NSummer

by Never Summer (retail) (epub)

  “OK,” Conyers said, clapping his hands. “Thank y’all for listening. Let’s load up. Time to plant trees!”

  So it began.

  On that first rough day, everyone suffered from sore flesh. There were stiff muscles all around.

  About mid-morning, Conyers had to let one man go. Tom never did learn his name. The guy was a fatty, and a plodder, with a peculiar shuffling gait. He moved with a waddling roll of the hips, pants riding low. It was a miracle they stayed up at all. One of the veterans whispered, “If that guy moved any slower he’d be a statue…”

  Conyers took the poor fellow aside to deliver the bad news. They never saw “the waddler” again.

  But he was the exception. By the end of that first day the rest had more or less mastered the use of the hoedad and the art of planting. The skill came through doing. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

  Within days the crew was toughening to the work.

  The routine never varied. Each morning, the boss rose early and transferred a day’s supply of seedlings from a humming electrical refrigeration unit parked in the woods into the back of his pickup. The seedlings were packed in large brown paper bags and had to be kept cool round-the-clock to keep them viable. Temperature and moisture were critical. Each morning, shortly after dawn, Conyers would be waiting for them when they showed up for work. The planters would rip open the paper bags and stuff as many baby trees as they could carry into their pouches, at least a thousand at a time. After loading up they would move out.

  It was “piece work,” three cents a tree.

  The planters would form up in a long straight line that became a diagonal formation moving across the landscape. The standard distance was twelve feet between seedlings.

  The wedge formation was simple but effective, enabling the planters to cover the maximum amount of ground in the shortest time.

  Soon they gravitated to their places. The quick and the determined moved forward to the head of the column. The slow, the methodical, and the weak slipped to the rear.

  Two of the women quit before the first week was out. One was a husky earth mother type named Linda Swaggart. She was an easygoing extrovert and not in the least bit bashful about why she quit. She hated planting and told them so to their faces. She even mocked them. “I think you’re all nuts,” she said with a laugh as she tossed her braided black hair back over one shoulder. Linda was up front about everything.

  Tallie, the other woman, never gave any reasons, but did not have to. The reason was plain enough. She was slight of frame, just a slip of a thing. Tallie could not have weighed more than 110 pounds and did not have sufficient body-mass to shoulder forty-pound tree bags. She was a beauty though, with fine-boned features, and a lilting, childlike voice. Because of the way she was put together her clothes seemed too large for her and hung loose on her small frame. She had her own way of moving, which some would call ungainly, even awkward; but she also showed flashes of a natural grace. The overall effect was stunning. Though she was generally quiet, on occasion she could be loquacious, a curious combination. She always wore sunglasses, even at night.

  To generate income and keep busy during the long days, Tallie and Linda organized a community kitchen, pooling their money and cooking skills, figuring to cash in on a commodity in short supply: home-cooked food. The field kitchen was an immediate hit because the food was out of this world. And the price was right, six bucks for all you could eat.

  As the roughshod planters lined up, one evening, for their first community meal, the talk in camp was a droll medley of voices.

  “Tell Daugherty to cut it out!”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “I did. But he don’t listen. Maybe if you tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Oh, Daugherty’s picking his nose again, and it drives Ferman out of his gourd.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “Now you mention it, he gets it up there don’t he?”

  “Yes he does, with them long bony fingers.”

  “If he don’t watch it he’ll puncture his brain.”

  “Brain? What brain?”

  “It ain’t the picking that bothers me,” said Ferman. “It’s what he does with it, after.”

  “Jesus! Will you look at that!”

  “Oh Gross!”

  “Daugherty, you’re a disgrace to your momma.”

  “He obviously don’t care about himself, or nuthin’.”

  “Booger Daugherty.” Chuckles all around. Tom laughed with the rest as he slapped at a mosquito on his neck. Others stepped up now and joined the food line. Each had a plate, a cup, and silverware.

  “Smells good. What is it?” one man said as he handed Linda six bills.

  “Yeah, what’s for supper?” said a face peeking over John’s shoulder.

  Linda was beaming. “Onion soup,” she said. “Home-made corn bread with butter. Fried chicken. Mashed p’taters and gravy. Half a chicken for each one of you. A big pot of peas. Oh and uh, Tallie made a peach cobbler.” The planters smacked their lips.

  “All right!”

  Tallie began serving up the chow. When Linda finished collecting the money, she helped too. They piled them high. Each man filled his cup with soup or bug juice, then found a spot in the grassy clearing. They ate in ravenous silence. But when the edge was off their hunger, the small talk resumed between mouthfuls of chicken, spuds, and peas.

  “Sometime early next week we’ll finish up the parcel,” said Conyers.

  “Where then, chief?”

  “We got two more sites, hereabouts. Then we go south.”

  “South where?”

  “Daytona.”

  “Alright by me. I’m a beachcomber.”

