The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

I was standing in Mom’s barn lot with a tobacco stick across my shoulder and the phone pressed to my ear when the clerk at the Farm Service Agency office said my sister’s name.

“Hon, that burley on your mother’s creek bottom has already been reported,” she said. “Six acres. Operator is Gina Bale. Her crop insurance agent already pulled a copy of it for a hail claim.”

I set the stick down against the barn wall very carefully, the way you set down something you are afraid you will throw. Five plants hung off it, wilted and torn, still dripping.

“A claim?” I asked her. “Somebody filed a claim on that crop?”

She was a kind woman. I could hear her deciding how much she was allowed to say. “I can’t tell you anything about the insurance, Shannon. That’s between Gina and her agent. She’s the one on the paperwork.”

I thanked her and hung up. Then I stood there in the mud with the barn swallows going in and out over my head, and I did the arithmetic I already knew by heart.

Six acres of burley. Somewhere around 2,200 pounds to the acre on a good year. My contract said $2.15 a pound. That is a little over $28,000 if God and the weather let you have it.

The weather had not let me have it. And my sister, who had told me in March not to worry about a thing, had put her own name on it.

My name is Shannon Cundiff. I am forty-two years old. I cook lunch at the elementary school in town nine months of the year, and for the last three summers I have raised tobacco on six acres of my mother’s creek bottom in central Kentucky.

This past year was supposed to be the first crop that was all mine. Not Rusty’s, not Mom’s, not a corner of somebody else’s field. Mine, from the seed tray to the barn.

I want to tell how it went, because I think about it every time I pass that bottom, and because I did one thing in the middle of it that I am still not sure a better woman would have done.

The farm is Mom’s. Dolores Cundiff, turning seventy-five this year, a widow for nine years, still walking her fence line every morning with a coffee cup in one hand and a pair of fencing pliers in her back pocket.

It is a hundred and forty acres off a county road outside Harrodsburg, rolling and rocky on the top, flat and rich along the creek. Daddy raised tobacco and cattle on it his whole life. After he passed, Mom leased the hay ground and let the bottom sit.

My husband, Rusty, raises tobacco and runs cows over on his family’s place, eight miles off. He is forty-four and he has been in a tobacco patch since he could walk behind his granddad.

When I told him three springs ago that I wanted my own few acres, he did not laugh. He just said, “Then you’d better start your beds in March,” and he showed me how.

My older sister, Gina, has done Mom’s farm office for twelve years. That means every paper that comes out of the county office, the property tax, the hay lease, the government programs, the insurance on the barns and the house. She lives in town, twenty minutes away.