Fog drifts past the doorway as the sun rises and a rooster crows, like a typical Boonville dawn this time of year, though our farm is located in a river valley surrounded by the foothills of the Appalachians. My sleep schedule is all screwed up, as lately the best time to be awake has been from midnight to about ten in the morning, the afternoons muggy with almost no breeze and temperatures in the mid nineties, our sand hills scorching and drying.
"I don't know why I don't quit growing corn and soybeans for Monsanto and just fence in all my fields, put livestock out there," said a distant relation at the Verona Bluebird the other night as we enjoyed cans of beer. That's all they serve, except for wine coolers in bottles for the ladies. It's one of the most chill bars in southern Indiana, where the bachelor farmers used to hang out. Dale Taschenrechner is one of the last of the breed. He used to grow watermelons and tomatoes as well as all the other produce crops and operate a roadside stand with his mother, back in the day when Verona was famous for watermelons and we had about forty roadside produce stands. Dale and his mother actually employed my sister to sit out there and read books over the summer when she was 16 and the rural fabric had not been shredded by meth and Monsanto. Now he just plants corn and soybeans and is tired of it, but the game is rigged so that he and his mom are somewhat stuck in this economic rut. "I'd get into grass-fed beef, but I'm getting old, don't know if I've got the energy anymore for such a change."
I know how he feels, but didn't want to go on about it and talk business on a Friday night. Jetta and I were at the bar to shoot pool, as some older woman we'd met had recently gifted her with a pool cue that was supposedly worth $5000. People sure throw numbers around these days. It's a damn fine cue, though, and Jetta won't let me use it if I'm playing against her, only if we're playing partners. The place was hopping, with a whole line of quarters on the edge of the table, talented old beer drinkers schooling each other, so we had to sit in a booth and wait.
Jetta and I had experienced an eventful afternoon, starting with the arrival of our buddy, Hippie, for an afternoon photo shoot in the doggone heat of the day. So we're putting on somewhat of a brother to our "Hoefest," scheduling this one for Oct 2 and dubbing it, "Rakefest," in the name of poetic justice. Most people think of female prostitutes when they hear the word, "hoe." Back in the old days, bachelor farmers like Dale Taschenrechner and me were considered "rakes." Rakes and hoes go hand in hand, literally, and if you check out our Hoefest community page on Facebook you'll see the original picture of Jetta and Lovebug topless in Daisy Dukes, their breasts painted like watermelons, both gripping a hoe with one hand. So in the name of poetic justice, Hippie and I agreed to let Jetta do a similar shot of the two of us in her Daisy Dukes clenching the handle of a rake.
"We're putting these posters up at the Bluebird, and all the liquor stores, just like we did for Hoefest. It's only fair," she said, handing us each a pair of her manufactured cut-offs, fresh from the drier.
"You had to use the drier on the hottest day of the year!" I said, as we have a clothesline out back, and driers tend to shrink clothes. My voice got a little higher when I slipped into them, and then I busted out laughing when I got a glimpse of Hippie, a tall dude with blonde dreads in Jetta's Daisy Dukes. "Goddam that is too funny, we got to do this!"
But Jetta was having a hard time deleting all the pictures from the smartphone, to make space for the photos.
"Come on! You better hurry or my voice is gonna get higher!"
We made our way out to where the stage had been for Hoefest, sweating in the heat of the day, and were able to get a few pictures in before the county deputy arrived in his brown sedan, not spotting us immediately, and proceeding to the front door of the Farmhouse which was wide open.
Of course we had smoked a bowl prior to this humiliating photo shoot, and the glass pipe still lingered on the front table, along with some buds.
"Holy--" we all said. Hippie and I thinking man we got caught with our pants down. "I don't know why they're here!"
Reluctantly, we tiptoed barefoot to the house--all three of us pretty much bare except for the Daisy Dukes, except Jetta wore the rasta bikini top decorated with pot leaves. The deputy had received a complaint that we were growing marijuana, he said, and would we please allow him to cuff us since clearly there were buds on the coffee table, as well as the pipe.
