A Southern Place (9 page)

A few hundred yards away, Cal could not see his father, but was not overly concerned. His daddy could be on the other side of the tractor or too low to the ground, working with the PTO, to be seen from a distance. He could be standing behind a bush relieving himself. To a farmer, there was no bathroom like the great outdoors.

Arriving at the tractor, Calvin did
see his father, stretched across the ground, completely still. His eyes were closed, making him look peaceful and asleep, but Cal knew this could never be. Hershel Mullinax would never
have taken a nap and left the tractor running.

Calvin stood frozen in the blazing sun, looking down on the man he loved with all his being. Health and safety rules he’d learned at home and school sent him mixed signals. He knew not to move anyone who might have a broken neck, or suffered a concussion or other serious injury. But getting immediate care was of the utmost importance if the injured person hoped to survive. Somehow, Calvin understood that none of those things really mattered for his dad. He was also aware that as long as he stood there, looking down on his sleeping father, he could hold onto the day he woke up to that morning, and still be just a farm boy with two loving parents. When he reached down to touch the man, that boy’s life would be over.

Calvin continued to stand as tears formed, fell, and dripped on the dry ground below. Then he kneeled and took his father’s hand in his. The skin was warmed by the sun and slightly damp with the remnants of earlier sweat, but stiff and lifeless. Cal scooped up his father and cradled him in his arms, being careful to support his head, like that of a newborn. His tears fell freely as he rocked the lifeless form, already only a symbol of the man he mourned.

“I’ll do it, Daddy, always,” Cal cried. “I’ll take care of the farm, as good as I know how, always. Like you did, and your daddy, and his did. I’ll take care of Mama and Delores and one day there’ll be another Little Hershel, my boy, or Delores’s if she gets there first, maybe. I’ll take care of our farm, you just watch me, you, and my brother, and all the folks before me. I’ll do it ’til there’s another boy to carry on, and we can watch him together.” Cal’s chest heaved as he let loose in rasping sobs, holding his father’s face to his, bathing him with tears.

As the sun faded, Cal’s mother came out to the field to check on them. Seeing them both on the ground, she ran full speed to meet them.

“What on earth, son, is he hurt—”

“He’s gone, Mama. I don’t think he felt any pain, but he was gone when I got out here.” Lulled into numbness, seeing his mother brought it all back, and Calvin began crying again.

“His heart,” she said. “His Papa went the same way. Just a few years older, I think.” She sat, holding Cal as he held his father.

“You’ll need to call—the ambulance? Or the coroner—I don’t know, but I think some medical person has to—” Touching her husband’s cheek, she sniffled and gasped. “I guess we should call the hospital and ask—”

“Go call ’em, Mama,” Cal said. “I’ll stay with Daddy.”

“Cal, you’ve got to come inside. Why don’t you go call and I’ll stay—”

“No, Mama. I found him, I’m staying ’til they take him away. I ain’t moving.”

“But, son.”

“No, Mama. You make the calls. You tell Delores. I’ll stay here; there’s no place we’d rather be together than out here.”

She left him for their last day of harvesting together. They remained entwined until the coroner came.

Even before his father’s death, Calvin Mullinax could have been a poster boy for a title such as “young working man of the south.” Born poor but proud, he embraced his family and never shied away from long hours and hard work. He was driving the tractor on the family’s small farm before he started school, excelling at hunting, fishing, and all things outdoors. Winning district, then state honors in 4-H and FFA, he seemed destined to make something of himself.

Calvin mourned his father’s passing by throwing himself into farm work. The day after the funeral, he returned to the peanut field to finish what his father had started. As is the custom in the farming community, many neighboring farmers pitched in to help at no cost, expecting only future help from Cal in their own peak times of need. Calvin finished harvesting the crops, and his mother proclaimed he’d brought in their largest profit margin in several years. In addition to working the family farm, Cal also hired himself out as a seasoned farm laborer whenever possible. With his mother’s encouragement, he had both his own bank account and vehicle before finishing high school.

