Pipe Tobacco and Fertilizer (Cumberland Saga)

Sig sat on the west side of his house and waited for Blain. As he waited, he ran a pipe-cleaner down the stem of his old pipe and then gently tapped the barrel against the leg of the chair he was sitting in to knock any old cinders and ashes free.

Then he gently packed it with the first of a small batch of Cavendish his wife had cooked up. Inhaling, he tried to identify the ingredients. Some were easy to pick out, the bourbon and black currants, for instance. Maybe a little bit of vanilla. It was easy to use too much vanilla and have it dominant. There was something else...something a little bit resinous.

Sig had come into smoking a pipe late in life, just like his preaching. In fact, they were directly related.

Sig had fought “The Call” for many years. He was too uneducated. He had lived an unGodly life following construction jobs. But mostly he fought the call because he was terrified of speaking in front of groups: Gasping-for-air, chest-pain, pee-your-pants levels of anxiety.

Finally, it became clear that Sig’s fighting the call was more terrifying than answering it.

Sig’s father had suggested that he smoke a pipe when preparing his Sunday Sermon. The thought of standing in front of people and pretending to be more learned than them caused his brain to lock-up. Now, he couldn’t prepare a sermon without a pipe in his mouth and he couldn't preach without a calming bowl of tobacco beforehand.

Properly lit, Sig pulled in a mouthful of smoke and held it. The strain of TN-90 they grew in Copperhead Cove had significantly more nicotine than modern, commercial strains. It didn’t take much to put his mind in a calm, reflective state.

But he still had nothing. He was getting a little bit worried. It was already Thursday and he had been unable to pick out the Sunday readings.

A frown furrowed his face as he thought of his upcoming conflict with Blain.

Well, it could have been worse.

When Blain approached him all scrubbed up clean with his hair trimmed and wearing his best Sunday-goes-to-meeting clothes, Sig almost panicked. He was sure that Blain was going to ask him for Sarah’s hand in marriage.

If he did, Sig was going to have to say “NO!” and kick him out of Copperhead Cove.

But Blain didn’t ask about Sarah. He asked “Do you have about 30 minutes? I wanna talk about fertilizer.”

Definitely not what Sig expected.

He was in the middle of fitting wooden handles to tools and was not in a good place to be interrupted.

“Bad timimg” Sig grunted, gruffly. “We can talk at my house. Come over about a half-hour before sunset after I have eaten dinner.”

And so now Sig waited.

Sig heard Blain’s feet crunching on the dry leaves before he saw him. Sig waved a hand to let Blain know where to meet. Then he indicated the rocking chair on the other side of the small table where Sig had his Bible, some notebooks and his pipe paraphernalia .

“Nice haircut. Didjya get it in town?” Sig asked.

“Too much money. Sarah gave it to me” Blain responded.

Sig grunted his reply.

Blain had seemed “OK” when he first came to Copperhead Cove but over the months little things about him started to bother Sig. Mostly that Blain showed no initiative...just stood around when he finished something waiting for somebody to tell him what to do next, even though there were a million things that obviously needed doing. That, and that he blew hot-and-cold. Sig never knew which Blain would show up.

Maybe that would have been OK for a hired-hand in regular times, but whether Blain knew it or not, he was auditioning for a bigger job than that. And times were shaping up to be much more challenging than "regular times". There was not going to be room at the feed-trough for a hired-hand who was just going through the motions and waited to be told what to do.
 

Frankly, he had no idea what Sarah saw in him. Sig figured that every big-brother felt the same way about men who were interested in their younger sister. Sig was particularly protective of Sarah. She had not chosen wisely the first time...although in fairness Sig had to admit that she was only 13 when she had first been bedazzled. They married when she was seventeen and things had “gone poorly” after that.

Looking over at Blain, Sig saw a fidgety, young man.

Sig figured he would make it short-and-sweet. No need to let the kid suffer. Let him say his piece, say "No" and send him on his way.

Sig coughed to get his attention. “Whatch on yer mind?”

And Blain started stuttering. Then his face flushed a deep, deep red and beads of sweat popped out like tiny diamonds in the slanting light of the setting sun. Blain seemed to have a hard time drawing in his breath to start speaking.

