Riverine

by Angela Palm

  “If you plant corn in your garden, it’ll cross-pollinate with these test rows after detasseling and muck up the whole harvest.” Amos didn’t like cursing. “We can’t have that.”

  “Which ones are the test rows?” my dad asked, crossing his arms.

  Amos moved his hand in a circular fashion above his head.

  “All of it? You gotta be shittin’ me.” My dad loved cursing. He worked a goddamn son of a bitch into most sentences, even when the emotional tenor of a conversation didn’t necessitate expletives.

  “All of it along this stretch of road anyway. Every fifth row’s a male. In between are female. Different test strain every nine rows. I lease these fields to a breeder. That’s the corn of the future right there.” His hand glided through the air, gesturing at the perimeter of our yard as if he were Vanna White. Looking more closely, I saw the wooden posts marked with a numbered code, indicating each strain.

  “No wonder they call it Millionaire’s Mile,” my dad said, and shook his head. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” But I didn’t understand why this would equate to wealth.

  Amos snorted. “You can pick whatever you want to eat once it’s grown. It’s all sweet corn. Won’t nobody miss a few here and there.”

  My dad nodded by way of agreement and returned to tilling. He didn’t like being told what to do, especially on his own property. It was odd the way people ruled their tiny plots of land like kings. Were people who lived in cities the same way? Did people in downtown Chicago or in New York behave like that? It seemed a universally American tendency—to subordinate those who threatened your personal property, especially land and buildings. We were wonderful at fencing ourselves in, moating our little kingdoms. But from what? And to what end? The actual Dutch weren’t like that. Many years later, on a trip to Amsterdam, I would be astounded at the vast differences between the “Dutch” I’d known in Indiana and the Dutch in today’s Holland. Communal space and neighborly communion seemed to be core values, dictating both building and land design as well as social interactions. Despite the issues of strict dominion over the garden at the new house, we crossed the property line to pick corn from the test rows every night for dinner that summer. We found stringy, shucked hairs in strange places long into the fall.

  When we moved, Latino immigrants seemed to have become as populous in town as the non-Dutch. With more land producing crops and more money to spend on production, more workers were needed, and the Latinos provided that labor. Our town now had three kinds of workers: union, nonunion, and migrant. There were plenty of field jobs available in our county, and the only people who worked them were teenagers and migrants. Occasionally a teacher who needed to make extra money over the summer would sign up. But there were no other able-bodied adults in line for these wages. I had heard that some of the migrant workers lived in rows of bunks in outbuildings scattered among the fields and farms. Hidden away. With their new faces, their dark hair contrasting with so much Dutch blond, came an inexplicable buzz of fear. “If they’re gonna live here, they best speak English,” my dad said, as if playing a stock character or caricatured bigot. His prejudice was one of the worst kinds, citing patriotism as the reason he held his beliefs and claiming that’s the way he grew up. I was to stay away from the goddamn bunkhouses if I ran across one that summer, because there was no telling what could happen. I ought not single him out, though. To be fair, this attitude was representative of the majority of adults with whom I was acquainted. My father’s voice was simply one that I heard loudly and often.

  I thought his beliefs—this unilateral dismissal—were flawed, and I told him so. I could not understand our differences, where they had come from, or how it was possible to hold on to beliefs that were, to me, so obviously uninformed and unkind at their core. Before I was sent to my room for having an unpopular opinion, my mother piped up. She cited a Hispanic-on-white rape incident she claimed to have seen on the Chicago-based news, which is the only news we got. “But I’m not racist,” she added. “I’m only saying you have to watch out.” They were always trying to protect me from the wrong threats.

  Despite recommendations that would curb immigration, a 1994 report submitted by the commission on immigration policy under the Clinton administration stated that “hostility and discrimination against immigrants [was] antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country.” It claimed to disagree with “those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant,” calling management of immigration “a right and a responsibility of a democratic society,” with the aims of such management to serve national interest. The report refuted its own assumptions about the impact that more-educated versus less-educated immigrants had on the American job market, stating that the commission had “called for favoring immigrants with more education and skills on the grounds that immigrants with relatively low education and skills may compete for jobs and public services with the most vulnerable of Americans, particularly those who are unemployed or underemployed.” The claim that immigrants were taking American jobs was refuted when the commission found and reported that, in fact, low-skill jobs performed by immigrant and native-born workers tended “to ‘complement’ rather than substitute for one another.” It showed no correlation between immigration and unemployment among the native-born, a belief I’d heard championed by many adults. The commission recommended measures to remedy their findings, including that any new policy “must give due consideration to shifting economic realities” and consider ensuring lawful entry for those who contribute to our society. But any progress made on that front was halted when former congresswoman Barbara Jordan, the commission chair, passed away before President Clinton had acted in any substantial way, as once promised, on immigration policy reform. The topic rested where it lay for the remainder of Clinton’s time in office.

  My school couldn’t accommodate the new Spanish-speaking kids, or “Mexicans,” as they were often referred to, regardless of where they were actually from. There appeared to be no interpreters available, nor any effective way to integrate these new students into the population. Whether that was the unfortunate consequence of a funding deficit or a conscious choice, I do not know.

