God Wore Denim

By Basil Rosa

Octogenarian, widower and Vietnam veteran James Robert Bradner, known to friends as JB, narrates this elegiac novel from his room in a retirement home. His focus is centered on one harvest season on a family farm in Macon County, North Carolina. Originally from Danville, Virginia, a history buff and long-time recovering alcoholic, JB is married to Bonnie, also a recovering alcoholic and a dental hygienist born and raised in the town of Franklin, where they lived together for over three decades, and where the family farm that JB worked on for 25 years was once located. This farm was owned and run by Rod and Thorne Shepherd. Rod is married to Bev, who is one of Bonnie’s closest friends. Thorne is a bachelor. Both men are veterans of the second world war.

There were two things that made this one harvest season special for JB. First, it was the presence of an outsider, 13-year-old Junior, who just showed up one day to sleep on a cot in the basement of Rod Shepherd’s house, sharing a room with Rod’s son, Duke Wayne. Second, it was the year of the Shepherd’s most lucrative burley tobacco crop. JB narrates in detail the day to day life and challenges of working in a crew as a field hand, supporting a way of life that in many ways has all but vanished in the United States.

JB recounts in detail the lessons that Junior learns from him, but that Junior also teaches him. He comes to understand that it is never to late to learn or to reinvent one’s self. He details the personalities of Rod Shepherd’s son, Duke Wayne, Rod himself the patriarch of the farm, so to speak, and his brother Thorne. There are the hands such as Earl Cabe, and Lee Locust. There is Bev, Rod’s wife, a churchgoer, a dedicated farm wife, taking care of these men and ultimately explaining to them all why Junior has come and what his relationship is to her family.

The Shepherd brothers raise not only tobacco but beef cattle, hay, soybeans, okra, potatoes and all sorts of garden vegetables. JB sees, day by day, that Junior really wants to learn. The boy asks many questions. Along with Thorne, a lifelong bachelor, Junior bonds with JB. In time, the men will learn Bev’s secret, that the boy came to the farm because his mother is addicted to crack cocaine and in rehab, and his step-father has been, for years, abusing him.

As Junior bonds with the men, asking them all sorts of questions about farming, animal husbandry, the region and its history, it becomes clear that he’s a boy seeking guidance. Each of them, as adults, have by chance been forced to provide it, whether they like it or not.

Duke Wayne is also seeking a better understanding with his father, Rod. The two have fought for years, Duke Wayne having moved out of state and only returning to the farm annually to help with the fall harvest. A friendship and a fraternal dynamic also develops between Junior and Duke Wayne. JB relates how the different men find, in their various ways, a father figure within and without, fatefully and intimately in such an usual and quite beautiful pastoral setting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Michael Flynn
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463026915

Basil Rosa

John Flynn (www.basilrosa.com), who also writes as Basil Rosa, has published chapbooks, as well as complete collections of poems, which include Moments Between Cities, and Restless Vanishings. He has also published three collections of short stories: Something Grand, Dreaming Rodin, and Off To The Next Wherever. He’s earned awards from the New England Poetry Club, and the U.S. Peace Corps.

Book preview

GOD WORE DENIM

by

Basil Rosa

Flight

Delay

Books

Copyright © 2020 Basil Rosa

All rights reserved.

Cover Image by Tony Duane Sturtevant

Book Design by Erika Brent Hollen

Matthew J. Kelly, Editor

Author website: www.basilrosa.com

For stewards of the land everywhere,

and a special thank you to John Saunders for insisting I wait,

and to the US National Park Service rangers at Connemara, Flat Rock, NC for their support during my residency there,

and in loving memory of Jack, my father, 1933-2020.

Contents

I

II

III

I

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery

Make me a poster of an old rodeo

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

John Prine

He’s gone now along with his farm and the culture that supported it, but I still dream often of Thorne Shepherd. I see him standing at the hour before dawn under those oak trees that shaded the house his grandfather built. Sometimes his dog Sadie joins him, but Thorne’s usually alone in the same overalls, a grimace on his face, not a look dead to the air but one that assesses fears and his conscience as memories dance back to him from across his pastures. Angling up, rounding off where they meet a tree line, they’re split in places by evergreens that act as windbreaks. Those pastures lie veined with the stone walls that Thorne has built, and the tiny creeks that turn to arid gulches in summer, scrawled like uneven seams rendered by an unstable hand. The fescue there is always dense and fragrant, fertilized by his Angus and Charolais cattle.

