Their son, Ricky, was an hour late, and Ellie begged Cyrus to wait for him before going out to plow the field.
But Cyrus was determined to get started. “I don’t need him to do the plowing anyway. He’d just be in the way. The hard work is the planting, so he can help me with that when he shows up. If he shows up,” Cyrus added with a grunt. He stood up from the breakfast table and took his empty coffee cup over to the sink. “You can’t count on Ricky for anything.”
“Oh, don’t say that now, honey,” Ellie said as she stacked the rest of the dirty dishes. “You’re just upset because he never liked farming. But he put himself through that correspondence course on computers and got a good job down at IBM.”
Cyrus went over to his easy chair, pulled on his work boots and began to lace them up. “And he up and left Jennifer and that baby girl. You gonna defend your boy for that?”
Ellie put the rest of the dishes in the sink then sat in the rocker next to Cyrus. “Well, now we don’t know exactly what happened between those two, do we? Likely we never will. I think maybe we all just expected Ricky to come back from Vietnam and pick up where he left off. But being over there changed him somehow.” She reached over to touch her husband’s bony shoulder. “All the boys we know who went over there came back different.”
Cyrus pushed himself up, shaking his head at his wife. “What do you want to go bringing that up for? That’s neither here nor there. He can still tell time, can’t he? He told you he’d be here by nine and now it’s ten. I’m not waiting no more.”
Cyrus let the screen door slam in the middle of Ellie’s objections and headed out to the shed where he kept the old red Ford tractor. As he walked across the yard, the midmorning sun warmed his skin through the long-sleeved work shirt and the denim overalls that hung on his gaunt body. He would have been out before dawn in the old days.
The tender green tobacco plants pressing against the plastic cover of the plant bed seemed as eager as Cyrus to get into the field. He always plowed his fields the second week in April. He was usually the first to plant in this part of Person County, but when young Matt down the road asked to borrow his plow yesterday, he couldn’t very well refuse. He liked that Matt was keeping his father’s farm going, not like his own son, Ricky. Matt had even offered to hitch up the plow to Cyrus’ tractor when he got done, but Cyrus told him just to drop it by the barn closest to the field.
He supposed young Matt meant well, but where did he get the idea that Cyrus was too weak to hitch up his own plow? “I ain’t dead yet or crippled,” he muttered to himself. Then his throat began to tickle. He coughed so hard that his eyes watered, and he had to brace himself against the rear wheel of the tractor. He hacked up some phlegm and spit it out before climbing up in the tractor seat.
Cyrus had spent all winter cooped up inside—a month in the hospital after surgery for throat cancer and the next two months recuperating at home. He’d lost so much weight the doctor prescribed that he drink a beer a day, for the extra calories. That was a real blow to Ellie, the teetotaler, who told him that now she no longer had any faith in the medical profession. But Cyrus had let ole Doc Hatchett know that after two months on a feeding tube he was not about to drink one more daggum nutrition shake as long as he lived, and that’s why the doc had recommended Pabst Blue Ribbon instead. On occasion, Cyrus supplemented the beer with a sip of two of home brew, hidden from Ellie’s prying eyes in the smokehouse and the barns.
It took a couple of tries, but Cyrus finally got the 1961 Ford going. It shook and rumbled underneath him as he let it idle. Ten years ago, he had saved up and paid cash for the tractor when it was new, the last of the red line before Ford went blue. Cyrus didn’t go for buying a lot of fancy equipment on credit like the younger farmers did. This tractor was a little slow to start and sometimes the gears got stuck, but it would do for an old man who didn’t have much time left to farm anyway.
“Get up now, Bessie,” Cyrus urged the tractor, talking to it the way he used to talk to his mule. He pushed and twisted the scratched black ball on top of the gearshift until he could pull it into reverse. Turning the tractor around, he headed to his farthest field. The dogwoods alongside the dirt road had blossoms that were fuller and prettier than in any other year he remembered. He would do the field by Jennifer’s house first, then work his way back home.
Ricky winced when he checked the time on his Toyota. He should have called Mama that morning and told her that he wasn’t coming, that he’d overslept, that something had come up at work. But then he would have had to listen to her voice get tight and hurt, that tone that made her sound so fragile and lonely and old. Ricky knew Daddy didn’t want his help. He’d rather do it himself, prove that he was still able. But Mama wanted Ricky to be there with him, just in case.