  Within a few years, a Mexican restaurant would open in town. But nobody would complain about that.

  For one summer, I worked as a corn detasseler on Amos’s farm. A whole crew of us signed up, over seventy in all. Each farm throughout our county and beyond employed hefty numbers of kids and migrants in the summer months, but the two sets of workers were strictly separated, coming into contact with one another only at long views sneaked across different fields. I walked over at six in the morning each day with my brother, Marcus, who was now thirteen, the state’s legal minimum age for corn detasseling. We wore gym shorts with warm-up pants overtop and tank tops under flannel shirts. Cubs hats on our heads. The early mornings were wet and cold, but by ten the temperature would reach ninety-five, which made walking in the space between rows of corn feel like being in a sauna. By eleven, breathing was nearly impossible due to the aggressive humidity.

  “I hate this job,” I said every morning. But a paycheck would mean I wouldn’t have to wear the clearance-rack clothes that my mother would buy in the fall, when school started. I planned to buy clothes that were in season and in style, and preferably from the Limited—like the clothes the Dutch girls wore. I wanted new books and blank journals from the bookstore, which was a forty-minute drive away.

  “At least it’s easy,” my brother said, lugging his water cooler in one hand and his lunch cooler in the other. We drank a gallon a day each. Marcus had inherited my father’s unflappable work ethic; he rarely complained about physical labor.

  “You call this easy? Look at my arms!” A few days after the work had started, I yanked my flannel sleeve up to expose the pink mess of scratches and bumps that was my arm. We’d had corn rash since the first day on the job, and it stung when it was recut fresh each morning. But you had to keep going. T
he rows felt endless, a rural hell that, until you had worked a field, was unassuming and picturesque from a distance. I felt something about corn now. The fields had looked inviting from our front porch, gently rippling for flat miles in the wind and catching the sun’s last shine at the end of the day. But up close, this close, the corn was violent with leaves as thick and sharp as thorns that cut right through the skin—ts ts ts. We would visit Dr. Vanderveen, one of a handful of Dutch doctors in town. He would prescribe salve; we would hand over our union health insurance cards and be made well again.

  As my relationship to the farmland’s layers grew more intimate and palpable, as I learned which scrubs and fowl were native and had been there longer than the Dutch, my understanding of anthropological shifts in society over time also expanded. In school we studied the hunters and gatherers; the agrarian societies; the industrial, technology, and postindustrial eras. The commingling of societal-era strongholds present in the region in which I lived perplexed me. We lived sixty miles from the dead center of downtown Chicago, and from here to there, one could encounter successful agricultural, industrial, technological, and postindustrial ventures—to all of which corn or soy was an integral commodity in some way. Farmers were producing it in mass quantities for almost innumerable purposes— among them, as feed for livestock, as fuel, as building materials, and as an additive to foods and everyday products. I could not help but feel that, considered in the context of federal subsidies, I was living in a country that was governed, to some extent, by corn. The belief in corn’s usefulness was reinforced on the consumer end, too. The food pyramid, for example, whose standards were issued by the federal government and mandated in schools, was comprised of a large daily helping of American-grown grains as well as a quantity of dairy products derived from cows that consumed the grains. My curiosity about and knowledge of the way that this crop was bound up in our country’s wealth and history, as well as its future, were rudimentary. Yet I sensed an orchestration whose scope and scale were larger than I could imagine. Corn, as a multifaceted industry, seemed a gorilla against whose chest one might futilely beat one’s tiny fists and not begin to wound it.

  The first time we saw the crop duster, there was no warning—it simply arrived as noise, drowning out the clucks of distant hens and the intermittent lurching calls of the scant blue heron population. We watched the plane buzz the field, spray a fine yellow mist from below its wings, and lift its nose right before it reached our house. And then we went outside to weed the garden, mow the grass, and breathe in the country air. Until that day, I had never thought about what might be on our food, what was unseen. Would it impair our health, sticking around in our bodies for an untold amount of time? We had been eating that corn all summer. We had certainly breathed in the chemical as well. What was the life span of fertilizer-laced corn products inside us? In this way, a place or an experience could potentially stay with you forever, corporeally.

  As I learned about the agricultural industry in the United States, and about the country’s economic system, I became fascinated by the life of a dollar. Where it had come from, through whose hands or accounts it had passed before it reached me, where it would go afterward, and how its value would be reduced as portions of it were given back to the government. I wasn’t interested in comprehending vast economic systems that reached across countries and oceans, but rather in the individual level of my own experience and how it fit into the larger picture. My thoughts scrambled when I thought of how many times each dollar from my detasseling paycheck had been taxed or transformed in its value before it reached me. My mind stretched sideways when I considered that I could, in theory, bear children, hold a job, go to jail, and pay taxes, but I could not vote for how my money was spent by the government.

