Chicken-shit regulations (Fiction)

---Author's notes: I am splitting off the Blain-Cumberland saga from the short-stories because it has taken a life on its own. Short-stories will be published on Monday's at 6:00am EST. Schedule for the Blain-Cumberland stories TBD.---

Blain was not wrong about Sally being more fun to work for than Sig. Sally (also known as Salisbury) was more fun to work with than a barrel of monkeys and twice as entertaining. Sig was, well, dour.

Blain rode his mountain bike about two miles west up the paved, two-lane county road. To his surprise, the higher he went in elevation the more level and fertile looking the fields became.

Sally chatted up a storm as he walked Blain around his property. Sally first showed him a grassed-over water-course. “This is what it should look like” Sally informed him.

The bottom of the water-course was gently concave and covered with grass, and the rim defining the "valley" was smoothly rounded over and grass-covered.

Then Sally led Blain to a gully that he had worked on ten years ago. It didn’t look a thing like the fully-stablized one. It was filled with grapevines and blackberry brambles and the un-eroded pasture above the gully was a rough corduroy of half-rotted logs and furrows. Blain could see raw dirt in places but he could also see the brush had gained a foothold and was fighting back.

Finally, Sally showed Blain a new, growing gully. The sides were raw dirt and the bottom was narrow and rocky. The edges were sharp creases and the sod above the gully was undercut in places. There was nothing green, or gently rounded about the young gully.

“Ya gotta work a gully from the top and work your way down” Sally informed him. Oncet a gully cuts its way in, water funnels into it. Ya gotta stop the tips from growin’ and then ya fill the tips of the gully with brush.”

Blain was confused by “tips” plural until he looked more closely at the gully. There was the main gully but then there were also a bunch of gullies growing out sideways from the main gully feeding into it. The side gullies resembling of the fronds of a fern or frost crystals.

Sally elaborated, “The best brush is grapevines that you ain’t cut from the roots. Pull them out of the tree and lay them in the gullies. They throw roots and grow like a house-afire.”

“Iffen you can't git grapevines, blackberry is almost as good and so is that nasty-ass multiflora rose and anything else that is vining”.

“Then ya gotta weight it down with brush ta mash the stems of them vines into the dirt so they can strike roots. Ya lay it so the tips of the branches is pointin’ downhill. Ya gonna drive some four-foot long stakes angled inta the ground and then start droppin’ brush over them. Kinda like throwing horse-shoes. The stakes are gonna keep that brush from washin’ away in the first good rain.” 

"Remember, tips DOWNHILL. Otherwise the stakes won't hold the brush. It'll just slide off."

“Above the gully, ya gonna do what ya can to divert the water away from the tip of the gully” Sally said. “Simple-as-pie but a lot of work.”

Sally showed Blain the shed with the tools and where he could cut brush. There was no shortage of thorny brush in the weedy pasture. Blain was glad he had the foresight to bring work gloves.

Over the course of the morning, Blain decided that Sally didn’t have a lot of folks he could talk with. Sally talked a mile-a-minute and barely paused to breath.

Mrs Sally was a terror inside the home so Sally spent a lot of time outside.

Sally had emphysema but that didn’t effect his ability to talk.

Sally was part Cherokee Indian and had a small patch of “Three Sisters”.

When Blain asked what that was, Sally said “The Injuns used to grow corn and cornfield beans and squash all in one field. The beans and squash climbed on the corn and they covered the ground and kept the weeds down.”

“Never seen a field like that” Blain admitted.

“Looks messy and you can’t harvest it with machines” Sally admitted. “But that is how they done it.”

“Corn and beans and squash have big seeds and make big plants. The weeds have small seeds an plant themselves. ‘Tween what they planted and what grew natural, they might pick 10 different kinds of vegetables outa one patch and eat all summer long...and into the winter and spring to boot.” Sally said.

Thinking back to what he knew Sig grew he asked “Didn’t they grow potatoes?”

