On The Grind
Migrants in Muskogee County, Oklahoma 1938.
Dorothea Lange via Wikimedia Commons.
Ferris Hatcher had been sure to cut off the power to the barn before she began her work in the structure’s high rafters, the farmer was cautious nonetheless as she examined the thick, rodent-chewed section of wires that fed into the heavy halogen lights. It could blow her arm off were it live, fling her down onto the concrete floors some twenty-feet below. If she was lucky enough not to be killed outright anyway. Maybe she would land on the array of produce she had stacked around the warehouse, the first of what looked to be an especially bountiful harvest for the season. Yeah, then she might just break her back and Ryan could drop out of middle school to care for her.
‘Careful,’ she reminded herself needlessly.
Pulling her gloves snug a final time, she reached into her pocket to find the small set of clippers and pulled them out to examine them. Stolen from the small toolbox her son kept on a neat shelf by his bed, they were sharp enough to cut tin yet of a size that suggested use for building miniature models or small metal-crafting – and so they were, but their task today was much different. Slowly, the tired woman put the small teeth to the rubber coating that shielded the fragile strands of copper.
‘Sorry, Ferris.’ The man raised his hands imploringly and shrugged. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you.’
The sale had gone bad. Worse, the sale hadn’t happened at all and the farmer looked at the small crate of goods clutched in her whitening knuckles.
‘It’s a good crop, no denying that.’ The merchant picked up the same radish for the fourth time and hefted it expertly, ‘no denying that,’ he repeated before setting it down in the same place once more. ‘But I told you, I’m already bought up for stock this season. Got guarantees from Manso Ag. Assured rates and everything. Full season.’
Ferris twitched a little as she envisioned slamming the wooden box over the man’s head. How many times was he going to say that to her? ‘Yeah Sam, I hear you,’ she listened to herself mutter, ‘but you know what you’re going to get with them: out-of-season, greenhouse-grown tomatoes that taste like the mush they are and flavorless cucumbers grown God-knows-where.’ She nodded firmly as his eyes wandered once more down to the crate of garden veggies. She had him on the ropes, but she had thought that twice already today. ‘Look, I’ll cut you a deal. First pick come full harvest, half-credit until end of the busy season.’ She was actually pleading with the man she observed miserably.
A look crossed the man’s face, his eyes flicked downward behind his thick glasses as his brain cranked itself into overdrive. His tongue protruded slightly as he chewed on it for a moment. It was a great deal, a net-zero on her end and a guarantee of a surge in profits for him. He eyed the turnip again and made as if to reach for it one more time.
She took a half-step back. ‘C’mon, Sam. We should be working toget-’
‘No,’ he interrupted with finality this time, ‘No can do, Ferris. You know I love ya and your folks out there, but I just can’t do it this time.’ Her fallen expression threatened to crush him but he carried on. ‘Look, if I back out of those contracts, it ain’t just money I’m burning, its product down the line. Shit, it’s my cousin’s seed stock when he goes to buy next season and they have him written up on one of them prohibited buyers lists.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Then what happens when he buys from someone else or, God-forbid, his new crop gets cross-pollinated with one of theirs down the road? You know their ain’t many not using Manso seed these days.’
Ferris did indeed know this. It was why she had long ago abandoned the growing of any form of commodity agriculture like corn, soybeans, or hay on her ten-thousand acre plot beyond what she could get away with selling locally or using herself. The look on her face told the man that she was well-aware of the legal fuckery the big ag companies would engage in were you not at least deferent to their bio-engineered fiefdom.
‘Exactly, Ferris. Exactly.’ The man tucked a crisp fifty dollar note into the crate. ‘For the fuel.’ He explained, red-faced.
None of the following shops had gone any better, not one of the seven small groceries she had visited in the county being willing to cross the industrial giant and having already been put into service in its interests. It seemed impossible that the Manso agents had been so efficient, they must’ve been touring and staking out the market for months, yet here it was.
The eighth and final, she realized as she pulled up, was gone entirely, a charred concrete floor all that stood behind the half-scrapped gas pumps out front.
‘What the hell?’ The farmer looked around to make sure she was where she thought and was upset to confirm that she was. How had she not heard about Jim’s Grocery burning down? Sure, the old man had passed a few months prior, but his son had taken over it and seemed to be doing well. She had just talked to him over the phone a month ago about the very samples she was now fruitlessly hauling around in her old square-body farm truck, he had seemed thrilled with the chance to put some local produce in his refurbished shop.