Just a week after Delores’ graduation, the bad cold Mary Pearl had nursed for months was diagnosed as lung cancer, and she died in the hospital before the end of July. Calvin was not only an orphan, but the sole provider for both the farm and his younger sister. Unbeknownst to her family, Mary Pearl Mullinax had used her husband’s life insurance to hold onto the farm, still heavily mortgaged. With no insurance of any kind on herself, she left young Calvin with abundant bills and little collateral. Within six months of his mother’s death, Cal watched as the South Georgia Farmers’ Credit Union foreclosed on his fourth generation family farm.

Cal had just turned twenty-one, his sister barely eighteen. With no influx of renters for their ramshackle home, the bank allowed the two to remain there for several months. By then Cal worked three plus jobs; Tuesdays at the Camilla Livestock Auction, Saturdays at Shiver’s Garage, and every other waking moment as an employee and
sharecropper on Oakland Plantation.

Calvin once had bigger dreams. With Mr. Danner’s help, he landed a scholarship at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, but Cal’s plans seemed to readjust with each downward spiral that life sent. At first he imagined graduating, coming home to the family farm, raising it to new heights and adding more land as finances permitted. Then college took a back burner to the closer reality of providing for the family and saving the farm. When this option died, fantasies of reclaiming it fueled his non-stop work ethic. By the time Cal and his sister were installed in an Oakland tenant house, his goal was still to make a living from the land, but residing in the same county seemed to be the only connection with his farming ancestry. Still, he persisted; Calvin Mullinax was an optimist.

“It ain’t ours, but it’s still good farmland,” he told his sister. “It’s the same kind of soil our daddy farmed, and his before him. And Oakland takes care of its own. We’ll have a place to live, equipment and supplies, a steady paycheck, plus a percentage of the yield I make happen. It’s not a bad life, no sir, it ain’t.”

Delores’s eyes looked sadly disillusioned, and she continued to point out the fallacies in this new life he’d committed them to. “But Calvin, our farm is gone. This won’t never be ours. Wouldn’t you be happier just leaving, going to a bigger place with other jobs, factories and, I don’t know, railroads, trucking companies, stores, businesses where you always know what you’ll make, and might not have to get dirty?” Delores asked.

“Why in the hell would I wanna do that? I’ve wanted to grow things from the earth since the first time Daddy let me ride on the tractor with ’im.”

“But what’ll happen when there’s another drought? Or a flood? Or when the government decides the peanut farmer don’t need any more help?”

“You worry so much, Sis. You’re just like Mama was,” he said. “Farming is a way of life, a good life for a man who keeps up with the times and ain’t afraid of a hard day’s work. Look at Mr. Danner.”

“Mr. Danner went to college. Mr. Danner has a real job, a government job he gets paid to do whether the farmers around here make a blessed dime or not. I know he farms, too, but he farms on the side. He has a real job with benefits and security. The kind of job you could’ve had if you’d gone to college.”

“Mr. Danner paid for his college by working on farms and saving his money. He owns farmland because he buys small acreage, a piece at the time, making a little more profit each year. He’s been makin’ more money on his farming operation than at his real job, as you call it, for several years now. And a lot of what he learned at college, I know already, just from working with him.”

“But it’s the college degree that got him the real job. And the real job has paid the bills while his farming operation came to be. You ain’t got that, and you never will, sharecropping on somebody else’s farm.”

“But if sharecropping is my real job, along with all the other odds and ends I do, I can save up and start buying acreage too, some day. Hell, we might even own our Granddaddy’s place again, stranger things have happened,” Cal said.

“You’ll do all this work, back-breaking work, day in and day out, just to save enough money to put yourself right back where we started from? Where spring to fall is a gamble every year? Where you pray for rain ’til your knees are scraped, then turn around and promise God the rest of your life if he’ll hold back the clouds ’til harvest is through?”

“Wouldn’t want it any other way, Sis.”

“God help us,” said Delores.

And in his sister’s voice, Cal heard the voice of their mother.