I see Rod, too, Thorne’s brother, viewing the farm from the picture window of his ranch-styled modular that he had trucked in and set on a poured basement foundation notched out of the hillside at the highest point of Shepherd Road. He’s returned home at last, retiring from a career in the Navy. He’s seated, legs crossed in front of his living room window while he sips black coffee and massages one of the creases in his forehead. Unlike his wife Bev, he’s not inclined to pray. I like to think he trusts the dawn light will carry his family along. He swallows his pills for hyper-tension and he squirms and lights another cigarette with what remains of the hot ash of the dying cigarette he’s about to rub out.

I worked for the Shepherd brothers for 25 years, stopping in 2000 when Rod died at the age of 81, three years after Bev. That same year Thorne, at 80, sold off the last big chunk of the farm to a local developer and then moved to Florida. Those were the dreariest of years. It’s the harvest of 1982 that I prefer to go back to and remember as the best and most meaningful of all. This was partly due to Junior who, after that harvest, though I wanted to, I never saw again.

I met the boy for the first time one morning when I’d showed up to Rod’s house to learn that Thorne hadn’t returned Rod’s call or showed up at his usual time. Rod was sucking on a cigarette, pacing and muttering Burning daylight, burning daylight. He repeated this phrase to the point of sounding insane. Bev wasn’t up yet. Rod didn’t expect her to be. She didn’t prepare three meals each day. She made one meal, dinner, which was often a feast, all the food farm-raised and eaten after twilight, because every workday ended when the sun went down.

I remember standing there in Rod’s kitchen, feeling tired. I kept waiting with this new boy, this Junior. I felt uncomfortable around someone so young. I remarked to Rod, Maybe something’s wrong.

From the bottom of the basement stairs came a shout from Duke Wayne, Rod’s only child, who was still getting dressed. He shouted up that I should ignore his father, that Uncle Thorne was fine. I’d shown up earlier than usual, unable to sleep, yet not so eager to work. Junior was up early too. Why? I knew nothing about this tenderfoot.

Yeah, maybe Duke’s right for a change and there’s nothing wrong, said Rod. He looked at me, a cigarette bouncing between his lips, his face unshaven, leathery, his eyes bloodshot. But let’s not take chances. You and Junior get Thorne on up here and tell him we’re burning too much dang daylight.

I nodded at Rod as I ushered Junior along. The boy looked nervous and afraid. All I knew was that he was thirteen and had just showed up with the clothes on his back. He’d been living in Rod and Bev’s house for one night, sleeping on a cot near Duke Wayne’s bed and the washer, dryer and meat freezers in the basement. This was his first day on the job.

We walked down Shepherd Road through foggy light that smelled of manure and wet grass. Not one car passed us. Crickets were still chirping as night was kept shifting into morning.

We didn’t find Thorne in his house. This hadn’t surprised me. Thorne awoke with a list of chores and he ran it through his head all day long. As work got done, he made amendments: which implement to next repair or buy, which cow to check on, which feed or seed or fertilizer to restock, which field to harvest next, who to visit while in town.

Yet I started to worry a little. A heart attack was a possible scenario. Though I didn’t know Junior, I didn’t think it right that such a young boy be with me if I discovered Thorne’s body twitching on the ground.

Junior stayed in my shadow and I thought he stayed too close. I wasn’t used to having anyone cling to me, but what could I do? I led him across Shepherd Road from Thorne’s house to his corn crib. Thorne wasn’t there. We walked toward his red barn and a muddy hoof-scarred area near a wide metal gate, open now, where cattle were penned before entering the barn. There were no cattle in the barn. Thorne must have put them out to pasture.

He’s up earlier than usual today, I said.

Junior said nothing. He looked awed by it all. The barn’s hayloft doors were open, but nothing seemed amiss. Sadie, a black and white mongrel with some Spaniel in her, sauntered out from the barn. She looked happy as she trotted up to me, a blob of pink flesh hanging from between her teeth. She dropped that blob on the dirt and began to nudge it with her paws. I took a closer look and saw that it was a dead piglet.

When I heard the sound of a pig snorting inside the barn, I understood better what was going on. I told Junior to follow me as I hurried inside, my eyes adjusting to the darkness and chill. We found Thorne standing in a daze. He wore his familiar overalls and blue baseball cap. He looked dejected and didn’t face me as he said, Sow had her babies.

