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This is something I wrote in my spare time between (and sometimes during) deployments. I was originally going to drop it off elsewhere but the forum I was going to drop it at is not taking submissions anymore. There are 25 chapters and I'll be posting them individually as my access to internet and my schedule allows. The stories are in the format of short self-interviews as you'd find on a documentary. Some are more elaborate than others, some are less. They are strictly one-way conversations..a lot like some of the 'man on the street' interviews where someone is given a camera and one minute to say whatever they want. I wrote these out of boredom on those long tedious evenings where there was nothing to do but try to stay awake and keep an eye on the comms.
Chap. I
Just sorta go with the flow and let the story tell itself, huh? All right.
I used to be the county roads manager. My job was to make sure the county roads were maintained, plowed in the winter, that sort of thing. Had almost forty people working for me at one point. Nowadays…well, it’s a different story. Nowadays my job is making sure that folks around here have enough to eat.
My grandpappy, that’s his picture on the wall there, was a photographer with the army in World War Two. Back then, you were in it from the beginning to the end. Normally a fella would see all the horrible things that war does but my grandpap, on account of his job, got to see more than his share. Whenever they came across a mass grave, or a concentration camp full of walking skeletons, or a grove of trees with people hanging from ropes he was the one they called to come take pictures of it. War’s got all kinds of horrors but he saw more of them than probably anyone else. Can’t tell me it didn’t make an impression.
‘Course, he never talked about it. Wasn’t until years and years later we found out about it. When he came home in ’45 the first thing he did was get together with his brothers and start driving all over the county looking at land. He wound up buying nearly 500 acres. Back then land was pretty cheap. Everyone figured he was going into farming. Europe was still smoking and a lot of money was made raising grain to send over there. But grandpap had no interest in farming. He took his GI Bill, went to school and became an accountant. Wound up being county treasurer after a few years…job he kept right up until he died.
That five hundred acres, youre looking at it all around us, by the way, was a mystery to a lot of folks. Grandpap leased it out in hundred acre lots to tenant farmers. Didn’t ask for anything other than what he needed to cover taxes. Every year he’d have the farmers move to one of the other hundred acre lots. In ’49 he bought a parcel adjoining and leased out the rights to a gravel company. They came in and dug out enough gravel and rock to grade most of the roads in this county. Grandpap had them use their machines and dig him a couple wells at either end of the property..deep ones…and let the tenant farmers use it to irrigate the place. After about fifteen years the lease expired, the company moved on and grandpap was the proud owner of a water filled hole in the ground. We’d all thought he lost his mind. We’d swim or fish in the gravel pit as it filled with greenish water. After a few years you couldn’t hold your breath long enough to swim to the bottom and come back up.
When he got too old to keep track of things he handed the whole shebang over to my dad. Invited him over for dinner one night, just him and my dad. Next day dad came home and there was something different about him. He had this old suitcase that grandpap gave him. Never talked about it, never showed it to us kids, just shoved it way back in his closet and told us kids if he ever caught us in that closet he’d beat us so hard we’d never sit down again. We believed him. Dad had a look about him that said he wasn’t fooling around.
When grandpap died we all figured dad would sell the land and that hole in the ground gravel pit and maybe do something big with the money. But he didn’t do a thing. Every year the farmers shuffled around, the taxes got paid, and we kids wished he’d sell the place and we could go someplace exciting like Disneyland.
I was in my early forties when dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Doctor said it had gone on too long and if there was anything dad wanted to do he had better do it in the next year. The weight fell off him and after about nine months he could barely walk across the house without help. He knew time was getting close. He called me up one day and said to come down and have dinner with him, just him and me. There was something he wanted to talk to me about, he said. Me and the brothers figured the old man was going to pass on the property to me just like his dad had passed it on to him. We had decided that whoever got the property was going to split it up amongst the brothers and we’d all cash out and move on with our lives. Do the things we had always wanted. Travel, new houses, new cars, college for the kids…that land was worth a few bucks.
