The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

Mom came down behind me. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she bent, slow, and picked up a torn leaf of her own and held it the way you hold a baby bird.

“You did all this by yourself,” she said. “Every bit of it.”

“Not by myself,” I said. “Rusty. Aaron.”

“You,” she said. “I watched.”

Rusty came over that evening after his own place, which had taken some hail too but not like mine. He walked every row with me and did not talk until the end.

“Cut what stands,” he said. “Leave what’s broke off at the ground, it’s gone. What’s bent at the middle, some of it will cure out ugly but it’ll cure. We need to get it in the barn before it rots in the field.”

“It’s not ready,” I said. “It’s two weeks early.”

“It’s ready now or it’s nothing,” he said, and he put his arm around me there in the mud, and I let myself cry for exactly as long as it took him to walk me back to the truck.

That is how the next three weeks went. I worked my shift in the morning. Then I went straight to the bottom with a tobacco knife and a spear and a pile of sticks, and I cut until I could not see.

If you have never cut tobacco, it goes like this. You drive a stick into the ground. You set the spear on top of it. You chop the stalk off low with the knife, lift it, and push it down over the spear point so it slides onto the stick. Five or six plants to a stick.

Then you leave the sticks standing in the field a day or two to wilt, and then you haul them to the barn and hand them up into the tiers, man to man, until the barn is hung from top rail to bottom.

A good crop is hard work. A hailed crop is worse. Every plant is different. You have to look at each one and decide if it is worth the knife.

I wore a faded red T-shirt and a straw hat, and I braided my dark blonde hair so it would stay out of my face. The sweat ran down my arms and dried and ran again. My hands blistered and then hardened.

Rusty came every evening when he was done at his place. Aaron came when he was not baling hay for the neighbors. Some nights it was just me, alone in that bottom with the barn swallows and the sound of my own knife.

It was the second week of cutting that I called the Farm Service Agency office. I was going to ask about the disaster programs and how to report the hail. I thought I would be the first one to call.

I was not the first one.

After I hung up with the clerk, I stood in the barn lot a long time. Then I called the insurance agent in town, the one whose name was on the feed store calendar in Mom’s barn.

He was polite. He was careful. He said he could only talk to the insured. He said the policy on the burley in that field was written to Gina Bale as operator, that the adjuster had been out on the twenty-fourth, and that the claim had been paid.