When my wife, Donna, and I were in our 20’s, Mary Porter and her husband, Herb, invited us to spend the weekend at her parent’s farm in Walnut, North Carolina.
It would be a threefer weekend:
***Donna and Mary were close friends, still are, and they would be able to talk all day and half the night.
***Our boys and their boys were about the same age and they would play in the creek together.
***Herb and I would help Mary’s father, William Shelton, harvest his burley tobacco.
Herb had told William that he was bringing a man and a half up there to help him — Herb being the man, me being the half a man — so the pressure was on.
Burley tobacco, grown in the mountains, is not harvested by the leaf, like Eastern North Carolina flue-cured tobacco. It’s harvested by the stalk. Five or six stalks are speared onto a stick, and then leaned against each other, like a wigwam, for a few days until the leaves wilt.
Our job was to carry those sticks of tobacco to a trailer, hauled them to a barn, and hang them up to cure.
At first it was easy. You grabbed a stick by both ends, held it high over your head so the top leaves wouldn’t drag on the ground, walked to the trailer, and piled them up. Nothing to it.
Then you carried another stick of tobacco. And another one. And another.
This was a mountain farm so there were a lot of good size rocks in the field and they would trip you if you weren’t careful. Sometimes they’d trip you even if you were careful. You could trip on a tobacco plant stob too, and they were everywhere. And as the day began to heat up, I began to wear down a little.
Each time we filled the wagon William or Herb would climb up on William’s tractor and pull the trailer to a curing barn. And then we would hang the sticks, starting at the top of the barn and working our way down.
Noontime was such a blessing — I needed a break. Mary’s mother, Pearl, cooked an enormous dinner, couple of meats, four or five vegetables, two desserts. It was good eating, and I needed every calorie.
After dinner we went back to the the field and each stick of tobacco I carried seemed to weigh a little more than the last one. I was a newspaperman so I was not accustomed to real work. [I only had one tiny callus, on the side of my left thumb from hitting the space bar on my typewriter.] Even so, I made it though Day One. One more day and I’d be headed home with my pride intact.
That evening Pearl cooked another big meal and I ate my share and then some, maybe. After supper I excused myself, took a bath, and by 8 o’clock I was in bed. In a few seconds, I was asleep.
When I woke up I knew I wasn’t going to make it through Day Two — I hadn’t recovered from Day One. I told my wife these exact words, I remember them well: “They’ve got me.”
Donna, who had just finished talking with Mary and come to bed –that’s what woke me up — said the sweetest thing to me. She said, “It’s not time to get up, Pat. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning.”
Postscript: I did just fine on Day Two.
Coming Monday: The Pencil Check