Dad didn’t eat much any more, what with the cancer medications and therapies making him nauseous all the time. We mostly sat around and talked a bit and I wondered when he was going to come around. He reached into the sideboard, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and poured a small glass for me and just a splash for himself. He struggled to get out of his chair and when he was finally upright he told me to take the glasses and follow him. I was dumbstruck..I’d never seen my dad drink before and now he was offering me a drink and expected me to drink with him. I followed him into his study. It was the room he’d used as his office when his own accounting practice had been in full swing. He told me to sit down and have a drink. I did so. When he fell heavily into that padded leather chair of his I noticed the suitcase sitting next to him. Open it up, he said. I leaned forward and picked up the suitcase. Part of me thought maybe there was gold or money in it, a family secret fortune, but to my surprise it was just suitcase full of old photo albums.
Your grandfather, he said, showed this to me the day he deeded over the property to me. He said that you can’t own that land without knowing what its for and what it can do. He told me to look through those photo albums and look carefully at the people in those pictures. Look at their faces, look at their clothes, at their eyes…see how they live and how they’re dying. When you’ve looked through every picture there, we’ll talk about the property. So I did. And now I’m telling you to do the same thing.
I opened the albums and the first thing that jumped out at me was a picture of a row of bodies laying along a street. They were all lined up, like firewood, as far as the image could capture down the length of the street. Even in the grainy black and white there was no mistaking the horrible scenes in the pictures. Page after page of pictures that grandpap had taken during his time in Europe photographing the wars cruelties and horrors. Pictures of bodies, of emaciated figures who only barely looked human, children with swollen bellies and tufts of hair missing from their heads…it was some pretty ugly stuff, I’m here to tell you. A suitcase full of pictures of what kind of horror could come upon a civilized society in only a few years. Grandpap had documented the whole thing, and kept these images…I had no idea why and I finally closed the last book. I finished the whiskey my dad had poured for me and now I knew why he had offered it to me…things like these needed a bit of numbing. It was quiet for a moment and he spoke.
My father, your grandfather, saw these things firsthand during the war, he said. He told me that when he got back from Europe that he realized that no matter what there would never be a time when he or his family would ever be like those people..crazed from hunger, weak, hopeless, dying… He bought that land and held it all these years against the possibility of something happening…war, panic, depression, whatever. But he told me when he signed it over to me that it was always to be kept just the way it was. Those folks he had farming it, you remember them? They rotate around every year so the soil doesn’t get used up. He never charged those people for the use of the land because they kept it fertilized, tilled, disked and irrigated for him. If he ever needed it, it would be ready for planting. That gravel pit, he made that deal so there’d be that quarry there full of water. It’s filled with algae and probably tastes like crap but that pit holds enough water that if you had to you could irrigate enough acreage to keep you and the family fed for an entire season if it didn’t rain. Those wells he had the quarrymen dig? They go more much deeper than the water table. If they ran dry then there’s no water anywhere in this county. I’m giving you the same story he gave me when he handed that land over to me. He’d seen those things…those terrible things… and wanted the best insurance he could for his family. I thought he was out of his mind when he told me the story and handed the papers over to me but as time goes by I think he was right. This is our insurance. I’m handing it over to you. The papers are on my desk here and tomorrow we’ll head to the courthouse and get the proper stamps. But you can’t tell your brothers about why we’re keeping this land. Your grandfather made me keep it a secret from my brothers and I’m telling you to keep it a secret from yours. When I asked him why he said it was because too many people knowing could convince themselves to do something else…to sell the property…and they’d think it was the right thing to do. But if one person takes it on and keeps the reason a secret then they’re more resolute, more strong, more determined to make sure the land stays in the family for the right reasons. I haven’t got long, son. You know it and the doctors know it and I know it. You’re getting the property, the stories and the photos. They’re yours now and it’s your job to keep this thing for the safety of our entire family. Maybe we’ll never see things like he saw, but he loved his family enough that he wanted them cared for and this was his way of doing it. I love you and your brothers and now I’m passing that gift on to you. They’re going to try to get you to sell it off, or split it up or do something with it but you’ve got to stay firm, son. If you ever have any doubts, you look at those photos…that’s why they’re there. I haven’t been sitting on my butt the last few years doing nothing, you know. There’s life insurance, a little money in the bank, this house…enough of an inheritance to pass on that your brothers won’t feel that they didn’t get anything. But no matter what, you do not let this property pass out of the family. Keep it as it is. You’re the oldest, it’s your responsibility. When you think you can’t handle it anymore you hand it down and you tell the same story I told you, you show the pictures that I showed you. But this property stays in the family, no matter what.