Mama also wanted him to come up and see his daughter, Hannah, something he hadn’t done since his divorce from Jennifer became final last month. He and Jennifer got married right out of high school, and Hannah was on the way when Ricky got drafted for Vietnam. At first, he wrote long letters to Jennifer—telling her how he felt about the war, not working on his daddy’s farm anymore, doing something different with his life. But she never responded to any of his thoughts, just wrote short notes about their high school friends, decorating the house and, later, all about the baby. They had a brief post-war reunion honeymoon when he returned, but that didn’t last, especially when he let her know he was serious about learning computer coding instead of planting tobacco for a living. She also didn’t like his new mustache and long hair or that he now preferred Three Dog Night to Merle Haggard. But the last straw for Jennifer was when Ricky introduced her to the world beyond the missionary position. Or tried to a few times, until Jennifer began to sob and say she wasn’t that kind of girl, that she didn’t know who he was anymore, that he had come back from the war some kind of pervert. She kicked him out, and by then he was happy to leave. But he did miss the little girl he’d barely gotten to know, and he’d like to take Hannah out for some ice cream and a Saturday matinee—if Jennifer would let him.
He found another family of sorts at IBM. Sometimes the college boys ragged him about his accent and his country ways, but they shared a love for these new computers, the beauty of the binary code. One/zero. Yes/no. Feed the machine a question, it spits out the answer.
This morning, though, he was back in the country, turning off the blacktop onto the gravel driveway of the big white farmhouse that had been his boyhood home. The dirt road that skirted the side of the property led to the modest brick ranch house that he once shared with his wife and daughter.
Mama was kneeling in the flowerbed when he pulled up, but she got to her feet and came to meet him.
Ricky rolled down his window. “What you planting?”
“Zinnias. They love the sun.” She wiped her hands on her apron and stepped closer to the car. “Your daddy took the tractor down to the barn about a half-hour ago,” she said, nodding in that direction. “I told him to wait for you, but you know how stubborn he is. And he said he didn’t know when you might show up.”
Mama looked hard at him. Ricky dropped his eyes and gripped the steering wheel tighter. Maybe he should have taken his chances with her on the phone.
But then her voice softened. She bent down and leaned into the car. “I wish you’d check on him, make sure he’s doing all right.”
“I will, Mama,” he promised her.
She reached in to pat him on the shoulder. “Park over there next to your daddy’s truck. No sense getting that clean white car coated with dust.”
Ricky didn’t argue, just parked where she said. Besides, after the drive from Raleigh, he felt like stretching his legs with the walk down the dirt road to the barn.
Cyrus stopped the tractor on the rise and looked over the land that had been passed down to him by his father and his grandfather, where his kinfolk had grown the golden leaf for a century or longer. And that’s all they had grown, except for a stretch in the Depression and into World War II when he and his father had cleared some fields for corn, alfalfa, and pasture for beef and dairy cattle. But when times were better, Cyrus went back to the cash crop of tobacco.
When Ricky got back from Vietnam in 1968, one of his newfangled ideas was that Cyrus should go back to growing food instead of tobacco. That had blown up into one of their biggest fights. “Why do you want to grow something that kills people, Daddy?” Ricky had asked him. “Grandpa died of emphysema, and cigarettes are liable to kill you, too, with that pack-a-day habit you have.”
“Tobacco has put the food on your table and the clothes on your back your whole life,” Cyrus reminded him. “You think a farmer makes any money growing crops like corn and alfalfa? Maybe on some of those big farms in the Midwest, but not on the acreage I have. Not in North Carolina.”
Then Ricky declared he wasn’t interested in farming at all. Some Army signalman he’d met in Vietnam had bragged about how some machines called computers were the next big thing and convinced Ricky he ought to jump on the bandwagon before it was too late. Now Ricky had a desk job at IBM and rarely came back home to the farm.
Yet in time the land would still go to Ricky. Who else could it go to? He and Ellie had endured several sad miscarriages and even one stillbirth before Ellie gave birth to Ricky when she was nearly forty and they had about given up hope. So one day Ricky would own the land, but he wouldn’t farm it. He might even sell it.
That terrible loss was not something Cyrus cared to think about this fine spring morning, a good one for planting. He took a deep breath of the soft, warm air and patted his overall pocket for the pack of Winstons that wasn’t there anymore and swore softly. Then his body betrayed him with another violent coughing fit. “Damn pollen,” he cursed as he spit out more phlegm.
He straightened himself on the tractor seat and surveyed the ragged furrows that stretched over the gently rolling fields from the bottom all the way up to the highway. He would have to hurry to get it all done today.
Cyrus turned off the tractor’s motor and scrambled down as best he could to hook up the plow that young Matt had left at the barn. He braced his back against the machine and bent over to pick up the plow’s heavy tongue. He was so weak he could only lift it up, not pull it toward him the few inches he needed to get it on the tractor hitch. If he could ease the tractor back just a little, that would do it.
