Slow Burning and Sweet

John Hand worked for City Transit twisting wrenches in the bus barns for more than thirty years. He retired, and decided to garden and to grow tobacco, because some other retired guy on coffee row with a trucker cap turned slightly sideways told him (between conspiracy theories about the government and currency manipulation) tobacco couldn’t be grown in Southern Alberta. Soil, climate, humidity – none of it is right. Tobacco? Can’t be done.

“I’ll try it,” he said. “I can make anything grow. Where there’s a will—and water—there’s a way.”

It isn’t technically legal either, you need a quota/permit/license to grow tobacco, but that’s what the internet is for. Mary, his wife, got one of the grandkids to find a place that would send seeds and she provided the credit card info and address.

The seeds came in the mail without legal repercussions and they were tiny. Tobacco seed is astonishingly small and it doesn’t germinate easily, but John set it in water in small glasses in the windowsill above the sink and sure enough, the seeds germinated. He planted them in rows, two feet apart, in a place he judged got the most of the morning sun, and he watered and weeded and fertilized with steer manure purchased in large yellow bags along with a high-dollar, brand-name plant food and the tobacco seemed to thrive.

In July an old Cowboy came to see him. He’d heard about John and his tobacco plants from some of the old men with the angled caps on coffee row. He wanted to see the tobacco plants he’d heard about. John led him though the house, through the kitchen and past the windowsill where the tiny seeds had first germinated in their glass cups and water poured from a pitcher left overnight to evaporate any chlorine.

“What are you fixin’ to do with that tobacco come the end of August” the Old Cowboy asked.

“Nothing,” John said. “I guess I’ll just knock them down and mulch them up. I don’t smoke and wouldn’t know how to cure it, but I think the mulch will be good for the soil. Maybe somebody will tell me about something else that can’t be grown here next year and I’ll try that.”

“I’ll say you what” the old Cowboy said, “Come the end of August I’ll come and harvest them for you and cure them. I know how it’s done. I have an old garage sitting empty, and I’ll hang ‘em up and dry to cure and see what I can reap from them.”

That was good by John.

The old Cowboy asked him, by way of leaving, if he was any relation to a Scotty Hand who’d cooked on the Mackenzie ranch many years ago.

“I sure am,” John told him. “Somehow, in some way. A cousin of my dad’s – a shirttail relative of some sort. But that’s as much as I know.”

“My daddy cowboyed on the Mackenzie with him then,” the Old Cowboy said, “back during the Depression. He and a man named Clifford who ran coyotes with a pack of dogs for the bounty on their pelts and some of the boys from the reserve like the Goodstrikers, the Crowshoes, and the Wells. Men with first names like Rufus and Mumfert and Charlie.”

“Is that so?” John said, not really asking a question. “Indians too?”

“Indians make the best Cowboys” said the old Cowboy. They are born to the horse, and they all ride and rodeo. If you chuckwagoned at Stampede, you got your outriders from the reservation. But they need cash money too, they have wives and children, so they cowboyed on the Mackenzie. It’s different now, but not that much different. You go on up to Stampede, or down to Cheyenne, or even to the NRA finals, and you’ll see men with those same last names in the saddle, riding and roping, only the money’s gotten bigger. Bigger in the rodeos is all though. There ain’t no money left in being a working cowboy because there ain’t any cowboy work left.”

John let him out and then came back in. He took out his hearing aids and turned on the TV. Mary could hear it loud and clear out in the kitchen. He didn’t like the feel of them, and it wore on her sometimes how he wouldn’t wear them in the house and couldn’t hear her. She washed dishes by hand again, it was a rare day there was more than the two of them in the house to make for enough dishes to fill the dishwasher.

The Old Cowboy stopped by coffee row a couple of times just to ask how the plants were doing and listen on the malfeasance of elected officials and of conspiracy both general and specific. It seemed that day by day, month by month, the bill of each old man’s caps got a little more off-center. In turn he told stories of bad-tempered cooks and Cowboy Poets, and of sleeping in stock cars taking bulls to the livestock show in Toronto, separated from them only by lengths of chain strung from one side of the car to the other and laying their bedrolls on the same straw from which they bedded the bulls.

August came, sere and hard, like all Augusts here since the end of the last ice-age, bent on cracking the earth and tiring out anything that walked upon it. John misted the tobacco plants in the cool before sunrise and in the shade of the fence when the sun began to lean into its gradual descent in the West. The Old Cowboy came and took down the tobacco plants, big and leafy now unlike anything that grew here naturally.

“I’ll be back,” he said, “and we’ll sit and have us a good long smoke.

“I don’t smoke,” John said.

Doesn’t matter,” said the Old Cowboy. “I’ll smoke and I’ll tell you about the old days on the ranch and rodeos and Indians. I know a few good stories.”

In a month he was back with a sandwich bag full of tobacco and some rolling papers, white and thin. He and John drew up chairs in the garage with the door open all the way and rolled up a cigarette expertly salting the tobacco on the paper with his fingers like an expert should, then rolling it up tight with a lick. He lit it up with a match that flared up on the first strike like the muse Shakespeare had once wrote of and began to smoke.

“Ah, that’s alright,” The Old Cowboy said. “You know” he said, “tobacco – real tobacco – should taste a little sweet and the smoke be mild. It should burn slow too, little more than an ember. A good smoke should last a while. It is to be enjoyed. These packaged smokes you buy these days burn like flares and taste like varnish – they are all chemistry, no botany. Unnatural. Should those things be banned? Yes, they should be banned. But not tobacco, not tobacco grown and reaped and air-cured like this. Hell, this should be free to everyone who needs it. I am convinced that it’s not the tobacco that kills a man, it’s the method of manufacture.”