  I could construct a similarly complex life cycle for corn. The seeds that were planted each spring behind our house had been manipulated at the gene level and sealed into a chemical fertilizer coating before they ever touched the farmer’s machinery. Their future was set before shipping. Once sown, they were watered with irrigation drawn from surrounding lands, water that was abundant due to the land’s original status as wetland marsh, fed to soil rich in minerals due to being drenched with that water for centuries. As the corn sprouted, it was lacquered with another chemical fertilizer to ensure an optimal yield for its producers and investors. I came into direct contact with it each morning when I worked those fields for one laborious summer. In the fall, the corn was harvested and stored in the silos I gazed at as I fell asleep at night; their massive drying fans hummed in my dreams through the morning. When the corn was siphoned out of the silo, it was piled into a truck and driven to market. And that was only the beginning. After passing through an unknowable number of hands, machines, and facilities, it came back to me in the form of fuel and oil, in my breakfast cereal, in the milk produced by the cows who fed on it, and in my lip gloss. I could neither see nor name all the things it had influenced or into which it had been inserted.

  My brother was right. The field work itself wasn’t that hard. You got used to the corn rash, and the heat was harder than the work. We got a lot of breaks, and I often rode piggyback on my friend Josh to work the rows I was too short to reach on my own. Josh would kiss me behind the bus sometimes, which left me rapt with anticipation and excitement. We were making a hell of a lot of money, too—thirteen dollars an hour if it was your first year in the field, and more for returning workers, which nearly tripled the federal minimum wage. After work, a few of us would skinny-dip in our pool before our parents got home. Sometimes we’d see the Latino workers lined up in a field, waiting for a farmer to pay them. I hoped they were getting paid what we were, or more, given that they worked harder, but I had a bad feeling they were not. If they were, they’d probably have looked happier about payday.

  One morning I told the foreman, who was only seventeen, that I was too tired to keep working. “It’s almost lunch,” he said. That would be at half past ten. Our work would be done before noon so that none of us got heat exhaustion.

  “But I’m getting a sunburn.” It never occurred to any of us to wear sunscreen.

  “Fine. Take a break.”

  I nodded for Josh to follow me. We headed for the bus that had brought us out a short distance into the rapidly growing corn. Traditionally, you knew whether the crop was on track for a good harvest when it was knee high by the Fourth of July. In recent years, though, the corn was well over our heads by that time—the seed and fertilization further refined toward perfection each year. If it weren’t for the years of flood and drought that affected the yield, they’d have attained that perfection. From the field, I could still see the roof of our house, but I couldn’t see so far as the road. The top of our backyard pool came barely into view when I stood on the steps of the field bus, and I wondered if I could sneak away for a dip. Cool off, then come back to work. But I wasn’t nearly that brave. I sat down on the steps of the bus next to Josh, so that I was out of the sun. It was too hot to go all the way inside. Despite the heat, it felt nice to lean against him. He was six-five, easy.

  “Want to go to the beach later?” Josh asked.

  “I don’t know. I think I’m getting heat exhaustion. I feel sick. Let’s go to the beach tomorrow.”

  Because my mother worked with Josh’s mother and she was a CPA, he was the one boy I was allowed to be alone with, no questions asked. Perhaps they thought he was a promising match for a boyfriend. I spent most of that summer with him. We would drive up to Lake Michigan and wade out to the sandbar. Or we’d drive around in his truck and listen to Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Some days we’d smoke doobies in his garage. The term was outdated, but we didn’t care. We were sure we were living in the wrong decade. Sometimes we took the South Shore train to Chicago and shopped at the resale stores on Clark and Halstead, where we took turns trying on the same vintage T-shirts and fedoras, unable to decide who wore them better.

  Josh and I huddled together on the bus steps, gazing
at the field across the dirt road, accessible only to the farm staff and secluded entirely from any real roads. We watched a group of about twenty men sweating synchronously, moving in perfect rhythm. Reach, yank, toss. Reach, yank, toss. Their muscles flexed along with their motions. Their skin was deeply tanned and their eyes were dark and shaded. They were loads faster than our work crew, and it was obvious that they took their work more seriously. I couldn’t understand the few utterances that broke their silence. There was no bus around for them. No shade, no breaks. I wondered whether we were working for the same farmers, or if the land they worked was owned by someone else. I wondered where they had come from and whether they were happy. Mostly, I wondered why we were kept separate.

  “I can’t believe we get paid to mess up this stupid corn and make out.” Josh laughed, then quieted, looking at the men. “Jesus, this is fucked up.”

  We looked away from the men embarrassed by our privilege and our own futility.

  By the end of the summer, I no longer wanted new clothes or new technologies paid for with my detasseling money. I put it all in my savings account, and my brother used his to buy a PlayStation, Cubs jerseys and tickets for the bleacher seats, and new Jordans. I was transfixed with the old—bell bottoms, hot pants, terrycloth jumpers, record players—while Marcus wanted every new thing available. Josh and I had discarded our CDs and listened, instead, to dusty albums that we found in our parents’ garages. Saturday Night Fever, the Moody Blues, Lovin’ Spoonful, Ella Fitzgerald. We spent our time running our fingers through the air as we sped along the country roads, stopping to scour yard sales and dip our feet into creeks. We never talked about the strange work we’d done, or how terrible we had felt watching real men do real work while we made a mockery of it in the next field over and collected paychecks that we hadn’t really needed. Instead we drove until we hit water, until we’d put all that troubling land behind us.