What Came After Read Online Free PDF Page B

tools over their shoulders and a weariness to their gait. A line of long shacks stood on a rise parallel to the road, low buildings painted red a long long time ago but gone to gray now. With strips of vertical siding that wasn’t just siding but opened itself up to the wind and the weather here and there. Long hanging slats, hinged at the top and free at the bottom. Banging in the breeze. She tilted her face toward the sound to study the buildings with the sun shining down on them at a pretty good angle right now and asked what it was that people kept in them. Being at that age where your father still knows everything.
    “Tobacco,” he said. “Or they did in the old days.” These were tobacco barns. Drying sheds. Nobody used them anymore. The tobacco that grew around here got processed down along the Mason Dixon, so these barns were empty. Not even worth tearing down. He picked her up on his shoulders and she used his big backpack for a seat and they walked on. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there would have been barns everywhere on land like this. All kinds of barns. All over. Filled up with hay and corn and horses and cows. Filled up with machinery like I keep in the quonset hut, but even better.”
    “Even better?”
    “Even better.” And more of it, he said. Tractors and cultivators and harvesters. Machines with blades and harrows and cutters that did the work of a hundred men and never got tired. “Machines almost as big as our house.”
    She laughed to imagine it. She said she thought he was kidding.
    “I’m not. Farming wasn’t always hand labor. People had equipment exactly that big and even bigger. Machines with rubber tires taller than a man. I’ve seen those tires in the dump. Sometimes they catch fire, and when they do they burn for days. On and on. That black smoke you see sometimes, that’s what it is.”
    If the machines did the work of a hundred men, she wondered, then where did all the food go when they got finished growing it? There must have been too much. A hundred times too much.
    Her father laughed. He described the world his own father had known first-hand. Told her there were more people then, but once everything got automated not that many of them had to be farmers. Not actual farmers. Not farmers who got their hands dirty. Just businessmen running factory farms from a distance. Agribusiness.
    She asked if he meant like PharmAgra. She was one smart girl.
    He said that was right. That was it exactly. PharmAgra was the only agribusiness left these days, though. They owned it all. She knew that because she saw their labels everywhere. She knew who her friends’ fathers worked for. What she didn’t know was that PharmAgra was the last of a breed that had once thrived everywhere. The last one standing, the sole relic of a system that had started small and gotten big and then gotten so big that it had to get small again. The small taking care of the big just the way things always went in the end. Farmers on their hands and knees pulling poisoned carrots they couldn’t even eat.
    They stopped to rest by the side of the road and watched a line of men carrying hoes slip into a fenced-in field and space themselves along a planted row at regular intervals and fall to working. Industrious as bugs. He put the backpack down in the dirt and opened it up and fished around for a canteen of water and some homemade granola in a paper sack. Homemade out of oats from eastern Pennsylvania and raisins and nuts from what used to be California, stuck together with something factory-made that tasted like honey but wasn’t, since you couldn’t have honey without bees and the last of the bees had passed on a long time ago. Not entirely unmourned, but that was then. All of the ingredients hauled in trucks and processed in factories and hauled in trucks again, but the granola homemade nonetheless. That’s what you called it.
    In the sack was a folded-over note from Liz addressed to both of them, but he