Thorne looked startled to see the boy. He rubbed his chin. He reached out one long arm and urged Junior and me along. Chickens clucked around our feet as we stepped across packed soil matted with straw. The smell of manure was so strong that Junior gagged and coughed a few times. I was long accustomed to and rather liked the smells inside barns. I particularly liked the fumes from bales of hay stacked in different places.

As I moved, the straw scattered over mud cracked as it gave way beneath my boots. Junior flinched when he walked into a cobweb, sounding a meek cry of disgust, wiping it from his face. This was a piece of Thorne’s world the boy didn’t know. What he did know was still beyond me, but he seemed respectful and polite. He flinched a lot and there was nothing to his frame. What was he doing there with us?

I felt relieved to see Thorne and I recalled how he’d mentioned earlier that week his sow was ready to give birth. I supposed as a daily ritual, he visited the sow before his day in the tobacco fields began.

Reckon she went plum crazy last night, he said. Look what she done to her litter. Some lived. Some goners. It ain’t pretty.

Thorne motioned toward the hog pen. Narrow bars of light slanted in through gaps between barn boards to add a ghostly pall to the horizontal planks in shambles. The plank walls of that wooden pen were cracked, splintered and mud splattered, as if someone had pounded each one with a sledgehammer.

Junior looked astonished. A pig did all this?

Right natural with a sow. They go crazy birthin’ sometimes, said Thorne. Don’t mean I have to like it. Lots of time and money I spent raising her.

We stepped closer to the pen where the sow, a massive and seething presence, lay on one side. Speckled with mud, her teats exposed, her swollen belly heaved up and down. The expression on her face looked tortured.

Givin’ birth, it’s an ordeal. Done lost her mind. Thorne forced Junior to look at the beast. You want to learn, Son? Then learn. That there is what you call farming.

Junior began to flinch and tremble. I thought he might cry. I took a more distant view of the situation. Thorne, as usual, hadn’t done anything incorrectly, but my suspicions had been right about Junior. He wasn’t farming material. Nor was he all that stable. Again, the question: What was he doing there? Turning away from us, he started to weep. Thorne went to him. He was gentle. Junior, come on, Son. A Momma has her fits. It’s right natural.

Junior sniffled and wiped his nose. But I don’t have to like it, do I?

No, I reckon you don’t, said Thorne. But I can’t lie to you. This is life here. Thorne guided Junior back toward the sow. Take a look. She’s done birthing and now she’s feeding.

Some piglets were sucking at the sow’s teats. The sow voiced her suffering in deep low grunts. Pained, she struggled to breathe. Junior eyed her warily, sounding his own exhalations. Nothing like this would have ever bothered me at thirteen, but it wasn’t right for me to make comparisons since my Daddy and his before him, God rest their souls, had been dirt farmers.

But there’s some good of it, said Thorne. She give me thirteen this time. I reckon two is caught under her back. You can see one over there. I got to help it.

Thorne pointed, insisting Junior look. The piglet, a mash of clotted blood, lay in the straw like an unsightly lump of jam. Moving toward it, Thorne remained careful not to anger the sow as he reached behind her and dug in the straw. He raised the piglet and showed it to us. Tiny, its eyes barely open, it twitched and sounded a squeal, dangling from between Thorne’s fingers.

Thorne looked at me, his face dropping. I knew what he’d seen. Hellfire, he said. Look at this. Hip is broken. He stepped around the sow and showed me. He showed Junior too, who flinched and wiped another sniffle across his nose.

Thorne held the tiny piglet firmly by one end, studying it closely. Then he turned away from Junior and me and with one swing slammed the piglet against one of the beams that held up the barn. I didn’t like hearing the echo of that poor piglet’s bones collapsing. I looked at Junior, who was trembling fully now, his mouth hinging open. I couldn’t blame that boy for looking so scared. I felt a little shocked too.

Thorne, why’d you do that? I had asked this for Junior’s sake. I already knew the answer.

Thorne wagged his head as if talking to himself. Dang hip was gone, its legs busted. Be too cruel, I reckon, to let her live. Thorne studied Junior’s face as if trying to understand and perhaps recognize the fear and shock written there. Two is dead already. Sow rolled atop and crushed ‘em, but she didn’t get all of this third one.

You just finished the job, I said.

It’s God’s work, not mine, said Thorne.

