If music wasn’t all-consuming before, it quickly became that way. I stopped cutting my hair, got illegal tattoos, and eventually the band let me start performing out front. At the farm, I pretty much quit doing any chores whatsoever. My aunt and uncle were at a loss, so they chose to ignore me, which kept our conflicts to a minimum. We even stopped eating together. I devoted more time to music, fantasizing about playing to massive crowds in sold-out venues.
In retrospect, I probably should have known it would never work out, since the band wasn’t all that good. All of our songs were in the screamy, post-punk vein, and while some people enjoyed the music, I’m pretty sure most of the audiences we played to in our part of eastern North Carolina weren’t dazzled. Nonetheless, we managed to find a tiny niche, and until almost the end of my senior year in high school, we played twenty or twenty-five weekends a year in dives as far away as Charlotte.
But there was friction in the band, and it grew worse over time. The lead singer insisted we play only the songs he’d written, and while it might not sound like a big deal, ego has killed more bands than just about anything. Adding insult to injury, the rest of us knew that most of his songs were mediocre. Eventually he announced that he was moving to Los Angeles to make it on his own, since none of us appreciated his genius. As soon as he stomped off, the drummer—at twenty-seven, he was the oldest among us—announced that he was quitting, as well, which wasn’t a surprise, either, since his girlfriend had been pushing him to settle down for a while. As he put away his kit and loaded it in the car, the other three of us nodded at one another, knowing it was over, and packed up. After that night, I never spoke to any of them again.
Strangely, I was less depressed than simply lost. As much as I’d enjoyed performing, there was too much drama and too little momentum that might lead the band anywhere. At the same time, I had no idea what to do with my life, so I just went through the motions. I graduated high school—probably because the teachers didn’t want to have to deal with me for another year—and spent a lot of time in my room, writing music and recording songs I posted to Spotify and Instagram and YouTube. No one seemed to care. Little by little, I began pitching in at the farm again, though it was apparent that my aunt and uncle had long since given up on me. More important, I started to take stock of my life, especially as I spent more time on the property. As self-absorbed as I’d been, even I could see that my aunt and uncle were getting older and that the farm was struggling. When I’d first arrived as a child, the farm grew corn, cotton, blueberries, tobacco, and we raised thousands of chickens for processing. All that had changed in the past few years. Bad crops and bad business decisions and bad prices and bad loans meant that a good portion of the original land had been either sold or leased to our neighbors. I wondered how I could have missed the changes as they’d been happening, even though I knew the answer.
Then, on a warm August morning, my uncle had a massive heart attack while walking toward the tractor. His left anterior descending artery was blocked at the origin; as the folks at the hospital explained, this kind of heart attack is often referred to as a widow-maker, because the odds of survival are incredibly slim. Maybe it was all the buttered bread he ate at dinners, but he died even before the ambulance arrived. My aunt was the one who found him, and I’ve never heard anyone scream and wail the way she did that morning.
Paige came home for the service and stayed for a little while, having left her child with her husband and motherin-law. I worried that her return would create more strife, but my sister seemed to recognize that something had broken inside my aunt in the same way my sister sometimes felt broken. It’s impossible to know what goes on in people’s private lives, but because I’d never seen my aunt or uncle act all that romantic toward each other, I guess I’d grown up thinking that they were more like business partners than deeply in love. Obviously, I was wrong about that. To my eyes, my aunt seemed almost shrunken in the aftermath. She barely ate and carried a handkerchief to soak up her constant stream of tears. Paige listened to familiar stories for hours, kept up the house, and made sure the employees at the farm adhered to a schedule. But she couldn’t stay forever, and after she left, I suddenly found myself trying to take care of things in the same way my sister had been doing.
In addition to managing the farm and making sure my aunt was eating enough, I began leafing through the pile of invoices and records on my uncle’s desk. Even my rudimentary math skills let me know the whole operation was a mess. Though the tobacco crop still made money, the chickens, corn, and cotton had become steadily losing propositions. To stave off a looming bankruptcy, my uncle had already arranged to lease more land to the neighbors. While that would solve the immediate problem, I knew it would leave the farm with a bigger long-term issue. My initial reaction was to urge my aunt to sell the rest of the farm outright so she could buy a small house and retire, but she nixed that idea immediately. Around that same time, I also found clippings from various magazines and newsletters that my uncle had collected, which discussed the market for healthier and more-exotic food options, along with notes and revenue projections he’d already completed. My uncle may have been quiet and not much of a businessman overall, but he’d clearly been considering changes. I discussed those with my aunt, and she eventually agreed that the only option was to put my uncle’s plans in motion.
We didn’t have the money to do much right off the bat, but over the last seven years, with tremendous effort, risks, challenges, financial help from Paige, occasional lucky breaks, and way too many sleepless nights, we slowly transitioned from raising chickens for processing to specializing in organic cage-free eggs, which have a much higher profit margin; we offer them to grocery stores throughout North and South Carolina. While we still grow tobacco, we used the remaining land to concentrate on heirloom tomatoes, the kind that are popular in upscale restaurants and pricey grocery stores, and the margin on those has proved to be substantial, as well. Four years ago, the farm turned a profit for the first time in ages, and we began to lower our debt to reasonable levels. We even took back some of the leases from our neighbors, so the farm is actually growing again, and last year the farm earned more than ever.
Like I said, I’m pretty good at what I do.
What I am is a farmer.
Yeah, I know. My career path sometimes strikes even me as unlikely, especially since I’d spent years of my life begrudging pretty much everything associated with the farm. Over time, I’ve come to accept the notion that we don’t always get to choose our paths in life; sometimes, they choose us.
I’m also glad I’ve been able to help my aunt. Paige is proud of me, and I should know, since we see a lot of each other these days. Her marriage came to a terrible end—pretty much the worst imaginable—and she moved back to the farm six years ago. For a while we all lived in the house like the old days, but it didn’t take long to realize sharing a room with my sister—as adults—wasn’t something that either Paige or I wanted to do. In the end, I built my aunt a smaller, more manageable house across the road, at the far corner of the property. Now my sister and I live together, which might sound strange to some people, but I enjoy it, since she’s still my best friend in the world. She does her stained-glass thing in the barn, I farm, and we eat together a few times a week. She’s become a fairly decent cook, and when we take our seats at the table, I’m sometimes reminded of all the dinners we had growing up.