Hippie has been described by the local newspapers as a "longtime cannabis advocate," and is constantly doing battle with the establishment. Several years ago, Jetta actually filmed him sitting on the army tank in front of the county courthouse, smoking a joint. He flies a marijuana leaf flag in front of his trailer along the highway.
"At least I ain't flying a marijuana leaf flag out front my house," I said, trying to keep my sense of humor as more deputies arrived, county cars filling the driveway as if we were putting on a special music event for cops.
"Spec, you might as well be sittin on the tank out front the courthouse, smokin a joint."
I wasn't too worried, though. It turned out that 2015 had been a great year for okra, and I had a row of it out back in the garden, quite a long row. The plants had thrived, and from a distance the six foot tall plants with the erect pods could have been mistaken for marijuana plants brandishing protruding colas.
"What about the greenhouse?" they asked.
"Nothing in there but goat piss and shit." I'd purchased four Boer goats this spring, one a billy, and he really likes the smell of himself. They were bred in south Africa, originally, and must like the heat, because they lounged in there in the middle of the day even.
Except for the buds on the coffee table, the extensive search of our farm over the course of hours sweltering in the heat, cuffed embarassingly exposed in Daisy Dukes, produced nothing but high voices out of Hippie and me. The deputies ended up leaving empty-handed, removing the cuffs and letting us go, warning me to be more careful and not leave buds on the table.
So Jetta and I had decided to celebrate our freedom by going to the Bluebird to shoot pool, and were still waiting for a chance at the lone table. She's relatively famous there for dancing on the mesas, as well as shaking her ass while opponents, mostly dudes in their sixties and seventies, are attempting to concentrate, but this night she was stuck in the booth with Dale Taschenrechner and me talking about the evils of Monsanto. So she went into this tirade about the upcoming solar flares that all the new-agers on Facebook are in a huff over. Supposedly we are in for a massive transformation something like the second coming of Christ, any day. "You guys just don't get it," she finally said in exasperation, judging by our smiles that we were more worried about economic bullshit than about solar flares. "Nobody around here understands!"
"We're just not as smart as you," I said.
"No you're probably not. Just sayin, I scored 1800 on the SAT."
"Pretty sure the highest score possible is 1600," said the bachelor farmer, Dale Taschenrechner. His last name translates roughly to "calculator," in German. "Unless they've changed it since I went to school."
"Ok, it wasn't 1800. It was 1430," she said.
Ironically 1430 is exactly what my sister scored on the SAT. "That's what my sister scored. She got a full ride to Dennison University, ended up getting her doctor's degree in Animal Science."
"What, are you calling me a dumb blonde? I thought dying my hair auburn would change that!"
"No! I just doubt you scored a 1430." I was thinking like a Taschenrechner, total logic with no emotion. My bloodline is half Taschenrechner, though thankfully I got some Cherokee and Irish in me. Most of the Taschenrechners are stockbrokers or scientists, or else cattle brokers, which would be the root words of both capitalism and the stock market. We are OCD with numbers. I was just drunk enough to start evaluating Jetta's potential SAT score based on our experience together, and had to admit her verbal score could have been near 800. She'd memorized every single rap Eminem spit. Obscure songs I've never played for an audience of more than one, that I only played once for Jetta, she'd sang along the second time I played them. But even if she scored 800 on the verbal, that would mean at least 630 on the math, and no way could anyone do that without taking courses beyond Algebra and Geometry. "No way. You never took any Calculus!"
"I'm nothing but a dumb bitch to you! Go ahead and laugh!" She got up and pretty much ignored me the rest of the night, flirting with every guy in sight.
Dale and I talked some more farming, for a few hours, until I was ready to head home. "I'll give her a ride if she needs it," he said.
I haven't talked to Jetta since, but we'll speak again. I ain't mad or anything. I'm a bachelor farmer. When I was a kid, there were dozens of bachelor farmers in our home community. If not for Monsanto and other corporations running all the families out of business and destroying our rural communities, there'd be bachelor farmers all over this land, as well as maids like my Great Aunt Dorothy, who never got married because she didn't want to submit herself to the will of any man. She's 94, and her letters to me in college are pretty much the inspiration and model for these Farm to Farm articles. My sister named her daughter after her.
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