Junior staggered a little as he backed away from Thorne and continued to stare at him, looking stunned. Thorne returned to the sow, muttering, Now calm down, Girl, it’s all okay. Thorne moved gingerly, reaching down to position piglets that were trying to suckle. He looked up at us. Now here, see that? Them’s the survivors. Right natural.

Thorne coaxed the piglets closer to each other, helping to nestle them into the straw, to squeeze in and find a teat. Them piglets is cold. We got to help and give them a chance. They gonna feed okay. Reckon it ain’t a total loss. Just three. That means ten for me. We’ll know better over the next few days.

Thorne spat as if this was his final word on the subject. He waved loosely at us to exit the barn. As we did so, Sadie trotted up to us. The dead piglet she’d been toying with earlier was dangling from between her teeth. Sadie dropped it on the dirt, sunk her paws into it and using her teeth she stretched the piglet upward like a mass of stubborn chewing gum. Junior sounded a moan of horror. Thorne raised his hand as if to strike the dog. Then he lowered it slowly, muttering, I reckon that’s right natural too.

Put it down, Sadie. My outburst felt raw in my throat. It wasn’t like me to yell.

Thorne looked surprised. He motioned for me to step aside. He bent over toward Sadie and grabbed her ears. Now you listen to JB here. You drop that thing.

Sadie wouldn’t let go. Thorne cuffed her once hard on the ear. Sadie whimpered and the piglet fell from her mouth. Thorne used his boot to shove the piglet toward some straw, covering it, tamping down the straw. I’ll bury it proper later. He turned to Junior. Sadie don’t mean no harm. She’s acting right natural too.

Junior’s face looked pale and clammy. He kept his hands in his pockets. I stayed close to his side, though none of us spoke while walking Shepherd Road. It twisted upward, bisecting the main pastures of the farm. We met Rod waiting for us. He’d used our time away to shave. He looked more awake, a cigarette in his mouth, his hair cut military style, both hands on his hips.

It’s all good, so don’t ask, I told him.

All right then, he said. I won’t.

To his credit, he didn’t. Rod was consistent that way. What he said, he meant. Throughout the rest of the morning while in the fields, neither he nor Thorne spoke. This was hardly typical. Junior didn’t speak either. The boy looked haunted and gloomy.

At lunch at The Normandie in town, our usual place, having eaten, Thorne leaned back and looked prepared to speak at last. I leaned in hoping that for Junior’s sake, Thorne would get philosophical about cycles of life and death and how raising animals sometimes required such difficult choices. It seemed the boy deserved at least a small explanation for his own sense of closure on the subject. I deserved one, as well.

What I heard confused me. Had Thorne already forgotten about killing the piglet? He didn’t even look at us. He looked only at Rod, remarking, I can’t understand why them people that moved here to town won’t allow them that been living here all their lives, to let their coon dogs run through them hills where they have their property. I reckon they gonna buy us and sell us out of business.

Rod, like Duke, knew nothing of the piglet incident. Taciturn, he offered a distracted nod of acceptance to his brother. Duke mirrored his father. To them, Thorne was just ranting again over the usual topics such as over-development and newcomers to the area, two divisive discomforting issues none of them liked nor believed they could control.

I looked at Junior. I felt for the first time that I wanted to protect him. How? More importantly, why? Maybe it was because the boy looked so sullen and shocked. He was a frail creature and would need some bolstering. He hadn’t eaten much of his lunch. Again, I asked myself why he was with us. He had neither the build nor the constitution for such work. Maybe him being there was more about me than about him. I had all sorts of questions. But I’d had enough of Thorne’s evasiveness. You gonna talk, Thorne, about them piglets?

Thorne, startled, cocked his head toward me. His lower lip curled up as his face reddened. He sounded a low hum. His eyes took on a distant cast and his face hardened while he began studying my features. No, JB, I reckon not.

Right natural and all that? I sounded flippant.

His lower lip still bubbling out, Thorne sighed through his nose. I knew he wasn’t liking the way I’d confronted him. I nudged my head toward Junior as if to explain my motivation. I don’t think Thorne liked this either, but he understood me. He passed a look toward Junior, one of deep sadness that suggested empathy, but also a look that proved Thorne’s lack of confidence in his ability to handle such delicate matters.

Then I’ll do it, I said. I’ll talk to Junior later on about what happened.

Junior looked at me. I looked back at him. I had validation I’d said the right thing. Little did I know it was the start of something special between us.

Reckon so, later on, said Thorne. That’s right natural. Better it you than me.

