Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [48]
“I appreciate that. But what if I don’t want to plant tobacco this year?”
“You don’t have to do a thing. You can stay in the house if you want to.”
“No, I mean, what if I don’t want tobacco planted on my farm?”
Now they did not glance at Lusa sideways; they stared.
“Well,” she said, “why plant more tobacco when everybody’s trying to quit smoking? Or should be trying to, if they’re not already. The government’s officially down on it, now that word’s finally out that cancer’s killing people. And everybody’s blaming us.”
Both men turned their eyes out toward the rain and the fields, where it was clear they suddenly wished they could be, rain or no rain. She could see them working hard not to finger the packs of Marlboros in their shirt pockets.
“What would you be wanting to plant, then?” Herb asked at last.
“Well, I hadn’t really thought. What about corn?”
Herb and Big Rickie exchanged a smile, passing the joke between them. “About three dollar a bushel, that’s how about it,” Herb replied. “Unless you mean feed corn, that’s more like fifty cents a bushel around here. But a-course you’d be talking about sweet corn.”
“Of course,” Lusa said.
“Well, let’s see. Cole’s got a five-acre tobacco bottom, so put it in sweet corn, that’d get you about five hundred bushels, maybe six in a good year, not that we ever have one of those around here.” Herb rolled his eyes up, counting on his fingers. “About fifteen hundred dollar. Minus your diesel for your tractor, your seed, and a whole bunch of fertilizer, because corn’s a heavy feeder. And some luck getting it sold on the right day. You might end up making near about…eight hundred dollars. On your corn crop.”
“Oh, I see.” Lusa blushed deeper. “We usually clear around twelve or thirteen thousand for the tobacco.”
“Yep,” said Big Rickie. “That’d be about right. Thirty-seven hundred an acre, minus your tractor costs, your sets, and your chemicals.”
“It’s what we live on.”
She’d said it softly, but the words we and live hung heavily in the air. She felt them pressing on her shoulders like the hands of a disapproving matron trying to get the message across to a selfish child: “Sit down, your turn is over.”
Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat. Grandfather Landowski’s rhythm section was fading out. She needed to empty the buckets and start them over again. She wished these men would go away. Just leave her to muddle through in her own way, however mistaken. She wished she could ask someone for advice without feeling skinned alive and laughed at.
“What else can people grow around here, on little scraps of land at the bottom of a hollow? What can earn you enough to live on, besides tobacco?”
Big Rickie warmed to the subject of bad news. “Turner Blevins up ’air tried tomatoes. They told him he could get ten thousand dollar an acre. What they didn’t tell him was if two other guys in the county try the same thing, they’ve done flooded the market. Blevins fed thirty-five hundred pound of tomatoes to his hogs and dished the rest under.”
“What about the other two guys?” Lusa asked.
“Same. They all three lost money. One of them was so sold on tomatoes, he’d put him in a ten-thousand-dollar irrigation system to water ’em with, is what I heard. Now he’s back in tobacco, and just hoping for a real dry year so he can turn on his fancy spanking hoses.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, that they’d all lose money. People need lots of tomatoes.”
“Not all on the same day they don’t, and that’s how tomatoes comes in. If you can’t get them suckers all into somebody’s grocery cart in five days or less, then you’ve got you some expensive hog food. And out here in the boondocks, no shipper’s going to touch you before he’s sure he can make his cut.”
Lusa crossed her arms, despairing of the depth of her ignorance.
“Your tobacco, you see, now,” Rickie continued, “you hang it in the barn to cure, and then it can just go on hanging there as long as it needs to, till the time