  “Mmmm that cobbler’s gooood. Is there more, Linda?”

  “You’ll have to wait till everyone’s had firsts.”

  “We won’t be on the coast. We’ll be working ‘bout fifteen miles inland. Couple of Georgia Pacific contracts.”

  “Hot damn. We’re gonna be rich!”

  “Rich. Hell.”

  “At three cents a tree, boy, you ain’t never gonna be rich.”

  “No, we gonna be. I know it. I dreamed about it, last night.”

  “Right, Watters. Dream on.”

  “I think I’ll get me some of that cobbler. Is there any cream?

  “There should be. Look in the cooler.”

  “So what did you dream, Jamie?”

  “Man, I dreamed we was planting money trees. As in M-O-N-E-Y! It was unreal.”

  “Money trees. Hah!”

  “Unreal. He got that part right.”

  “Sounds high on the hog to me.”

  “Can you imagine? Pickin’ hunnerd dollar bills...”

  “The water’s hot,” Tallie said in her musical voice. After serving up the food the women had set two large pots of water on the fire. One was soapy and the other clear for rinse, so they could wash their dishes and also purge some of the day’s dust and grit.

  Heads turned when Tallie moved away from the fire, her long calico dress gathered up in both hands.

  Next evening,Tallie and Linda caused a stir when they were seen frolicking together, laughing, embracing and kissing on the lips. There was nothing casual about the display of affection. When Conyers heard about it his reaction was “Oh shit.” The crew included some conservative southerners and he could not help but worry about the possibility of trouble. Once before, he had seen a crew split down the middle over something as trivial as an off-color remark. Fortunately, nothing much happened, aside from a few cold stares.

  Next morning early, the boss caught two of the ne’er-do-wells “J”-rooting pine trees. The two had already had their first warning. This time, Conyers was really pissed off and whistled everyone in. The planters trudged over and gathered around. The offenders endured a verbal spanking with their heads down and their eyes on the ground.

  “If I catch you boys ‘J’-rooting tr
ees again you’ll be gone. Understand? Out of here. Strike three and you’re out.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “Sorry don’t count.”

  “We’ll try to do better.”

  “I need results. Look, you guys are moving way too fast. Slow down and do it right. Focus on quality, first. Then, pick up your speed. It will come.”

  “OK, boss.”

  After that, the two men settled down and, for a time, there were no more problems with ‘J’-rooting.

  The next Friday, after ten straight days working from dawn to near dusk, “can to can’t” in treeplanting parlance, the crew dispersed to Gainesville for the weekend and some needed R&R. It was a fun-loving college town, with lots of night life and good restaurants.

  One group, including Tom, designated Bill Nelson as ‘point man’ for the expedition, because he was the most presentable. Bill still boasted a somewhat clean shirt and had managed a recent shave. While the others held back, he signed into a Ramada Inn as a party of one, politely requesting “...a double suite in the back, away from the street, so I can stretch out and relax. I need some sack time...”

  Within minutes of check-in six grungy planters and a golden retriever descended on the room with six-packs in hand, tracking in sand, grit, mud, mange, fleas, and swamp reek; a motel maid’s nightmare.

  Sprucing up assumed top priority. The men queued up for hot showers and shaved at the mirror, while the rest guzzled cold beer and watched cable TV, a process of hygienic restoration that soon expended every article of clean linen in the place. Promptly they proceeded to the next order of business, dinner at “Gators,” a local eatery; after which, the men returned to the room to laze away the stag weekend watching round-the-clock cable movies and pro football, while scarfing endless junk food and swilling beer by the case.

  By 11 p.m. Saturday night, the topic of conversation had turned to “women.” Things were beyond mellow. Bill Nelson lay flat on his back on the floor on the verge of an alcoholic stupor. Someone held a can of Bud over his head and emptied the suds onto Bill’s face. Some of the beer made it into his mouth. Most did not, but no matter, it was all the same to Bill. “That’s when she smiled at me,” he moaned, “with them beeuutiful brown eyes.” Amazon barked playfully and began lapping his face. “Hey? Whaaa? Iye aaawww...”

  “Nelson’s got a thing for Tallie.”

  “So that’s what he’s been raving about like a loonie.”

  “Good luck with that one.”

  “She likes to have women suck her clit.”

  “That boyfriend of hers. Alan. What’s with him?”

  “He ain’t no boyfriend, that’s her cousin.”

  “Well, what about Linda’s boyfriend? Ned. What’s he think about it?”

  “Oh Ned don’t care. He’s laid back.”

  Bill’s mumblings were becoming incoherent as the tail-wagger continued its ardent ministrations.

  “Nelson says Tallie smiled at him. One time, that’s all she wrote. Now look at him, a good man turned to mush.”

  “She is a cutie. I like the way she talks.”

  “What a waste of good pussy.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, that’s for sure.”

  Tom Lacey was probably the only man in camp with no strong opinion about Tallie one way or the other.

