The Sandwich Generation
Jim was just going to have to wait for Cliff to die, but his dad looked awful good for 90.
Jim had learned everything about farming from his dad, and he’d learned how to do it right or else. Before he could walk, Cliff was showing him how to find the grease zerks on the ancient tractor. By 5 he could balance the giant grease gun in his small hands, connect the tip to the tiny metal fittings at every mechanical joint and push a lever as big as his arm. On Jim’s 8th birthday, his dad taught him to drive the old red pickup, sitting him on phone books so he could see over the wheel as they lurched over the frozen south field. He was 10 when dad finally let him drive the tractor for the first time. He remembered his terror if he missed any of the instructions his dad barked ferociously over the rumbling diesel engine.
Jim was a teenager the day he was baling hay, distracted about how he was going to ask Kate to the prom, and drove the baler too close to the barbed-wire fence. Dad gave him a beating he never forgot, then made him go unwind the fence. “And don’t come back til it’s done,” his dad had said. Jim came shuffling in at dawn the next day, bleary-eyed and bloody, the fence and the equipment in working order. He cleaned up for school in time to catch the bus and never hit the fence again.
Life had given Jim 60 years to fall in love with a tractor, the old one and the one they replaced it with in ‘02, but he never did. He tinkered with the one he grew up with, because a guy could still do that with a classic, when he was tired of hearing his wife grind on about someone at church or the school she worked at. It was a good place to be when his granddaughter came home from state university, unfamiliar in her new college ways, and he didn’t know what to say. But he was eternally bored driving up and down row after row, season after season, seed going in, spray going on, corn coming out, husks getting baled, trucks and dust, wind and heat.
To fight the boredom, he had taken up reading about the tallgrass prairie that used to be there. The new tractor had GPS and practically drove itself, giving him a lot of time to read. At first, he took out prairie books from the library his extension agent suggested. Later he looked up websites on his phone. Iowa had been home of hundreds of species of prairie, most of them listed as weeds on the back of his RoundUp hazmat safety sheets. Some roots ran nearly 20 feet deep and some just a few feet. They were all shapes and sizes. He found an illustration that showed them side by side, above and below ground. They didn’t compete with each other like he’d learned they do with corn. They all lived together on the same acre, each growing to be its own self, everyone getting the just the amount of water and sunlight they needed. He thought the Latin names were fascinating, so he memorized those along with the common names of every species he could find in the ditches and cemeteries around the farm. Anthropogon garardii was big bluestem, lespedeza capitata was round headed bush clover, and rattlesnake master was eryngium yuccifolium, a very cool name in either language. The names told stories and if they didn’t he made them up and the stories entertained him alone in the cab of the tractor, hour after hour, row after row, year after year.
For 20 years, Jim studied the flowers that turned an entire field bright yellow in July and the grasses that grew to 12 feet tall in an August drought. For that same 20 years, he had been waiting patiently for his dad to hand over the farm to him. But ever since Jim learned that the government would pay him to plant prairie along the fencerow and even in the fields, his patience had evaporated. He was pushing 65, retirement age for most men, and he hadn’t even run his own farm yet. He was fed up with his dad’s insistence that the only right way is the way it’s always been done. There were so many new technologies that could make his life easier and lighten their debt load. As for Jim’s passion, there were cover crops and prairie strips they could incorporate that could improve the soil and the pollination. There were so many ways they could treat the farm better. His dad would hear none of it, accusing him of wanting to plant weeds on perfectly good farm ground. Year after year, Jim shut up and gave in.
Every Friday for every one of those years, Jim dutifully drove his dad to morning coffee with his old friends, sitting with them and now their sons, lately sometimes a grandson or two, catching up on the news of the week. No matter what he had going or what needed to be fixed, he drove his dad because that was the highlight of the old man’s week.
“So how goes it at your place with this weather?” asked Casey Sr., who farmed 600 acres 3 miles south of town.
“We got in a few good days this week,” Cliff answered. “About 30 percent’s in the ground.” The men around the table looked at their coffee cups and nodded their approval.
Jim took a sip of coffee and held the cup in front of his face, his large hands tightening around the warm ceramic. He’d been pulling equipment out of the mud for a week, sinking in up to his knees, cussing at log chains slipping out of their slots and sinking into brown goop, unburying trucks that had spun themselves up to their bellies, just so his dad could report this news to these men.
Speak only when spoken to, his father had taught him, a back of a hand always waiting in case he forgot. So he sipped again, taking a minute to look at the lightest of age spots appearing on the back of his hands and the veins running thin tight rivers to the back of his wrists.
Maybe it was the thumb he sliced fixing gear he could see slowly getting infected. Maybe it was the ache that never left his lower back anymore, even when he sat. It could’ve just been the tinny sound of bad music coming through the coffee shop speakers. He’d had enough. He’d had too much in fact. He put the cup down and got up from the table. The old men looked up at him like a gaggle of geese, confused by this sudden move. He walked out on them into the sweet, cool, early Spring morning. The heavy glass door clicked shut behind him, the way it had for as long as he could remember.
He fought the reflex to put up his arm to duck the sun, instead just pulling his seed cap down a bit more. Across the street, he could see the last dirty snow from the pile the town plow had pushed against the shady side of the barbershop.
It wasn’t too late, he said to himself, and climbed into his truck. His father would have to find his own way home.
This story is from a recent writing workshop. It may or may not appear in a larger work in progress.