And that was that. I took the suitcase, went home that night, and signed the papers the next day with my dad at the courthouse. My brothers thought I was trying to cheat them out of what they thought was their rightful inheritance. One of them didn’t talk to me for a few years. They’re all out there now, with their families, helping in the fields or working the business end of things. Dad was right. Grandpap was right. When we had the drought last year we had enough water to keep one of the fields irrigated all summer. It kept us from starving that year.
This year we’ve got enough coming in to feed ourselves, the hands, our neighbors and still have enough for sale and trade. When they had that craziness with all that lawlessness two years ago we managed through it because everyone around here knew that if we went under everyone would go hungry. We can make food, so we’re going to be okay.
It wasn’t always this way. We didn’t just jump onto a tractor one day and make food pop out of the ground. We made some mistakes and we made some smart moves. The remaining tenant farmer had been with us for almost twentyfive years. When the jobs dried up and the pantry started getting empty he showed us how to grow what we needed. Did you know you have to plant cover crops? Or switch crops from year to year to keep the soil from becoming no good? Or that some crops grown in combination actually help each other grow better than on their own? I didn’t. It was on the job learning. If I could do it all again I’d have at least kept a small garden at home for all these years so that when the time came I’d at least have some grounding in what I was doing. Now, we do okay. You’d be surprised what you can grow and how much of it you can grow when it means the difference between being hungry and being happy. We can’t grow everything we need but we grow enough to trade and sell for what we can’t provide on our own. Grandpaps insurance policy paying off, I suppose. He’s buried up on the hill over that gravel pit, by the way. My dad is up there, too. I think they’d both like to be able to look down on the land and see it doing what they intended it for.
I still have that suitcase of photos, you know. My oldest boy, he’s got an eye for photography. He uses one of those digital cameras. I had him take pictures of everything…the crops, the harvest, the water flowing through the sprinklers, everything. I keep those photos in a separate album and when I look through it I think about my grandfather and what he saw and what he wanted for his family and how he made it happen. If it weren’t for him I wonder if someone would be taking pictures of us standing in line somewhere, skinny and weak, with our skin shrunken and grey. Things aren’t as bad as it was back when he took those photos, but there’s no telling how bad it will get before things get better. I haven’t held a job in three years, my boys can barely find any work that’ll last more than a few months, and sometimes the only thing that brings in money and keeps us going is what we pull out of the ground here.
Ah, but listen to me go on….anyway, you wanted to know my story and how this place came to be, there it is. They say that things are going to get better soon but until then we’ve got this land my grandpappy left us and I know it’ll take care of us as well as we take care if it.
Chap. I
Just sorta go with the flow and let the story tell itself, huh? All right.
I used to be the county roads manager. My job was to make sure the county roads were maintained, plowed in the winter, that sort of thing. Had almost forty people working for me at one point. Nowadays…well, it’s a different story. Nowadays my job is making sure that folks around here have enough to eat.
My grandpappy, that’s his picture on the wall there, was a photographer with the army in World War Two. Back then, you were in it from the beginning to the end. Normally a fella would see all the horrible things that war does but my grandpap, on account of his job, got to see more than his share. Whenever they came across a mass grave, or a concentration camp full of walking skeletons, or a grove of trees with people hanging from ropes he was the one they called to come take pictures of it. War’s got all kinds of horrors but he saw more of them than probably anyone else. Can’t tell me it didn’t make an impression.
‘Course, he never talked about it. Wasn’t until years and years later we found out about it. When he came home in ’45 the first thing he did was get together with his brothers and start driving all over the county looking at land. He wound up buying nearly 500 acres. Back then land was pretty cheap. Everyone figured he was going into farming. Europe was still smoking and a lot of money was made raising grain to send over there. But grandpap had no interest in farming. He took his GI Bill, went to school and became an accountant. Wound up being county treasurer after a few years…job he kept right up until he died.
That five hundred acres, youre looking at it all around us, by the way, was a mystery to a lot of folks. Grandpap leased it out in hundred acre lots to tenant farmers. Didn’t ask for anything other than what he needed to cover taxes. Every year he’d have the farmers move to one of the other hundred acre lots. In ’49 he bought a parcel adjoining and leased out the rights to a gravel company. They came in and dug out enough gravel and rock to grade most of the roads in this county. Grandpap had them use their machines and dig him a couple wells at either end of the property..deep ones…and let the tenant farmers use it to irrigate the place. After about fifteen years the lease expired, the company moved on and grandpap was the proud owner of a water filled hole in the ground. We’d all thought he lost his mind. We’d swim or fish in the gravel pit as it filled with greenish water. After a few years you couldn’t hold your breath long enough to swim to the bottom and come back up.