  Come Monday they were back at it, hung over but refreshed nonetheless after the wild weekend. The morning turned into one of those good and glorious days when everything is right with the world. The planting seemed effortless. The tree bags never became burdensome. There was a welcome breeze – the mosquitoes never showed up. There were no eastern diamondbacks coiled in the brush and no pestilential thistles ripping their flesh. The crew was in “gravy” all day, flat sandy ground. There was joking, free and easy laughter and a feeling of camaraderie, especially among the group that had coalesced around Bill Nelson.

  Tom, who loved dropping trees, had by now taken to planting them with near equal enthusiasm; perhaps because it was hands-on work. The silent, earthy rhythms were so very different from the noisy mayhem of logging; yet, Tom found hefting a hoedad to be immensely pleasurable. The best part was the pure elation born of mindless routine, when monotonous repetition set him free on his feet to think and to imagine.

  He had one such experience later that very afternoon, near dusk. Down to the last few seedlings at the soggy bottom of his tree bags, the sun riding low, a ball of molten fire in the western sky, the air already feeling cool against his skin. As he paused and watched the sun slowly flatten down into pure ochre, then slip behind a pastel thunderhead piling up over the Gulf, something stirred within him, an inner fire. Everything shifted then and suddenly he was in a different time frame. The work had become a passion play without beginning or end. He was dancing with every swing of the blade, light of step, in tune and rhythm with everything, totally in the here-and-now of Nature and rolling up the past. Each thrust into the ancient ground was an act of co-creation and each boot-tamped seedling a rite of renewal. More than this, his hoedad had become a vajra blade, the razor edge of discrimination. With every swing he was shaping the world to come, carving out an arc of future possibilities limited only by the reach and integrity of his own thoughts.

  It was a rare moment of pure elation, and one that renewed his confidence in the course he had begun to chart – the path of inquiry.

  The evening concluded with a torrential downpour accompanied by hell’s own fury, berserk lightning unleashed like wild artillery. Again and again the western horizon uncoiled with incendiary flashes, barrage after barrage, in rapid series with delayed thunder rolling and booming in the purple distance.

  This strange delight of winter lightning was new in his experience.

  He read only one book that winter, The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, and he spent many an evening with it, alone, by the light of a lantern, propped up against a pillow in the back of his pickup, serenaded by the frogs and the crickets in the pine brakes around camp; and, despite terminological difficulties of every kind – Kant is by no means easy – he felt that he made steady progress.

  Tom was always the last to douse his light. As the days passed Bill Nelson discovered his habit of reading late, and began to kid him about Kant, always in a good-natured way.

  One evening Tom was reading by the light of his lantern, as usual, accompanied by the roar of a billion croaking frogs, when someone lightly tapped on his camper window.

  “Who’s out there?” He looked closer. “Tallie? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Hi, Tom. Can you help me? I … umm … think I need a light.” She explained that she’d ventured out into the woods to pee, but her flashlight batteries had gone dead. Conyers had emphatically and repeatedly warned them about the danger of walking around after nightfall in cottonmouth country.

  “Umm, sure,” Tom said. “No worries.” He opened the back hatch and climbed out with his Coleman. He turned it all the way up to expand the circle of light and escorted her back across the clearing to her trailer. They had not gone ten yards before they encountered a large cottonmouth coiled in the grass. The venomous white mouth drew back with a faint hiss as the fangs leered up at them. The serpent seemed primordial – something dredged up from the depths. That was when he noticed she had no shoes.

  “My God. You’re barefoot!”

  She smiled.

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “But I love the grass between my toes.”

  He let this bit of blithe insanity pass without comment and they detoured around the snake. When they reached her trailer he lifted the lantern up to get a better look at her. It was the first time he had seen her up close absent her sunglasses. She had freckles on her nose, yes, and suddenly he knew why some of the men called her “peek-a-boo.” Her beauty flashed at you, now you see it, now you don’t. He stared at her. He couldn’t help it. Something in her dark eyes startled him. Before he could say “Good night,” she wrapped her a
rms around his neck, pulled him down and gave him the sweetest kiss. She smelled really good. For a moment he felt her looking into his soul.

  “Thank you, Tom. You’re a life saver.”

  “N-night,” he stammered.

  TWELVE

  The next day, about mid-afternoon, the crew completed the first big planting contract of the season. When they returned to camp they were surprised to find a succulent meal of barbecued spare ribs waiting for them courtesy of Ed Conyers who had arranged for Linda and Tallie to baste the ribs southern-style over a slow fire. According to Conyers, the sauce and charcoal fire was the secret to “finger-licking-good” ribs. He claimed the sauce was an old family recipe. The women had also prepared a large salad, two different vegetables, baked potatoes and endless chips. Conyers had brought in a keg of ice-cold Bud, which immediately drew a thirsty crowd around the tailgate of his pickup.