Could I be the reason Junior had come to us? Fine, I thought. Somebody should do it, so why not me. I took on Junior as a challenge. The way I saw it, I had nothing to lose.

***

Tobacco farming, and small family farming, in general, is a vanishing way of life all over America. It’s one of loyalty to community and family that I don’t see enough of anymore. That’s why I offer a piece of this banner harvest season in the hope that you young ones out there, you troubled ones, can use it as a window into another’s past in order to understand your own present a little better. None of us, after all, are really very different. We all know or have been a young teen struggling to cope. Just as Junior was. He’d be 51 now. It still hurts and moves me when I think of him. A good boy he was, through and through, but it took me some time to learn that.

So was I at his age. I lived to impress the adults. You must know I take full responsibility for what I have to say about our briefly shared and intense life at that time. Sometimes, passion and remorse cloud my better judgement. I’m not a reporter. I’m speaking from the attic of memory and dimly recollected dreams, from experiences that have bled deep into my heart rhythms, and from my own book learning too. Bradner is my name. James Robert. Some have used Jim Bob, or Quiet Jim, both of which I like, but after I got sober, remarried and settled with Bonnie in her native Franklin, I got fond of being called JB.

I liked Franklin, but when I first arrived there I couldn’t find a square sit-down job, so I started working in the fields for the Shepherd brothers. That was in ’75. There were still KKK-devils in those hills and in corridors of power, but I had no interest in their ways. I was inclined to outdoor work, mostly farming, due to my childhood in rural southern Virginia. In 1982, that year I met Junior, I was already a fixture on the Shepherd farm, almost like a third brother, but there remained limits to what kind of personal business Rod and Thorne would share. Both were tight-lipped, played it close to the vest, though neither had been in the KKK and recoiled at any mention of it. I liked that about them. I’ve got no use for prejudice of any kind. I served in Uncle Sam’s Army with some of the finest young patriots I’d ever met, many of whom were black men who’d come from dirt-licking poverty and wanted nothing more than to make good for their family and to serve their country with pride.

I didn’t know Junior’s story. Where were his parents? Why had Rod and Bev taken him in? Why were they so secretive about it? Doe-eyed, skinny, inexperienced, he was like a leaf afraid of its own shadow. On top of this, the poor kid had to sleep within earshot of rough, opinionated Duke Wayne, who was twenty years older and, as his father often said, the kind they threw away the mold for once he opened his mouth.

If I had to choose a big brother figure, Duke Wayne Shepherd would never have been my first candidate. That Yankee weighed at least 285 pounds, much of it hardened working-man muscle. With his long shanks of ginger hair, his square jaw, his overbite and curly beard and Roy Orbison sunglasses, he looked like a Viking alien wired on LSD. I often thought he’d been dropped into pastoral Franklin for only one reason: to stir up trouble.

Duke didn’t have to speak to intimidate. He could just glare. He wasn’t a gentle giant. He was big bad Duke and had the scars to prove it. He kept his head covered either with a bandanna that made him look like a pirate, or else used a sun-bleached red baseball cap with a dark oval where an advertising patch had once been. He told me the patch was missing because on a construction job up north he’d made a statement during a lunch break about how men shouldn’t act as walking advertisements – he’d ripped off the patch from that cap and chewed it down with a sandwich in front of his co-workers.

He said to Junior, I eat newbies for lunch. Just like I’ll eat you if you piss me off.

A bizarre and what I considered a doomed family experiment was unfolding. Rod told me he couldn’t rely on Duke to be a supportive influence. He offered no explanation as to Junior’s relationship with the family. I should just protect Junior from Duke and make sure he didn’t get hurt. Teach him up when it’s right, Rod had said. The boy needs it.

So, that’s what I started to do, spying on Junior as he’d pause dreamily in the tobacco fields, sometimes looking lost and in despair, hatchet in hand, mooning over the sway of burley leaves surrounding him. To see over them, the boy had to crane his neck higher and stand on his toes. I doubted he could see much.

He was one skittish fawn of a boy, but he kept to his spot in the tobacco rows as the leaves kept the air tangy with nicotine fumes. Judging by the way he sniffled and sneezed, those fumes smarted in his nostrils while the rest of him poached in a broth of sweat and tar. The poor kid, I often thought. He’d gotten himself into a real pickle.