He stood by the big rear wheel and reached up to turn the key in the ignition. The safety wire that was supposed to prevent the engine from starting without the driver in the seat had slipped off long ago, but Cyrus had never bothered to fix it. Besides, it was so convenient in times like this to ease the tractor a few inches in neutral without having to climb up and down the blessed thing.
The tractor lurched backward when Cyrus turned the key. He lost his balance and fell to the ground, behind one of the powerful rear wheels. He felt the rough rubber tire trap him under its weight. He heard his ribs crack, and the searing pain took his breath away. Then he was in a daze of weakness and hurt, yet strangely calm. He sprawled on the ground, his face partially buried in the sandy soil. It smelled musty and sweet, like an old tin of chewing tobacco, like old Cyrus himself.
With an effort, he rolled over onto his back. Blood seeped through his shirt and overalls and formed a new vein in the soil. If he’d been hurt less, Cyrus would have been ashamed of the carelessness that led to his accident. But the pain in his gut blotted out all but two thoughts—that he needed a drink and that he wanted to sleep lying here in the warm earth.
Ricky heard the tractor motor sputtering and coughing before he rounded the second bend in the road. He first saw the old tractor at the bottom of the hill, turned on its side, wheels spinning in the air, then the mangled plow on top of the rise, next to the barn. But where was Daddy?
Then he began to sprint toward the limp figure he now spotted lying beside the plow. It was his father, his overalls dark with blood. But miraculously, still alive, trying to lift his head.
Ricky knelt beside his father, slipping one hand behind his neck to support him. “Daddy, Daddy, it’s going to be all right,” he said soothingly. “Let me just take a look.”
In the Army, Ricky had learned first aid for wounds, and now a blur of information about bandages, tourniquets, and pressure points flashed through his brain. But when he let down the flap of Daddy’s overalls to look at the gaping wound, he knew none of that was going to help.
“It’s pretty bad,” he told his father, tearing off the paint-spattered shirt he had planned to work in and wadding it up to staunch the wound in his father’s stomach. “I’ve got to get you to the hospital.”
Daddy opened his eyes. “No,” he said quietly.
Ricky blinked in disbelief. “But I’ve got to take you. I can’t stop this bleeding.”
Daddy shook his head. “I ain’t going back to no hospital,” he whispered huskily. “There ain’t nothing they can do for me.” He paused, wincing from the pain of the broken rib, barely able to breathe. “Look me in the eyes. Promise you won’t take me nowhere.”
Ricky peered into his father’s pale blue eyes and saw the familiar strength still there, though weakened by the pain. But then he saw something else. The whites around Daddy’s blue eyes had started to turn yellow—the same sign of organ failure caused by the throat cancer before. And now he knew why Daddy didn’t want to go to the hospital. The cancer was back.
“I promise,” he told his father.
Daddy coughed and grunted sharply. “They can’t do nothing, but you can.”
“What, Daddy?”
He swallowed heavily. “Go get me some brew.”
Ricky scrambled to his feet and headed straight for his daddy’s hiding place, a hollow in one of the ancient timbers of the barn’s foundation. He raced back with the jar, but by the time he returned, the old man’s breathing was shallow, and his skin was cool to the touch.
He cradled his daddy’s shoulders with one arm and raised the mason jar to his lips with his other hand. Daddy swallowed a few drops of the brew and lay back in Ricky’s lap. His blood soaked Ricky’s jeans and his white T-shirt.
“I’m going,” Daddy told him, in a barely audible whisper. “You’re the man of the family now. You do what’s right.”
In its way, Daddy’s code had always been simple, too. Right/Wrong. And the answer he spit out was always Right. He never fought in a war, but he kept the family farm going through the Depression. He took care of Jennifer and Hannah when Ricky was overseas and after the divorce. He even beat cancer this winter, at least for a while.
Yet Ricky was programmed differently. He couldn’t give his father the Right answer he wanted, but he could make this promise.
“I’ll do my best, Daddy,” he said softly. “I’ll do my best.”
Sometime later, Daddy gave one last rattling gasp and sunk heavier in his lap. Ricky touched his father’s neck for a pulse but felt only the roughness of the newly healed scars from the throat surgery. No heartbeat. He leaned over to look in the old man’s face. Daddy’s mouth was slightly open, not unlike when he fell asleep in his recliner watching Monday Night Football. But Daddy wasn’t sleeping now. His eyes were open and staring vacantly into space.
Ricky lifted the mason jar to his own lips and took a big gulp that seared his throat like fire.
Susan J. Hudson is a former journalist who now does communications for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her short fiction has been published by Half and One, The Write Launch, and Hoxie Gorge Review. She is currently working on a historical novel set in colonial Virginia.