and we couldn’t watch TV. One summer we did that for maybe a month, after a Nintendo Duck Hunt challenge where I accidentally let fly the controller gun and busted the screen. Maggot took credit for that deed so I wouldn’t get sent home and skinned alive. Mrs. Peggot pretended to take his word for it, even though she heard the whole thing. Probably everybody has had some golden patch of life like that, where everything was going to be okay thanks to the people that had your back, and sadly you wasted it, by being ticked off over some ignorant thing like a busted TV.

They had chickens at one time, including this rooster with the mind of a serial killer that gave me bad dreams.

Mom despised church, due to some of her fosters getting carried away with it, but I myself didn’t mind. I liked looking at the singing women, and the rest you could sleep through. Plus that thing of being loved automatically, Jesus on your side. Not a faucet turned on or off, like with people. But some of the Bible stories I minded, definitely. The Lazarus deal got me mentally disturbed, thinking my dad could come back, and I needed to go find him. Mrs. Peggot told Mom I ought to go see Dad’s grave in Tennessee, and they had a pretty huge fight. Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

I asked Mom one time how to fix the bed so it was covered up like you see them on TV, which she thought was dead hilarious.

Recovering druggie mother, excuse me. Mom was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, telling me how great she was doing at rehab, how everything was going to be different this time. I know this was not nice of me, but I asked her, How is it going to be different? Just saying. Oh, she had answers. She’d only ever before done the freebie rehabs, a long weekend in the tank, courtesy of DSS. This was a whole different level, with therapy sessions and so on. It cost money, and Stoner was paying. She said she never even realized before that the moral inventory meant taking stock of your entire life. Wishes for the future included. She said her future was me. That I was one hundred percent of her reason for getting sober. I could see how this was supposed to make me feel great, but honestly it hit me as one more thing to worry about. What if she turns around in a month and gets shitfaced again or starts using? What does that tell you? That I wasn’t a strong enough reason. Stoner would be pissed off about the wasted cash and take it out on me. Mom was assigning me the superpower of getting and keeping her clean, and our family on track. It’s a lot of pressure. On the good side, she looked nice, for somebody living in a home for junkies. She had her makeup on, not so tired, and something different with her hair. She was wearing a new dress that Stoner had bought her. She said he’d come to see her three times already, the most visits allowed. He’d brought her the dress, flowers, and a card t...

Mind you, she never had one good thing to say about being raised in foster care herself, and now she thinks it’s all rainbows? I told her, Yeah, Mom, it’s exactly like a petting zoo where the main animals are roaches and mice. I told her for fun times we shoveled cow shit, and my foster was a creepy old man that threatened to file down my teeth. I didn’t mention I’d started doing drugs. As far as I was concerned, drugs were not the problem in that home. Just the opposite.

It’s not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don’t go there, it’s a trap. I’d tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

It was a normal day of Tommy and me pulling out an old fence, yanking crusty barb wire off of crusty palings and rolling it up to save for a rainy day because that was Creaky. Nothing but rainy days ahead, boys! Save everything, because life sucks and then you die! Fence work meant walking all the steep hills he couldn’t climb, so on the good side it was a vacation from his shit. We were at the edge of the woods, taking turns pissing on an anthill, which Tommy felt bad about. He found these blue flowers coming up through the hay. Then we sat in the shade listening to what all was going on up in the trees. Birds having their discussions, a woodpecker making his little tack-tack-tacks, this whole other life of little beings out here minding their business and not actually giving a damn about yours. It could set you back on your haunches, in a good way. Why I liked the woods. We heard a rain crow, which is not your everyday crow. It sounds like a two-cycle engine revving up, finally getting to this spooky gulp, gulp. A rain crow calling means you’ll have a storm within the day. Tommy was surprised a bird would know that, but this came out of the bible of Mr. Peg, so he believed it. I’d already amazed him of countless things, like how chewing on sassafras stems tastes exactly like root beer. Or how squashing touch-me-not weeds like a washrag and rubbing it on your poison ivy will take the itch away. Amazing the hell out of Tommy with Mr. Peg lore was one of my pastimes.