While working, he’d take his sweet time, pausing often to rest, but I was not under any circumstances to scold him for that. He was often breathing hard, going at his pace, which Rod had insisted he do. When he caught a glimpse of the horizon of low hills that steamed in a greenish-blue haze, I wondered what he was thinking about.

Me, I thought about two things. First, how over the years I’d come to learn that all my fears were unfounded. They were a product of my imagination. Second, that the beauty I’d come to love in the Carolina hills hadn’t vanished. If anything, it was growing more beautiful as I saw it through Junior’s eyes.

Those hills were emerald waves and we were afloat, carried along. I told Junior that they kept me going. Maybe he understood this. With tar stuck to our arms, wanting to rip it off, each of us had to stop now and then. When Junior did so, he could also stop craning his neck and stand flat-footed. I’m not sure what he told himself. For me, it was a time to relax and feel the eliding of morning into afternoon. I’m not sure he understood that whether he watched or not, damp earth would continue to dry and steam off the horizon. It had taken me years to comprehend that all was in motion, forever mutable, not to be contained.

Neither Junior nor I could always see our co-workers in the fields, but we heard them from just a row or two away between those tall tobacco plants. Thorne was often plenty loud when in the fields and he liked to gab with Earl Cabe, the oldest member of our crew. Earl and Thorne had known each other nearly forty years.

Earl, I reckon you get them grasshoppers on yer lip, they like a tomcat a-scratchin’.

Reckon so, said Earl.

I smelled ‘em, Earl, but I didn’t taste me none.

Earl cackled. I imagined his lips showing little bubbles of foam.

Maybe Junior thought he knew what Thorne had meant, but he had no idea, not really. This didn’t appear to bother him. I think the boy found it impossible not to marvel at the rolling cadences of Thorne’s and Earl’s speech. Junior was curious, too, a trait I liked in him as much as I liked his politeness, though I broke him quickly of the habit of calling each of us Sir.

During our breaks together, I talked to Junior about the lone peaks of the country around us that the boy couldn’t name even when I showed them to him on a map: Mount Pisgah, Wayah Bald, Blackrock, and Sheep Knob. Or the towns I told him about, none of which, apparently, he’d laid eyes on: Murphy, Sylva, and Sapphire. There was also Hogback Gap, Cullasaja River Gorge, the Cherokee Indian Reservation, and Nantahala Ridge. I told him Robbinsville was allegedly home to Ronnie Milsap, a country singer. Junior had never heard of him. I told him about the history of moonshine stills in the region and the selling of white lightning in a jar. He knew little about that, as well. Lastly, I told him never to shorten Cullowhee to Whee, that locals didn’t appreciate such slangy amendments.

I can’t say why, maybe it was his absolute innocence and ignorance and the way he flinched in fear so easily, but the more time I spent Junior, the more I cottoned to him. I had no child of my own and I’d always wanted one. This boy was quiet, so dang genuine and afraid. That’s what hit me hardest. I’d never seen a teenaged boy so lacking in confidence and who startled with such ease.

After the episode with the piglet, he came to me first and tried to express his concerns. He wasn’t clear. We talked some about that piglet, but not much. I didn’t believe him when he said he was okay with it, that he understood what Thorne had meant by the words right natural. I appreciated that he’d come to me. I liked feeling needed.

When Junior talked in the fields, which was rarely, it was to ask questions. He seemed to drift off into his own fantasies. He never spoke about kin. Did he have any? I wasn’t sure. As days passed, I wanted to know more, but I held back. My role was to watch over him as a co-worker and show him the ropes.

Junior did love talking kudzu, though. He’d learned from Duke that it had been imported from Japan to help stop soil erosion. This invasive crawler had spread throughout the region. It formed clots and tangles that filled recesses, carpeted mountainsides, choked trees, devoured bushes and snaked sinuous vines across forest floors and meadows. While its leaves rotted to black in winter, its root systems thrived. In springtime it spread and suffocated less aggressive ecosystems.

As a living thing that seemed transcendent and beneficial but could become destructive, I took a risk telling Junior that the kudzu we saw while riding two-lanes from field to field was a picture that I used to describe to myself my own lack of control over urges. It was a risk, but I sensed Junior liked when I talked to him this way. Duke witnessed some of this interaction between us and maybe it was leading him to respect the intelligence that I saw in Junior, that the boy would listen if talked to in a certain fashion. Duke, though, wasn’t a guidance counselor. He told Junior that he viewed the kudzu as poetic revenge from the Japanese for the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Junior had no idea what Duke was talking about.