How could things get worse? Her head hit the steering wheel with a soft thud and she fought the tears burning passed her tight sealed eyelids; she inhaled in a shuddering gulp of warm air and steadied herself. She had to pick up Ryan from practice.
The following days only made things much worse, her crops beginning to wilt in the sun as she delayed harvesting and what was already reaped spoiling in the barns; carriers she thought may be able to distribute her produce dried up as well and nobody, it seemed, would so much as transport her goods, let alone buy them at market rate. Shit, based on her last few calls she wouldn’t get seventy-five percent of “market rate” this season.
She had had to lower her hopes for the year when she decided to enlist a distributor rather than sell direct, the fifteen percent cut would mean she would have to put off some projects around the property for yet another season. She wondered just how many more storms the old barn roof was going to withstand, how long before another derecho charged across the plains and leveled it entirely. All that work she had done, the preparations and new equipment, all based on the idea that the roof would be replaced this winter. And now her labor stood somehow cheapened, hours of her life and thousands of hard-saved dollars reduced to near worthlessness by a flat inability to shift any of her products.
She gazed out the window, watching Ryan as he dutifully pushed an old mower back and forth across the wide front lawn. He liked the work, found value in it for both himself and his family, and Ferris wondered how he would cope when they had to finally give up the land he had always known.
Her family had been struggling against this exact fight for generations, fending off land-hoarders and corporate conglomerates since they had first settled the area in 1889. They had fled the South, finding promise and early success as homesteaders on the land straddling the Great Plains-Ozarks-Deep South triangle. All in all, the early Hatcher clan had managed to grow their modest holdings five-fold over two generations – whether from generationally nurtured skills in the sugarcane fields of Louisiana, those created in the harsh new environment, or a mix of both.
Then came Henryetta in 1907 and Springfield in 1908; Harrison in 1909, Slocum in 1910, and Okemah in 1911; Broken Bow, Detroit, Oscarville, and Hamilton in 1912; Atlanta in ’15, Waco in ’16; Chester, Houston, Lexington, and East St. Louis in ’17; Philadelphia, Estill Springs, and Porvenir in ‘18. The Red Summer came next, the 1919 burnings of neighborhoods in Bisbee, Charleston, Omaha, Elaine, Knoxville, Chicago, Longview, and Washington D.C. Then Ocoee, then Greenwood, then Rosewood.
These weren’t her memories, Ferris glanced at the phone hanging on the wall, yet she had them nonetheless. She remembered her Meemaw talking at all hours of the day and no matter what else she happened to be doing. It was ancient by contemporary standards, faded blush pink and corded by a seemingly infinite length of coiled pink wire which, like a slinky which has been pulled and twisted upon itself one time too many, was a crimped and jumbled knot hanging beneath the wall-mounted base.
She remembered the summers here, the games they would play indoors when the blazing sun outside was too hot and the misadventures she, her brothers, and the cousins would get themselves into when the grandparents weren’t paying enough attention. The old shed her aunt had built at thirteen – a collapsing and rusting mess by the time a young treasure hunter calling herself “Ferry” stumbled across it in her survey of the large property decades later – was still out there, inaccessible and covered in a smothering pile of poison oak, ladyfern, and supplejack, visible to anyone who knew just where to look. Not too many left, she considered, who knew where to look. She may soon be the only one who knows what lies beneath that unappealing pile of strangling vines on the other side of the rusty barbed wire lining the driveway.
‘Screw it.’ The farmer stood, walked into the kitchen, and snatched the phone from its cradle. She jammed the number to the Board of Interstate Commerce. If she couldn’t sell here, she would ship her goods north instead.
‘What do you mean “rejected,” Hatcher?’ Old Simon Williams regarded Ferris through his thick, cracked glasses as she strode in and set his etched mug down on the counter a little too hard. ‘Rejected for what?’
‘What I said in the text, I can’t get an interstate trade permit for the season.’ She held up the printed copy of the letter which had arrived in her email that morning. ‘“Produce of insufficient quality and/or lack of demand in requested states,”’ she quoted without looking at it.
‘They ain’t needing vegetables in Ohio now?’ Samson a young farmer spoke up incredulously.
