I’m a Peasant, I’m Used to It

Yesterday my chainsaw ran out of gas and I put the chain brake on, pushed my ear buckets back on my head and looked up. I saw a thick column of ink black smoke boiling into the sky. It was not leaves burning. They burn with a thin grey color. This was the black of oil, of gas, of metal. It was machine death. I put the saw down and walked toward the end of the row. When I came out from under the trees I saw that the smoke was from Bill’s place. If his tractor went up in a pasture and that pasture caught, his hundred acres would burn right toward where I stood, on the orchard, where another forty acres were ready to go. I turned the corner and looked down the road. Gary stood at the end of Bill’s drive talking to him. I heard sirens in the distance. It was under control. Gary does not pay me to stand and stare so I went back into the orchard. I had 160 peach trees to cut down into firewood and I was half finished.

Later, covered in sawdust and my hands black to the quick, I stood by the gate and talked to Bill. He described the aluminum casing of the zero-turn mower’s engine block melting in the fire’s heat and the pool that it made in the grass. He was on the zero-turn when it caught fire. He jumped off just before the two diesel tanks burst into flame.

I thought of Bill that night as I sat outside the tenant cottage I live in. Bill’s farm is down the street from the farm I live on. I do not own the farm; I just work the owner’s land. When Bill was a teenager he and his father farmed the land I live on for the people who owned the place then. But I didn’t think of that. What I thought of was the mower bursting into flame and Bill making it out alive and I thought of Bill’s son who died when the tractor rolled and crushed him. On Bill’s farm, Bill and Gary built a timber frame barn by hand, just the two of them, over many years. Hurricane Sandy knocked it flat. It still lies in a rotting pile.

I lied.

These things passed as images through my mind but what I thought of, what I kept coming back to, was anger and a question. The anger was the blank nameless injustice of it, of how much this one man has been forced to take, of how much he has endured. And that was my question: how much can one man’s heart take?

In the fields and barns and machine shops and construction sites, there is no career advancement because the word career does not exist. It is do or don’t do. You either, make it through the day alive and come back the next, or you are broken.

This is not an exaggeration.

At the orchard this summer we lost field hands by lunch. The thirty-pound peach crates strapped to their chests in the thick July heat, going up and down ladders, up and down again and again, wore them to nothing.

This is what life looks like in the places the Brooklyn writing scene refuses to recognize. This is what it means to work, to go all in and know that if you fail, you have nothing.

I want to hand Bill and Gary Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) and Patrick Michael Finn’s two books, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet (2011) and A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich (2008), and tell them that it’s in there, that the breaking and loss and everyday death of the heart has been said before and is being said now, that they, we, us, aren’t the only ones. But I am not sure Bill’s heart can take these books. I had a hard...