Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.
On a recent early morning drive to a noontime appointment a state away, my drowsy eyes spied the tell-tale short shanks of a corn field recently cut down by a silage chopper.
The 65-mph glimpse tripped many 30-year-old memories about September silage chopping on the dairy farm of my youth. I could hear the throaty roar of spinning chopper knives. For a moment I saw tanned men on green tractors pulling red silage wagons beside gray silos.
As these vignettes spun into a longer playing daydream, I saw Jackie, a hired man who came with the farm when my grandfather purchased it in the late 1940s. That’s the way it was in the Mississippi Bottoms back then; like a barn or a fence, people went with the land.
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And Jackie did because, in truth, he had no choice. He was an ageless bachelor who needed the job to support his mother and three brothers.
And since he could neither read nor write, his destiny was a life as a farmhand.
He was the runt of the clan, five foot-six and no more than 140 pounds-when he still had all his teeth.
For years, Jackie had but two uniforms, a summer one and a winter one, and neither landed in a washing machine more than once a week.
His summer attire was two socks, two workshoes, one colored T-shirt and a pair of stiff Duck Head overalls.
His winter outfit was the same but it included long underwear, Duck Head coveralls, and a cap with earmuffs.
Jackie’s daily schedule varied as little as his clothes. He’d arrive at the dairy barn at 6 each morning for a cup of Folgers instant coffee and the day’s marching orders from my father.
He’d work till noon, go home to check his mail and grab lunch, then return to work until 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday, 51 weeks a year, his unchanging days melted into unchanging weeks into unchanging years.
Usually, the highlight of Jackie’s day was mail. It was his link to the outside world-his family never owned a television or telephone. Since he couldn’t read, one of my brothers or I would read his mail to him before the long afternoon of work began at 1 p.m.
Jackie could work, too; he was a tough little man.
His standard jobs bordered on the unthinking-stacking hay, hauling grain, spreading manure.
He never milked the cows, drove the combine, cultivated or mowed hay because, as he made plain, he didn’t want to.
Jackie never made what today would be called a living wage; nobody on that farm did.
But since his job included a free house, utilities, meat and milk, Jackie’s shiny leather billfold – carried in the bib of his overalls – always contained what he called “walkin’ around” money.
And if he wanted a new shotgun or a new car, he’d just go to the bank to withdraw the cash from a rarely tapped savings account to cover it. Because he couldn’t write, he did not maintain a chequing account.
One Sunday evening while milking with his brother, Howard, I was told the story of how Jackie remained illiterate even though his siblings “got schoolin’.”
According to Howard, Jackie was in the second grade of the nearby one-room schoolhouse when Santa came to visit one bleak Depression Christmas.
Jackie, a sharp-eyed kid, thought St. Nick looked like the neighborhood poacher everybody knew only as Buck.
“So’s when Jackie got on Santa’s lap to get his candy,” related Howard, “he yanked off the whiskers that old Buck was wearing to show everybody that Santa was a fake.
“The school teacher took him outside and blistered him good with a pecan branch.
“Then she sent him home-without his candy. After that, he never went back.
“Yessir, that’s how it was.”
Howard told the tale with humor, laughing as his mind replayed the scene of fat old Buck being unmasked by scrawny little Jackie.
Jackie lived the next 50 years within a half mile of that schoolhouse, working 30 of those years on our farm until – don’t you know it – some smartypants college kid, me, came back to the farm and replaced him.
Two years after I pushed him out of his near-lifetime job, I left the farm for college again.
By then, however, Jackie had a job stacking boxes at a nearby cake mix factory.
Cancer claimed him a decade later, a shriveled, still-tanned runt of a quiet, working man.
A generation ago, there were a million or more Jackies in American agriculture.
Few, if any, had stories written about their plain, honest lives.
Now one has.