“Nope. They didn’t come till after the white man came. Injuns ain’t stupid. They jumped on a good thing when they saw it.” Sally said. “Ya can feed a lotta people with potatoes.”

That is when Blain screwed up. He shared information he wasn’t sure was his to share. “Sig says we gotta grow a lot more food. Says we might have more people comin’ our way.”

As soon as it was out of his mouth, Blain regretted it.

Sally shot Blain a look that Blain could not decipher.

After about a half-minute during which Sally was uncharacteristically quiet, Sally said “I don’t doubt that you are going to have a lot of company, maybe more than you can feed.”

"It happened with Y2k and then again in 2009 when the economy went into the shitter. Lotsa folks came down here thinkin' this was a good place to hunker down."

“Wouldn’t be a problem, though, if Sig used a little bit of fertilizer” Sally continued after a bit of thought.

Blain leaned back to look up at Sally. Blain had been pounding a two-and-a-half-inch diameter, Red-Maple stake into the wet, rocky ground with a sledge hammer and he asked “Whaddya mean?”

Sally didn’t need a lot of encouragement to resume talking.

“Without any fertilizer, these upland fields might give you 25, maybe 30 bushel of corn an acre or maybe 120 boxes of potatoes. With fertilizer, you can get more...a lot more” Sally said.

“Well, that ain’t gonna work. We are as poor as church mice. Fertilizer cost a lot of money” Blain said. He had seen the prices on the bags at the grain elevator!

“Maybe” Sally said.

That caught Blain’s attention. Sally rarely used one word when twenty would suffice.

“Whaddya mean, ‘Maybe’?” Blain demanded.

“Broiler litter” Sally said. “Chicken shit, if you prefer. We got a bunch of farmers who raise meat chickens around here. In fact, we got one just a half mile up the road.”

“Government says he has to meet regulations to get rid of his chicken-shit. Costs him a lot of money meeting those chicken-shit regulations” Sally said, chuckling at the joke he made.

“If I show up there with a trailer and talk nice to the right guy, I get a load of free fertilizer and he don’t have to pay to have it hauled away. Alls I gotta do is keep my mouth shut and not drive over the scales” Sally said.

Blain’s disbelief must have showed on his face.

“Say bub, looks like you could use a break. Whaddya say I SHOW you what I am talking about?” Sally suggested.

The way Blain figured it, Sally owned his time for the next three days. If Sally wanted to drive him around in a truck, Blain wasn’t going to complain.

Together, they hitched an old trailer made from the back-end of a pickup truck to Sally’s truck and drove a half-mile down the road. The trailer had boards that extended the sides and front upward another fifteen inches.

Sally drove to the loading dock taking care to swing wide of the scales and he pulled up with the trailer alongside the corner bay.

“Somebody will be out in a minute. They got wireless security” Sally explained.

Sure enough, a minute later a young man about Blain’s age came sauntering out of a man-door.

“'Lo, Sally! Whats up?” the young man asked. Looking across the width of the cab he saw Blain and seemed to recognize him.

“My name’s Dale” the young man stated. “Weren’t you in town the other day?” the young man asked.

“Well, ya I was” Blain admitted. "My name is Blain."

“Dontchya recognize me? I was working in the mill when you-n-Lliam dropped in” Dale said.

Blain was not about to admit that all of the faces were a blur to him.

“Anyway, whatchya need, Sally?” Dale asked again.

“I was wonderin’ if ya could spare anya that chicken-shit?” Sally asked.

Dale seemed to think that was a real good joke.

“Help yourself” Dale said. "Just make sure you don't drive across the scale. You drive across that scale I gotta get two weights and take a sample to analyze whats in the chicken-shit an I gotta get information about where you are spreading it."

Then Dale turned and walked back into the broiler shed to his "second" job.

And that is how Blain learned to use a skid-steer with a bucket, moving chicken-shit from a steaming pile at one end of the dock and dumping into Sally’s trailer at the other end of the dock. Slow and easy, a bit at a time.

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