I leaned over to see what he had, which was the smallest, smallest green grasshopper you can imagine with your brain. Like it came from the planet of smaller things. He said, “The storm thing, I get that. Birds would need to know, right? So they won’t get rained on.” I agreed with him on that, caught in the rain would suck for a bird, hard for flying. Tommy and I could go into mental-type things like that, where with other guys, you just don’t go there. Mainly we were stalling because we’d finished winding the fence, and ended up with giant wire rolls that were way too big for us to drag to the barn. Then what? At Creaky’s we basically lived in terror of doing the wrong thing, and in terror of asking him what was the right thing, so we spent a lot of time debating on which would be worse. Finally, I said I would go ask if he meant to haul the wire out with his tractor, or what.

Halfway down the hill I saw what looked like Mr. Peggot’s truck parked in front of the house. No way. Then I spotted all three Peggots up on the porch talking to Creaky. I whooped and tore down the hill, thinking for sure they had come to take me home. Long story short, no. Just to visit. I wondered how they’d convinced the DSS they were not molesters. And Miss Barks had said no visits allowed here, so it blew out all circuits, seeing my old life and new one chatting on the porch. Mr. Peg and Creaky were figuring out they had some of the same cousins, which is what you do in Lee County whenever you meet somebody. First, how are your people related. Then you move on, in this case to silage, Angus cattle, beef prices. Creaky sounded like a different person talking to Mr. Peg in his raspy voice. You’d look at Creaky and ask yourself, How was this old cuss ever married and young and a human being at all? And there it was. Once upon a time, a nice piece of land and good prospects and a boy that loved his farming. Mr. Peg knew about that because back whenever he was a boy, his family did well with the corn and tobacco before they had to sell off their land a piece at a time for people to build houses on. Same with Mrs. Peggot, she started out as a little girl on a farm before their daddy sold his land for a certain number of hogs, one for each child. After that, their farm was a coal mine where her brothers worked, and Mr. Peg also. Mining is how he got his crushed foot.

Anyway I brought Maggot and Mrs. Peggot into the kitchen, where she had a near heart attack. She’d brought ham biscuits but said the tin was not to be opened until she cleaned up, and where did the man keep his Lysol. Good question. This was just skimming the surface, mind you. She had yet to see a bathroom. I introduced them to the two dogs Pete and Mike that were still lying where last seen. Maggot wanted to see some of the rank shit I’d told him about at school, sewage bathtub of doom, the mummified raccoon we found in the basement, but I skipped those. We got out clean towels to put on the couch so we could sit and eat Mrs. Peggot’s amazing ham biscuits. I felt like, saved. They asked if I was coming home soon. They’d not even talked to Miss Barks. They found out where I was from our bus driver that was some kin to Mr. Peg, and just came over. Mrs. Peggot seemed pretty torn up. She leaned over and patted my knees and said I should go on saying my prayers. I thought of them going to the prison to see Maggot’s mom. He never talked about it, but now I could picture them at Goochland in the visiting room eating ham biscuits, Mrs. Peggot telling Mariah, You hang in there, honey. Say your prayers, and we’ll spring you.

I hate to say it, but I looked at the Peggots from a Fast Forward viewpoint, wondering if he might think they were a couple of old bumpkins, and that boy of theirs just a little bit odd, or what.

Swap-Out for all his derpness could chop onions like a ninja. You just had to not watch.

I came in, and Creaky asked where the hell was Tommy, and I said, Oh shit, oh Jesus. I’d left him up in the field with the rolls of barbwire. It had been hours, and Tommy would still yet be up there in the tall grass. He’d wait there till the sun went down, because I’d said I would be right back, and he believed me.

Mom graduated from rehab and got to go home. Now instead of McDonald’s I could go sit in our kitchen, or in my room that was the exact mess I’d left it the night it all happened, visiting Mom with my chest hurting for how much I missed being a normal kid. Any minute Miss Barks was going to tap on the door and say, “Sorry, time’s up.” Then bam, back to foster life. Some years down the road it would be like this with the girls saying, Pull out now, quick! Honestly, give me all or nothing at all. Give me the damn visits at McDonald’s. But Mom said she lived for these times. Regardless the unfairness of her being allowed home while I wasn’t. Me being not the one of us that screwed up. She still had drug tests to pass and a hard row to hoe, so Miss Barks said it was a realistic goal for us to get me home for Christmas. She didn’t babysit us at the house, even though if Mom had wanted to do me damage there were a lot more options there than at McDonald’s. Miss Barks said Mom was earning trust. She’d drop me off and sit outside in her car for the hour, doing her homework or her case files. Homework, yes. Miss Barks was seriously young. She was taking night classes to get certified for a teacher, which she said was her dream, because she loved kids. And I thought, What am I?