One afternoon during a break, I shared with Junior in private that the kudzu’s deep green reminded me of the enamel used for the shingles of a wooden one-story schoolhouse I’d attended as a kid in Pittsylvania County outside of Danville, Virginia. This was long before Danville and its environs became an anagram for evil land.

I thought the kudzu was a prolific display of durability. I liked how it cascaded down a steep gulley, covering brows of granite that jutted from hillsides to form walls that rose on both sides of Macon County’s narrower byways. I didn’t use such flowery language, but I did speak up to the boy, not down to him. He was an earnest listener.

Duke showed none of my tact. I can’t stand kudzu. He was always proclaiming loudly so all of us could hear. It’s an infestation. All over the Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains. Eats everything in sight.

Like you do, said Thorne.

This had brought a cackle out of toothsome Earl Cabe. All those bubbles forming on his lips again. I really liked old Earl, just as much as I sometimes disliked Duke. True, I admired Duke’s intelligence, but you could say I wanted to like him. I found it hard to accept his brutish tendencies and his exaggerations. Besides, he was just a little too proud of being a Yankee.

I do kinda like it too, said Junior. It’s pretty.

Pretty? Just don’t tell that to my old man, said Duke. He hates the stuff.

But Rod already knows I like it, said Junior. I told him so.

So at least you two got that in common, I said.

You told him? Duke’s eyes grew wide at Junior. And he didn’t get pissed off?

Hands behind his back, so slender a waif in Duke’s towering shadow, Junior shook his head no. I said so. I said it was pretty.

Maybe the worm is turning at last, said Duke. And it’s about time.

I didn’t know what Duke had meant by that comment. I cared enough to want more details, but I didn’t ask. Duke and Rod had their complex and sometimes violent father-son issues which I tried to assess and keep distant from whenever possible. In the past, since Duke came down to Franklin from up north at each harvest season, there had been some real donnybrooks between them. Duke’s sanest years had occurred during a time when he’d been living with a woman named Robin, who even drove down herself one year to visit the farm and to prove to us all that not every Yankee was an ingrate.

Sadly for Duke, Robin had severed ties from him and I thought this was the reason why he was so often in such a foul mood. I preferred to think it was a different cause, something simpler, perhaps how Kudzu vines, like cataracts, naturally swallowed up ledges, faults, low walls and fallen trees. Duke’s love life was no concern of mine. Yet spending time with him, he made it my concern. It was like he wanted us all to feel his misery.

Junior, in his sweetly innocent fashion, told me – again, in private – that he really liked the kudzu. I thought he should strive to be that way: healthy, absorbing all in his path, a link connecting living and dead, fusing and twisting between forest shadows as if he were one vivid spirit birthed by an ancient source. I didn’t say any of this. I tried to show him that he didn’t need to fear me. He was a sensitive type of kid and some of that sensitivity was in me, too. As the adult between us, I should respect that we could share simple profound ideas that he lacked the vocabulary and courage to express. I couldn’t dislike such an attitude of appreciation and humility in a boy who struck me as damaged somehow yet still unspoiled. I could remember when I was thirteen. I’d had my share of fistfights and acts of truancy. It hadn’t been easy.

Junior imagined shapes and creatures in the kudzu. I’d done the same at his age, dreaming that clouds represented various things. Junior saw jade zodiac creatures, gigantic insects, furry couples holding hands. I knew what he was getting at. With the help of cloud fantasies, I didn’t doubt that he often felt less fractured. When light glanced across those leaves, an iridescent glaze emerged and shapeless outgrowths became massive fingers reaching out to caress and console.

I thought such fantasies were harmless. They brought solace. My first wife, Harlene, had called me a useless no-good dreamer. Maybe she was right. She took my car and emptied my bank account to prove it. Luckily, we hadn’t shared a mortgage or kids. She’s got three of her own now from two different Daddies and last I heard is still cashing welfare checks from a trailer somewhere near Roanoke.

Bonnie, on the other hand, likes that I’m a dreamer. We don’t have kids because Bonnie can’t conceive. I’m her boy, I suppose. She takes care of me. I surely don’t miss Harlene. We were only married a few years and due to my habits at that time, I don’t remember much from them. This, you could say, is a mixed blessing.

Years of drunken binges later, ages ago it seems now, I met Bonnie. She’s a dental hygienist. We met at an AA meeting when the two of us were living in Florida. We just clicked.