When he got too old to keep track of things he handed the whole shebang over to my dad. Invited him over for dinner one night, just him and my dad. Next day dad came home and there was something different about him. He had this old suitcase that grandpap gave him. Never talked about it, never showed it to us kids, just shoved it way back in his closet and told us kids if he ever caught us in that closet he’d beat us so hard we’d never sit down again. We believed him. Dad had a look about him that said he wasn’t fooling around.
When grandpap died we all figured dad would sell the land and that hole in the ground gravel pit and maybe do something big with the money. But he didn’t do a thing. Every year the farmers shuffled around, the taxes got paid, and we kids wished he’d sell the place and we could go someplace exciting like Disneyland.
I was in my early forties when dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Doctor said it had gone on too long and if there was anything dad wanted to do he had better do it in the next year. The weight fell off him and after about nine months he could barely walk across the house without help. He knew time was getting close. He called me up one day and said to come down and have dinner with him, just him and me. There was something he wanted to talk to me about, he said. Me and the brothers figured the old man was going to pass on the property to me just like his dad had passed it on to him. We had decided that whoever got the property was going to split it up amongst the brothers and we’d all cash out and move on with our lives. Do the things we had always wanted. Travel, new houses, new cars, college for the kids…that land was worth a few bucks.
Dad didn’t eat much any more, what with the cancer medications and therapies making him nauseous all the time. We mostly sat around and talked a bit and I wondered when he was going to come around. He reached into the sideboard, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and poured a small glass for me and just a splash for himself. He struggled to get out of his chair and when he was finally upright he told me to take the glasses and follow him. I was dumbstruck..I’d never seen my dad drink before and now he was offering me a drink and expected me to drink with him. I followed him into his study. It was the room he’d used as his office when his own accounting practice had been in full swing. He told me to sit down and have a drink. I did so. When he fell heavily into that padded leather chair of his I noticed the suitcase sitting next to him. Open it up, he said. I leaned forward and picked up the suitcase. Part of me thought maybe there was gold or money in it, a family secret fortune, but to my surprise it was just suitcase full of old photo albums.
Your grandfather, he said, showed this to me the day he deeded over the property to me. He said that you can’t own that land without knowing what its for and what it can do. He told me to look through those photo albums and look carefully at the people in those pictures. Look at their faces, look at their clothes, at their eyes…see how they live and how they’re dying. When you’ve looked through every picture there, we’ll talk about the property. So I did. And now I’m telling you to do the same thing.
I opened the albums and the first thing that jumped out at me was a picture of a row of bodies laying along a street. They were all lined up, like firewood, as far as the image could capture down the length of the street. Even in the grainy black and white there was no mistaking the horrible scenes in the pictures. Page after page of pictures that grandpap had taken during his time in Europe photographing the wars cruelties and horrors. Pictures of bodies, of emaciated figures who only barely looked human, children with swollen bellies and tufts of hair missing from their heads…it was some pretty ugly stuff, I’m here to tell you. A suitcase full of pictures of what kind of horror could come upon a civilized society in only a few years. Grandpap had documented the whole thing, and kept these images…I had no idea why and I finally closed the last book. I finished the whiskey my dad had poured for me and now I knew why he had offered it to me…things like these needed a bit of numbing. It was quiet for a moment and he spoke.