Mom said Stoner was still anti me moving back in, due to the stress of the three of us as a family making Mom relapse. You’re going to say, What kind of shit is that for a mother to be telling her kid? Even I thought that, at the time. But Mom had milk and cookies out on the table for me, so probably she was trying to learn the drill from TV. She was nervous. I cut her some slack. She showed me the presents Stoner got her for coming home, including a new microwave that told the time in lit-up numbers. She asked if my foster was still being an asshole, and I told her a person could get used to anything except hanging by the neck. Something I’d heard from Mr. Peg. After our time was up, Miss Barks came in and said I should get together anything I wanted to take with me. My first thought was to load up on stuff I missed like Snickers bars and my best comics. But anything valuable I would have to turn over to Fast Forward, so I ended up not taking much. Just two of my small-size action heroes that I could sneak in. I would hide them in Swap-Out and Tommy’s beds, and they’d never know who put them there. God, maybe. The surprise toy in the shitburger happy meal of their lives.

On the drive back we rolled down the windows. “Just smell that,” she said. “Fall time.” Plowed-under silage fields, smoke from people’s leaf burning, and something a little bit sweet, maybe apples that had rotted on the ground. She was a country girl. She showed me where her parents’ farm was because we went past that road. The happiest I remember being that fall was in the car with Miss Barks. She was chatty and would ask questions like who were my caseworkers before, which I couldn’t remember, honestly. I’d see one a couple of times, she’d be all like, Hey, I’ve got your back. Next visit, here’s a new one reading my name off the files.

She said her two best high school friends had gotten their scholarships and gone away to college, but she didn’t get one and it about killed her. Everybody knows there aren’t that many to go around, but she was still ashamed. She’d thought she was as smart as her two friends were. But here’s the thing, she told me, you don’t give up, sometimes you just have to take second choice. In her case the job at DSS, slob-roommate apartment, and night classes at Mountain Empire Community College.

She asked me what I wanted to be whenever I grew up. I had to think about that. We went past some barns and tobacco fields with their big yellow-green leaves waving in the sad evening light. She looked over at me and said, Hey, why so glum, chum? I told her nobody ever asked me that question before, about growing up and what I wanted to be, so I didn’t know. Mainly, still alive.

At one point she looked at me and said, Oh my god, Demon, I think you went and got taller than me! Which was impossible, so we measured ourselves with marks on the wall, the official way with a cereal box on your head. Of our two pencil lines, mine came out on top, by a hair. Mom always said she was five-feet-sweet in her two bare feet, but it turns out all this time she was only fifty-nine inches. Which rhymes with nothing, but now that was me too, plus a hair. Unbelievable. I was used to being taller than most kids, except the ones that had been held back a lot of grades. But taller than your own parent is a trip.

asked where its room would be, and she was vague on that. Actually it kind of killed the mood. It turns out she and Stoner had been having arguments on moving to a bigger house. They hadn’t been married that long yet and he still liked the good times, so he was not keen on her having this baby. Which was ridiculous. If he wanted to run around with the no-kids version of Mom, he already missed that boat by ten years. Plus, the baby was on the way. You can’t take it to customer service and get your money back, I told her, but she didn’t laugh. Without really going into it, she told me that was more or less what Stoner had in mind.

Stoner was supposed to get home around four, and it was required for me to wait and at least say hello. Our so-called work to do on learning to be a family. Miss Barks said she’d come in and get me at four thirty. I’d not seen Stoner since the night of Mom’s OD, so I kind of froze up. He looked the same: denim vest, leather bracelet, gauges. I’d spent a lot of time making him die in my drawing notebook. Even if he never saw those drawings, I’d made them, and looking at him now, I felt like he knew. Not sensible, just an in-my-mind thing.