Sig was struck with a sudden realization. Looking at Blain he could have been looking in the mirror at himself just before leading his first church service fifteen years ago.

“By gum, your scairt shitless, ain’t ya?” Sig exclaimed.

Blain nodded, miserable. He had folded just when he needed to shine.

Sig frowned. “Do ya smoke?” he asked.

“Tobacco?” Blain asked, surprised. It seemed like an odd question.

“Course I mean ‘baccy” Sig said. “We don’t grow the Devil’s Lettuce up here.”

Blain shook his head “No.”

“Bout time ya learned” Sig said as he picked up one of his spares from the table. Sig kept several "extras" just-in-case.

He tamped in a modest charge from the pouch he had just opened and showed Blain how to ignite it by relighting his own.

“Ye ain’t gonna smoke the whole thing. It will make you sick” Sig said.

“Yer gonna pull in a mouthful of smoke and hold it for a heart-beat and then blow it out. We’re gonna talk about nothin’ at all for ‘bout a minute and then you are gonna try another mouthful...I figure three, maybe four pulls and you’ll get settled down to where ya can talk reasonable” Sig told him. 

Figuring that at this point, he had nothing to lose, Blain complied.

Seconds after his second pull on the pipe, Blain felt a pleasant warming rush and calmness settle over him. The buzzing of anxiety settled down to a manageable hum.

Sig could see Blain’s face relax.

“So, you wanna talk about fertilizer?” Sig initiated the conversation.

“Yessir, I do” Blain said.

“You don’t gotta call me “sir”. I work for a living” Sig said.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to call you sir. It is just how I was raised” Blain said.

Sig shrugged his shoulders “Suit yerself.”

Blain started out “Ya know, for the last three-four weeks Sarah has me collecting Bessie’s shit from the pasture and tossing it into the garden.”

Sig nodded. It was work that had to be done when the cow-shit was dry and held together.

“The shit that is close to the garden I just toss. The shit that is too far away, I load in the barrow and wheel it about three, maybe five paces from the edge and then dump it” Blain said.

“So? Why are you telling me this?” Sig asked. Not challenging, just helping Blain get to the point.

“I was here when we were digging potatoes and I noticed that some of the hills had three times more potatoes than some of the other plants. I didn’t think about it because I was just hired help” Blain said.

“But as I was tossing the shit on the garden I realized that the heavy producers were always on the edges of the plots next to the pasture...right where I was tossing the shit. Right where everybody had always tossed the shit” Blain said.

“I seen the same thing” Sig admitted. “I figured it was because being lower, those parts of the field stayed wet longer.”

“Point being” Blain said, warming up to the line of reasoning he had shared with Sarah “we are already fertilizing the edges of the potato field and have been doing it for years and nothing bad happened to the potato plants that were growing in the fifteen feet closest to the pasture.”

“So I figure there is not much risk in fertilizing the MIDDLE of the potato fields to match the edges” Blain said. “At least a few of them as an experiment.”

Sig tugged on his pipe and mentally replayed what those potato fields looked like through the spring, summer and fall. How could he have been so blind? Even though he had a lot of balls to keep up in the air, he should have seen it.

“Where would you get the labor?” Sig asked.

“My algebra class. This is a good rubber-hits-the-road example” Blain said. “I will mix in the lime at the broiler farm and load it into a trailer that Gregor will be pulling. He will drop-and-hook at the bottom of the drive. Lliam will pull the full trailer to the field with the tractor and help unload it with the other students and then bring the empty back down.”

Sig drummed his fingers on the arm of his rocking chair. Being able to double or triple the potatoes per field would provide a lot of ease on the food situation.

“What does Sarah think about all of this?” Sig asked.

“She said you are boss but if you are OK with it, she wants to run an experiment; one field like we always grew them, one with our best guess of what it would take to double the yield of potatoes in the middle and another field with our best-guess of what it would take to triple the yield” Blain said.

“I’m gonna have to sleep on that before I make any kind of commitment, but as of now I don’t have any objections” Sig said.

“Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?” Sig asked, not expecting Blain to have anything more to discuss.

“Yes. I wanna talk about fertilizing the corn, too” Blain said.

Sig recoiled as if he had touched an electric wire.