John nodded. “Slow burning and a little sweet” he said by way of agreeing.

The Old Cowboy continued. “That coyote-skinner Clifford – he rolled his own just like this. He taught me how to do it. I was fifteen. This is more than sixty years ago on the Mackenzie. He married a little Scots-Irish girl that worked in the cookhouse. Francine I think. Her daddy was a blacksmith in town who later became a mechanic. It was common to pass from the blacksmith’s trade into the mechanic’s as the automobile superseded the horse. A man who works with tools is a man who works with tools. Things move, whether they walk or are pulled or are propelled. Francine wasn’t more than one hundred pounds and it was her job to pump two five-gallon buckets of water from the pump and then walk it back uphill to the cookhouse. They needed a lot of water. In those days they fed three squares per day to more than eighty hands and all were cooked on wood-burning stoves. She’d be up and down, up and down, with her buckets all day long starting a half-hour before sunrise and by the end of the day she’d be plumb wore-out. Cliff would come in and see to his horse, then carry her last few buckets up that hill, three or four trips at least. That’s why she married him. That’s as good a reason to get married as any I think.”

John nodded. The smoke did indeed smell sweet. Nothing like the cigarettes he’d smelled in the last few years that burned like gasoline and smelled like weed-killer.

“I think I will have one” he said, and the Old Cowboy rolled one up for him and lit it from a single strike of a real match, just like he had his own.

The Cowboy continued with his stories while they smoked. The earth once had two moons he said, and the second was lost with the creation of man. When wolves howl, they howl not at the moon that we have, but in memory of the moon that is gone, trying to call it back and restore the world to the time before man. They will never succeed, but they don’t know that. All wolves are part of the first wolf, all animals part of the first animal of their kind, but every man is different from every other man, both to the men that came before him and the men to come after, that is why men are not animals. He said too that in the depression, out riding on the Mackenzie, golden eagles flew over from time to time come down from the aeries in the mountains and their shadows in passing startled the horses and calves drew close to their mothers. There are few golden eagles now and he hadn’t seen one in flight for many years but he’d seen one on the reservation, in the front yard of a house in Standoff,  that a man had tethered to a post in his backyard. The talons were thick and strong like a blacksmith’s hand, as large or larger than the hand of a large man, and had the eagle worn a wedding ring he was sure that you could drop a silver dollar through it and he marveled at what he thought must be the terror of its grip and was sad that it had come to this, to see such a thing tethered to a post in a yard. It was 1975 then and he’d taken his grandson to see it and wished he hadn’t. The golden eagle was to other predatory birds as angels are to men, one a more perfect inception of the other, superior in motion, form and eye.

As their tobacco burned down (no one would call them cigarettes) he told a story about a man he knew who had raised bull mastiff’s, large dogs, big and strong, stronger than a man in their necks and shoulders, and how if the dogs took to fighting the owner would break it up by coming up on one dog or the other from behind and jamming his thumb hard and quick into their rectum. The dog, thus violated would submit immediately and the fight be broken off. The man had scars on his hands from trying to pry the dogs apart by their collars in fights previous to being instructed in this method but another breeder had told him to use his thumb just so and he’d been uninjured ever since.

John laughed hard at that and the Old Cowboy laughed hard with him in the manner of man sharing a joke he knows will be pleasing to all parties. Both agreed that this method might break up more than dogfights, even those fights between boys or men or possibly, should a man be brave enough to try, contests between boars, bulls or even bears.

In the kitchen Mary heard them laugh, full and clear, from their seats in the garage and wondered what they had come up with. She smelled the smoke of their tobacco too and thought it not unpleasant exactly, but not something she’d want in the house. In the drying rack beside the drink there were two plates, two bowls, two coffee cups and two each of knives, forks and spoons.

Their tobacco done the Old Cowboy left and John walked him back out of the house through the kitchen and then the front door and they said their good-byes.

“What are you two old coots laughing at” Mary called out after she’d heard John let out the Cowboy and shut the door but he’d already popped out his hearing aids and did not hear her. He was soon in front of the TV with the volume high and his mouth and nostrils still warm with the smoke of the tobacco, slow burning and a little sweet.

The Old Cowboy didn’t live to Christmas. A story he’d never told: He’d had pancreatic cancer the whole time. It didn’t metastasize, he had the right blood to endure, but he too walked up to his last day like everyone eventually does. They said in the hospital that he was in good form and told stories up until the last twenty-four hours when he slept mostly and then his soul moved on and away.

The old men on coffee row speak of the travesty of government and you can’t keep their caps straight on the heads even if you try stapling them in place and John thought he might grow tobacco again or might not but no one could think of anything that wouldn’t grow without the will and the water except for maple trees and John said that a tree like that was a quarter-century project and he didn’t have the time for that no matter what he had for will or water.

Spring came and he decided to plant zucchini but when he dug up the tobacco plot for planting he thought he could still smell the sweet, slow smell in the roots and black soil and with it the sweat on the flanks of horses being tended to out on the Mackenzie in July of 1930, the bedding straw in the railway cars for the bulls, and see in the reflected sun in the Old Cowboy’s eye the marks the eagle left on the pole where it was tethered.

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author bio:

Puschart and Best of the Net nominee Steve Passey is from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the collections Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock (Tortoise Books) and The Coachella Madrigals (Luminous Press) and many other individual things. He is also part of the editorial collective at The Black Dog Review.