Chapter 6: Summer 1958

Phil

In a charmed, collegiate life, Phil’s summers had been linked to tennis and pool parties and weekend getaways at the beach. The heat was deadly, but a wonderful excuse for pitchers of margaritas and lazy afternoons. With Phil’s first summer on the farm, the face of south Georgia heat became a monster of villainous proportion, enslaving those who dared stand up to him and making them fight for every shallow breath drawn from the humid, sun-parched atmosphere. The work itself was grueling but not impossible: Phil’s prep school athletic training made him far more fit than those gangly or pot-bellied farm workers, but operating in three digit temperatures really changed things.

What the hell is wrong with me
, Phil wondered, trying to disguise his near-dizziness and shortness of breath with resentment. He looked at the other men, spent but not panting, sweating but not pale. They performed their tasks as if by rote, appearing unaffected by the stifling succubus of the sweltering climate. Phil ran a hand through his sweat-drenched hair and blew upward, irritating the colony of gnats sticking to his eyelids just enough to fly a few inches away and return.
Strange
, he thought as he cautiously looked for the same insects around the eyes of the other men.
Why are the damned things only sticking to me?
He leaned over and spat on the cement floor of the barn, almost submitting to the gag reflex as he saw a half dozen of the tiny insects in his saliva.

“Damn, Mr. Phil,” Will said. The thin black man looked somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and ninety. “You have you a gnat samwidge for dinner today?”

Phillip sniffled hard, fighting the urge to vomit. Did he swallow the little creatures or breathe them in? Were they going through his eyeballs and down his throat? Were they poisonous? Did they carry diseases? Why the hell wasn’t anyone else worried? Hoping for some hint of a breeze, Phil turned quickly in the opposite direction and headed outside, away from the desensitized farming mutants and their knowing sneers.

But the quick turn, thrusting Phil into the zenith of the two o’clock sun, ended his tug-of-war with regurgitation, and his gullet won. Expelling the contents of his stomach on the dry, brown grass, he sank to his knees, hanging his head and willing the others to stay in the barn for just a few more minutes. He dry heaved and spit into the grass, trying to purge the vile taste from his throat, his teeth, his tongue. Then he felt a warm hand brush the top of his shoulder.

“Well, now. You’ve just officially guaranteed yourself a heatstroke, maybe worse. And you seem a nice enough guy, but I ain’t wild on the idea of giving you mouth-to-mouth,” Calvin said, helping Phil to his feet.

“I don’t know what happened,” Phil said. He looked to the side of Cal’s face, avoiding his eyes. “Must be a virus or something.” Phil thought of how pathetic he must look to the seasoned workers, like he was weak, powerless, ineffectual. And why wouldn’t they think so? To them he was a spoiled kid; pampered, spoon-fed, never having to do a real day’s work, and on that point they were right.

Calvin handed Phil a ratty bandana, faded to near-pink but folded in a perfect square. Phil wiped his face and neck, finding the fabric soft and incredibly cool against his hot, sticky skin.

“Thanks,” he muttered. Tears stung the backsides of his eyes. Cal’s small gesture of kindness seemed foreign in this frightening new world of heat and sweat and perpetual drudgery, a hands-on world he knew he could survive if only his stomach would let him. But Cal probably thought he was faking, and Phil was too embarrassed to try and explain or ask for advice, looking toward the ground and hoping to appear simply preoccupied.

“No problem, man,” Cal said. “There’s a lot more to farm work than most folks think, and we’ve all seen new-to-the-farm guys who hold up about like you have so far, to begin with.”

“What happens to them? I mean, does it get better for them?”

“For most of them, sure. Course I’ve seen a few that got their first paycheck and never came back, usually city guys that’d never stepped foot on a farm before. Farming ain’t for everybody, and a lot a folks think if ol’ redneck white boys can do it, anybody can.” Cal grinned as though making fun of himself.

Phil moved his head, somewhere between a nod for yes and a shake for no. Calvin was being nice to him, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. But hell, he’d thought the same thing about farm workers. If they could do it, couldn’t anyone? Phil looked up into the sunlight and felt his stomach lurch again. He gasped and covered his mouth.

“You still heavin’? Damn, boy, spit it on out. It’ll feel better on the outside than it does still in. But you need to go on back to the house, cool off, lay down, drink something; a co-cola, ginger ale, something like that to begin with. When that stays down, drink water, a lot of it.”

“Nah, I’m okay, musta been something I ate,” Phil said.

