Dispatch 3 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction
The farmer
Andrew McCurtain rose early, as was his habit. He liked to make himself a cup of strong sweet tea, watch the mist rise, and check on his fields and his barns before things started happening around the farm. If he had been honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that what he really liked about the early morning hours was that his old father was not yet awake. Once his father, Andrew Senior, was about, things were crowded on the farm, though it was a generous 300 acre piece, with an additional 100 up the way. Young Andrew, not quite 32 years old, got along well enough with his parents, who lived in the main farmhouse, but he was a busy, industrious young agriculturalist, and he needed some time alone on the farm to do what needed to be done. In his youth, Andrew had no interest in farming, but after some years away, years during which he made the disappointing discovery that he wasn’t as good at baseball as he had hoped, Andrew had begun to see that an ambitious man such as himself could do a lot with a piece of land such as his parents farmed.
Especially with his family’s ties to the mayoral dynasty of Little View. When the current mayor had first been elected, after her father and grandfather before her, she had succeeded in bringing the fast train line to Little View, and she had done it by purchasing a plot of his family’s land. Having a fast train line come through the station less than five miles away was just what he needed. And having a mayor who owed him was a game changer.
The soil was rich, the tree lines were crooked, the lightning bugs made a beautiful show in the early summer rising from the fields blinking out their interest in sex. That was how Andrew thought of it. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that the land was zoned for corn. Bourbon corn, of course. Technically.
Andrew set his empty tea mug, a solid Kentucky stoneware with a cobalt blue lip, down beside the sink in the kitchen. He walked out to the secondary barn, the cat barn as they called it, though now all the cats had switched their allegiance back to the main barn in the mysterious way of cats. Here in his private domain, one of the tack rooms was filled with sacks of corn. The sacks were a smooth sturdy hemp, undyed, with a label “Bourbon Corn,” the date of harvest 20--, and McCurtain Farm with a little sketch of a sprout. The labels were hemp labels, re-usable, and printed with Commonwealth-made soy-based ink. People liked personal touches like that, and all of the local companies he worked with became his friends. Smells of oil and gas mixed with the earthy old barn smell that permeated the place. There was a hint of manure, though cows hadn’t inhabited the cat barn since Andrew was a boy. Andrew turned on the CB radio, listening to the local chatter, both official and unofficial. All was as it should be.
The biggest news was that a neighbor up the road had lost some chickens in the night. The coop yard was a mess, with several mutilated birds. “Wasteful little bandits,” Andrew muttered. He knew his neighbor’s double latch gate. It should have been enough, especially with plenty of more accessible food sources about. But the coons were getting cleverer and cleverer by the sound of it. Time for a better latching system on his own coop, he thought, as he listened to the distant sound of a single-engine plane. Many of the local farmers shared a crop-duster, a few had their own. Some might fly into Louisville, though it took about as long as the train. The sound was growing louder and louder. The pitch sounded different than he was used to, higher, faster. It didn’t sound right. He went over to his CB, tuned to the main unofficial local station, “Morning. This is Buddy Blue. Are we supposed to have company today?” He heard a rumble and thought he felt the ground shake. “Anyone else hearing this?”
He tuned his radio to the safety and alerts channel. “Ground to air, Little View,” he said. “Everything OK?”
As he waited for a response, he looked out the open barn door over the field, bright in the morning sun, just in time to see a streak of red and white as the plane skimmed across the top of his ripe corn field. There was a crash, the whomp of aviation fuel as the air rushed in and exploded out as it ignited. Andrew stood, holding his radio, frozen. He didn’t hear a mayday or any other signal from the plane. “Mayday. Mayday,” he said into his radio, but he had forgotten to hold down the “talk” button on his handset.