My father, your grandfather, saw these things firsthand during the war, he said. He told me that when he got back from Europe that he realized that no matter what there would never be a time when he or his family would ever be like those people..crazed from hunger, weak, hopeless, dying… He bought that land and held it all these years against the possibility of something happening…war, panic, depression, whatever. But he told me when he signed it over to me that it was always to be kept just the way it was. Those folks he had farming it, you remember them? They rotate around every year so the soil doesn’t get used up. He never charged those people for the use of the land because they kept it fertilized, tilled, disked and irrigated for him. If he ever needed it, it would be ready for planting. That gravel pit, he made that deal so there’d be that quarry there full of water. It’s filled with algae and probably tastes like crap but that pit holds enough water that if you had to you could irrigate enough acreage to keep you and the family fed for an entire season if it didn’t rain. Those wells he had the quarrymen dig? They go more much deeper than the water table. If they ran dry then there’s no water anywhere in this county. I’m giving you the same story he gave me when he handed that land over to me. He’d seen those things…those terrible things… and wanted the best insurance he could for his family. I thought he was out of his mind when he told me the story and handed the papers over to me but as time goes by I think he was right. This is our insurance. I’m handing it over to you. The papers are on my desk here and tomorrow we’ll head to the courthouse and get the proper stamps. But you can’t tell your brothers about why we’re keeping this land. Your grandfather made me keep it a secret from my brothers and I’m telling you to keep it a secret from yours. When I asked him why he said it was because too many people knowing could convince themselves to do something else…to sell the property…and they’d think it was the right thing to do. But if one person takes it on and keeps the reason a secret then they’re more resolute, more strong, more determined to make sure the land stays in the family for the right reasons. I haven’t got long, son. You know it and the doctors know it and I know it. You’re getting the property, the stories and the photos. They’re yours now and it’s your job to keep this thing for the safety of our entire family. Maybe we’ll never see things like he saw, but he loved his family enough that he wanted them cared for and this was his way of doing it. I love you and your brothers and now I’m passing that gift on to you. They’re going to try to get you to sell it off, or split it up or do something with it but you’ve got to stay firm, son. If you ever have any doubts, you look at those photos…that’s why they’re there. I haven’t been sitting on my butt the last few years doing nothing, you know. There’s life insurance, a little money in the bank, this house…enough of an inheritance to pass on that your brothers won’t feel that they didn’t get anything. But no matter what, you do not let this property pass out of the family. Keep it as it is. You’re the oldest, it’s your responsibility. When you think you can’t handle it anymore you hand it down and you tell the same story I told you, you show the pictures that I showed you. But this property stays in the family, no matter what.
And that was that. I took the suitcase, went home that night, and signed the papers the next day with my dad at the courthouse. My brothers thought I was trying to cheat them out of what they thought was their rightful inheritance. One of them didn’t talk to me for a few years. They’re all out there now, with their families, helping in the fields or working the business end of things. Dad was right. Grandpap was right. When we had the drought last year we had enough water to keep one of the fields irrigated all summer. It kept us from starving that year.
This year we’ve got enough coming in to feed ourselves, the hands, our neighbors and still have enough for sale and trade. When they had that craziness with all that lawlessness two years ago we managed through it because everyone around here knew that if we went under everyone would go hungry. We can make food, so we’re going to be okay.
It wasn’t always this way. We didn’t just jump onto a tractor one day and make food pop out of the ground. We made some mistakes and we made some smart moves. The remaining tenant farmer had been with us for almost twentyfive years. When the jobs dried up and the pantry started getting empty he showed us how to grow what we needed. Did you know you have to plant cover crops? Or switch crops from year to year to keep the soil from becoming no good? Or that some crops grown in combination actually help each other grow better than on their own? I didn’t. It was on the job learning. If I could do it all again I’d have at least kept a small garden at home for all these years so that when the time came I’d at least have some grounding in what I was doing. Now, we do okay. You’d be surprised what you can grow and how much of it you can grow when it means the difference between being hungry and being happy. We can’t grow everything we need but we grow enough to trade and sell for what we can’t provide on our own. Grandpaps insurance policy paying off, I suppose. He’s buried up on the hill over that gravel pit, by the way. My dad is up there, too. I think they’d both like to be able to look down on the land and see it doing what they intended it for.
I still have that suitcase of photos, you know. My oldest boy, he’s got an eye for photography. He uses one of those digital cameras. I had him take pictures of everything…the crops, the harvest, the water flowing through the sprinklers, everything. I keep those photos in a separate album and when I look through it I think about my grandfather and what he saw and what he wanted for his family and how he made it happen. If it weren’t for him I wonder if someone would be taking pictures of us standing in line somewhere, skinny and weak, with our skin shrunken and grey. Things aren’t as bad as it was back when he took those photos, but there’s no telling how bad it will get before things get better. I haven’t held a job in three years, my boys can barely find any work that’ll last more than a few months, and sometimes the only thing that brings in money and keeps us going is what we pull out of the ground here.
Ah, but listen to me go on….anyway, you wanted to know my story and how this place came to be, there it is. They say that things are going to get better soon but until then we’ve got this land my grandpappy left us and I know it’ll take care of us as well as we take care if it.
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