Mom pushed her hair out of her eyes, edgy. She’d been happy and fun all day and now without even looking at her straight on, I could feel her change.

“Guess what!” Mom said. “I told him about the baby, and he’s as excited as he can be.” She was looking at me, mouth-smiling but not the eyes. Those please-save-me eyes. “Just think if this one’s a boy, and Demon gets a little brother. They’ll be two peas in a pod.” Stoner stared at her. “It wouldn’t be a fucking mulatto.” “My dad was Melungeon,” I told him. “Not a, whatever you said.” Mom tried to change the subject, asking where all Stoner made deliveries today, and why didn’t we go in the living room because the chairs were more comfortable and her back hurt. Stoner was still staring her down. “You wanted us to talk. We are fucking talking.” He had much to say. How I would have to be more considerate now, due to Mom’s fragile situation. Stoner had learned a lot, he said, from him and Mom going to their counseling. New words to help us all get along. Opposition disorder being one of them. Supposedly that was a disease, and I had it. If I wanted to move in here, I’d need to go on the medication to knock some of the wind out of my sails. Evidently I had too much of that in my sails. Wind.

Stoner slowly turned his head and fixed on her, like a big guard dog. “Since when does this Barks bitch make the rules about what we do as a family?” I’d been thinking it was ever since the night Mom almost offed herself and Stoner gave me a black eye, but maybe that’s just me. According to Stoner, the Peggots and me were a no-go. He said he was getting an injunction, so if I went over there the cops would arrest me. I looked over at Mom like, Is this true? And she made just the tiniest, tiniest shake of her head. He didn’t see it. The microwave he’d bought her with the blue lit-up clock said 4:21. Nine minutes to go. I didn’t want to be in that kitchen, and didn’t want to go back to the farm. I sat still, trying to be nothing and nowhere, watching my minutes tick out.

Like the saying goes: They passed out the brains, he thought they said trains and he missed his. That was Swap-Out. Tommy, though. Smart as hell, he could think himself out of any hole, but then would crawl back into it and sit there. It was like he chose the shit end of the stick, so nobody else would get it. A hard thing to watch.

Sure enough, Creaky called us in the kitchen for his lecture on how farming is a war. All your livelong days, it’s you and your livestock and machinery against the bank that wants to foreclose on you. If you waste one thing, that’s a win for the bank. So, you do not waste one thing. Not food, not an ounce of grain, not water. I’m trying to be Christian here, he says, taking in orphan boys, and what does one of the damn idjits do but go and waste a whole goddamn well full of water. I wanted to tell him I was no orphan, plus, if he was so Christian we’d all be in church right then discussing certain rules like, don’t be pimping onto others as you wouldn’t want to get pimped on yourself. But I was not the damn idjit of Creaky’s concern.

Fast Forward would tell Creaky that’s what happened. I was sure of it. He knew how the damn hydrant worked, he’d been there longer than any of us. And Creaky wouldn’t punish him, because as far as Creaky was concerned, Fast Forward’s shit smelled like hand lotion. The old man would figure some way this water was a necessary sacrifice working to the benefit of America and Lee County football. So confess and get on with it, I’m thinking. Creaky is asking Tommy what a stupid wasteful boy has to say for himself, and Fast Forward is over by the stove getting his coffee. I’m staring. Catching Fast Forward’s eye as he turns around. Thinking, Squad master, yo. What in the hell? Not a word. Creaky goes outside and fetches a piece of dirty old broken hose, like this is justice for a water-related crime, and makes us watch while he thrashes Tommy twenty licks on his sad big bottom. Fast Forward leaves the house. Tommy takes it for the team. He’s bent over hanging on the counter, trying not to cry, but most of all he is not ratting out Fast Forward. I was amazed, honestly. I’m just not that good of a person. Not that brave. We went on with our day the best we could, waterless, and later I found Tommy in the barn. There were nooks and crannies between the stacked hay bales, and he was curled up in one of those with his head hanging, doodling on an old paper grain bag. He always carried a pencil just in case, the way another person would carry Band-Aids or their heart pills. I sat down ...

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 For...

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 ea...

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 al...

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 ...

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 h...

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.

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.