“All you ate was a store-bought sandwich, and whatever you had for breakfast. I doubt that’d be enough to have you on your knees like you are,” Cal said. “Put your head between your knees. Let your neck drop, loose-like. Now breathe deep.” He placed his hand on Phil’s shoulder and Phil did as instructed. After a few minutes, Phil rose, slowly.

“I don’t eat breakfast,” he admitted.

“And there’s your first problem,” Cal said. “There ain’t been a farmer on the planet that didn’t get up in time to eat a big breakfast before hitting the fields.”

“I don’t get it, how could not
eating make me so sick?”

“Dehydration, pure and simple,” Cal said. “You’ll see it in the cows, every now and then, when we move the herd from one pasture to another. There’ll be one or two that hadn’t grazed much, or taken any water, the morning we start moving ’em. Now we herd them up and push them together, have them going at a pretty fast clip for cows.
The one or two that haven’t eaten, and are caught up in the big mass of them, and have to wait longer to get to the watering trough in their new pasture, sometimes they just can’t handle it. The hotter it is, the worse it is, usually. But it’s easier to lose your cookies when ya got some cookies to lose. Just the way the body works.”

Two other men had joined Phil and Cal, and neither seemed
as judgmental as Phil had imagined. An older man patted his ample belly and spoke. “Yeah, I tell my ol’ Velma that’s the only reason I keep her around, her biscuits n’ gravy in the morning stick to the ribs and hold me together ’til dinnertime.”

Phil had noticed they all referred to the noonday meal as “dinner.” He tried to smile.

“Stick to your ribs, hell,” said Shorty, a sickly-thin figure of over six feet. “Sticks to that donut you been carrying over your belt for ten years.”

Will joined them, carrying his worn, green Coleman Cooler of water. “You feelin’ any better, Mr. Phil?” His tired eyes were impossible to read, like his age.

“I think I’m okay, now,” Phil said. “’Bout time to get back to work?”

All the men laughed. Phil cringed.
The minute I let my guard down, they laugh at me. Assholes
.

As if reading his thoughts, Cal spoke. “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with
you. Everyone of us has been where you are, one time or another, and most of us worked the fields before we started to school.”

“I learned to drive on a tractor,” said Shorty. “Took me forever to get used to automatic transmission.”

“I remember skipping breakfast on a scorcher of a day, right after me and Cindy got married,” said Jimmy.

“Early morning nookie,” said Shorty. “The demise of many a man.” There were catcalls and guffaws.

“Had to stop my tractor in the middle of a row,” Jimmy said. “Got down and spewed soured beer and chili dogs from the night before all over those damned peanut rows. Burned like holy hell, and I swear it was comin’ outta my nose.”

Phil smiled. They were trying to make him feel better, to feel like one of them. There was no way he’d slink home in disgrace. “I’m okay, guess we’d better get back to work.”

“No, buddy,” Cal said. “We’ll get back to work, but you need to pack it in for the day. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty left for you to do tomorrow, and we ain’t the kind to let you forget it, but the upchuckin’ won’t be ending ’til your body gets back up to snuff. You go on home and get some rest. Drink as much as you can stand, and eat some when you think it’ll stay down.”

“Make sure you eat a good breakfast tomorrow,” offered Shorty.

“And bring something for lunch that’ll set good on your stomach,” said Jimmy. “Sometimes them store sandwiches have so much extra stuff in ’em, to keep ’em from going bad, that can make you sick to your stomach on a hot day.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” said Clifford, who’d been silent until then. “Remember ol’ Jim Bob Simms, who lived in that old school bus out by the creek? Used to do seasonal work at the cotton gin?”

“Yeah. Used to say he was taking a leave of absence from the junk business. That old man was a piece of work,” said Shorty.

“He never ate anything that didn’t come out of a can. Honest to God. Like you and me, even in a bad month, we still have things out of the garden, and can fry a chicken, grill a hamburger patty, something like that. Jim Bob couldn’t eat anything fresh. Said it made him sick, the way too many preservatives do us. Said he was raised on canned food, and anything else sent him running to the commode, using a tree worth of toilet paper.”