He was one of only two remaining young farmers who had chosen to stay rather than pursue careers in the city, the last of a dying breed as far as Ferris was concerned. She turned to him. ‘Apparently not.’
‘Got the same letter last week.’ Another old-timer named Al Green shifted his chair back and stood to address the room. ‘More-‘r-less.’ He was the son of a pastor from nearby Red Bird and had adopted many of his father’s mannerisms. Speaking in an assuring baritone, he continued. ‘They won’t take wheat or alfalfa east, won’t take cattle north for slaughter either.’
‘Beef too?’ Samson looked legitimately confused. ‘The army fighting to hold Denver turn vegetarian?’
Ferris frowned. ‘Heard Denver fell… what, two months ago now? Don’t you read, Sam?’
The young farmer shook his head, frowned, and looked to his feet for emotional support. ‘I haven’t been able to negotiate a single contract since Dad passed in May. Not a single deal has gone my way at all.’
‘Looks like that’s all of us this year.’ Al’s calming hand found a home on Samson’s shoulder. ‘All that remains anyway.’ He looked into the collective gazes, taking a moment to read each as he did so. He sat back down.
‘Thought I just didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘Probably doesn’t help.’ The man’s deep voice brought chuckles to the room and a blush to Sam’s already ruddy complexion.
The Farmers’ Collective had shrunk dramatically since Ferris had been a small bean riding her Pa’s shoulders into the grand, old VFW lodge for her first co-op meeting with the other farmers. Though young, she could remember times when the smoke-stained room had been packed from wall to wall with shouting farm-owners, field workers, and truck drivers, all trying to get a word in edgewise during the seasonal negotiations on who would sell what to whom; when and in what quantity; and for how much to any of them. Today, there were only seven of them and a smothering silence had descended upon the room.
Ferris recalled the meaning of it all, her father explaining the negotiation as their “power” against the big companies who sought to squash the family farms, consume them wholesale for massive profits and leave the people to ruin. That is what happened after the dark years of massacres and lynchings; the Land Barons coming in to outcompete the family farm, to smother any who couldn’t be bought by company agents or chased out by local Klan – under color of law or otherwise. Company Boards used their wealth and influence, bargaining with banks at rates far beyond what was available to the average person; they brought in big machines to do the work of ten families with the time and labor of one. By the time the Depression came and the dust began to choke the sky, many of those closest to the Hatchers had been forced to move on, left no choice but to abandon all they knew in a hopeless journey west in search of anything at all.
The Hatcher family had been one of the few that stayed; their farmland not suited to the great machines and much too expensive to drain and deforest properly, they had been spared the most ruthless of land agents and their less-than-legal-minded henchmen. No kin of hers had ever been forced to travel the long, dusty expanse of Route 66 in search of work or a roof to sleep under. Today the option to head west didn’t exist, even if she – or anyone for that matter – had wanted to.
And yet the rest is the same, she considered: Ag-conglomerates run by pharmaceutical boards and executives buying out politicians of any stripe; Manso’s genetically engineered crops bred at-large in the countryside, infecting crops and condemning families to generations of economic trauma and hardship at the hands of company lawyers come harvest; giant drones spraying all manner of pesticides on fields and defoliants on forests, rendering tens of millions of hectares of prime farmland toxic and unusable for anything but cotton, flax, hay, and the most resilient of modified soybeans or rapeseed. Where before scores of farms and their families had populated the community – had sat in these very seats – today there were seven.
The decision had been made – for her and everyone else.
Corn was sold at quarter-price, prime maize-become-cattle feed.
Eggs were crushed, ground ‘neath churning tractor tires into pulp for flies.
Milk was spilt, aquifers and acequias overtop in frothing white.
Hay was burnt, piled high as hungry horses knickered nearby.
Pigs were slaughtered, left in fields for raptors, corvids, and vultures.
Cattle became weak, hounded by coyotes and drug off by cougars.
Vegetables softened in the sheds, fruit fermented in their branch’s shade.
Children grew weak, bare necessities blocked by red lines.
Parents grew supine, their world stripped from them day-by-day.
Shareholders grew fat, writing checks on trampled lives.
The Devil’s deal is easy when someone else is paying.
Thanks so much for taking some time to read this short from my WIP anthology! If you found it enjoyable and can spare a few bucks, a tip would be greatly appreciated. Your support plays a crucial role in making it possible for me to continue working on projects like this. It truly means a lot!