“That’s crazy. Ain’t nobody ever got sick from eating fresh food. And can’t nobody live offa just canned food, neither. That man lies like a dog,” Shorty said.

“I swear it’s the truth,” said Clifford. “My daddy got in a poker game with him, and they got a little wasted and dared him to eat some homemade chili and cornbread. Kept offering him money, everybody put in a dollar, then two, you know how it goes. When it got where he’d make near fifty dollars for just eatin’ a meal, Jim Bob obliged. But they said the stink was terrible, him on the toilet and the rest of them goin’ out to puke from just the smell. Said he—”

“Dear Jesus, Clifford, can’t you see this man’s doing good not to spew on his own shoes, and here you’re telling this damned—” Cal looked at Phil with apology.

“Oh shit, man, I’m sorry,” said Clifford, looking to Phil. “But I swear it’s the truth. Eat whatever you’re used to, just be sure you eat something
.
And drink plenty of water. You’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“I’m gonna run Phil to the lodge,” Cal said. “The rest of you head back out to Circle 5, we should be able to get it all sprayed before dark, maybe with a half hour to spare if we hustle.”

“Damn any hustling,” said Shorty. “I don’t wanna end up like him.” He gestured towards Phil.

“I can walk, I’m not that sick
,
” said Phil. If he had to go home, he wanted to keep a little dignity.

“It’s a good half mile back to the lodge,” Cal said, but caught a glimpse of what Phil meant. “Okay, but only if you drink something first.” He reached into the chest in the back of his pickup and pulled out a ten-ounce Coca-Cola, floating in cold water and a few tiny chips of ice. “Funny, ain’t it, this is the best chest I’ve had, but they can only help so much. This was just drink bottles and ice at eight o’clock this morning.” He opened the drink with a metal opener attached to his keys.

Phil took the cold bottle into his hands and drew it to his lips, fighting the urge to rub its watery sides against his blistered face. The drink had a bite—it startled him, brought tears to his eyes and a quick freeze to his teeth that was almost painful, but sinfully wonderful. He felt the coldness of the bubbly liquid through each passage—his mouth, his throat, his esophagus, down through his chest and into his sore, empty belly—a rush like none he’d had before.

“Slow down, easy,” Cal said. “You drink it too fast and it’ll come right back up, and it won’t feel near as good on the way up as on the way down.”

Phil’s stomach clenched just as he processed the words, but not too late. He slowed down, breathed deeply, and waited a few seconds before trying another, smaller sip. This one was not as intense, but equally medicinal.

“Stay here ’til you finish that one, and take your time,” Cal said. He pulled another bottle from the chest. “Here’s one for the road.”

“Thanks,” Phil said. “For everything.”

“Like I said, be sure to eat breakfast tomorrow, and I’ll bring plenty of lunch and drinks for the day. Then you can get your own cooler, stock up on necessities and such, over the weekend. Sound okay?”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “Thanks.”

“Another thing,” Cal added. “Not meaning to get in your business, but what you drink at night, especially when it’s this hot outside, has a hell of a lot to do with how well your stomach can handle the next day. I’ve been known to out-drink all of Dumas County, but in the summer, I do my drinking on weekends. Just a word of advice.”

“Taken. And thanks,” Phil said again.

“And one more thing,” Cal added with a smile, his eyes twinkling.

“Yeah?”

“About those gnats. They probably don’t hurt anything, all of us breathe in a few in our sleep, but they are pesky little bastards, can bother the hell out of you. The reason they cling to you and no one else is easy: OFF.”

“What?”

“OFF. O-F-F. You can buy it in the grocery store, the drugstore, Bill Tom’s, probably anywhere around here.”

“OFF?”

“Yeah. It’s insect repellent you spray on yourself. Don’t smell much like Chanel No.5, but gnats hate it, and that’s all that matters. I’d have let you use mine if I’da known you didn’t have any. Sorry.”

“No problem, and—thanks.” He said it again, like a zombie, as Cal got in his truck and pulled away.

Phil stood still, watching, then headed across the barnyard for the dirt road to the lodge. He was going home, cooling his face with the bottle as soon as he got out of sight.