I pulled my father’s top left desk drawer out slowly, so it wouldn’t make a sound. It was a summer afternoon; my father was still out in the fields and wouldn’t be home for hours. I was nine years old. With the drawer halfway open, I could see his navy-leather, ledger-style checkbook, which he used to buy supplies like tobacco seeds. When I pulled the drawer all the way out, I found what I was looking for: the blue-and-white pack of True cigarettes tucked away in the back. As the months went by, I would revisit the drawer, watching like a detective as one by one each cigarette went missing until eventually, a new pack appeared. The company’s advertising slogan, “True has nothing to hide,” didn’t apply to my father and his habit.
The same drawer also held my father’s mechanical engineering set from college: a black leather trifold case lined with blue velvet and held shut with two metal snaps. The top flap was imprinted with the words “Keuffel & Esser Co., New York” in gold. I would open the case to touch the small, metal instruments: three compasses with flexible legs and removable pencil points; two drawing pens; and one semicircular protractor. I handled them like treasures to be returned in perfect order. I never saw my father use them. Maybe he held on to them much like you might keep your engagement ring in a drawer long after the break up: it reminds you of what used to be. My father had spent only two years at Western Kentucky University before returning to the farm at my grandparents’ urging, one of his many acts of duty and obligation.
I also never saw my father smoke. I never removed a cigarette from the secret pack. If I had and my father found out, then we’d know each other’s secrets. Yet, I wanted to know my father better; I wanted to be granted permission to enter his interior world.
In 1973, tobacco was Kentucky’s leading cash crop and the lifeblood of our family farming operation. The USDA’s tobacco price-support program ensured farmers received a minimum price per acre, which meant a guaranteed income for us. My father held a vision of a family farm, with the words family and farm held in equal importance. Since the majority of the work required to raise a tobacco crop was done by hand, we each had a particular job. My grandpa would drive the tractor slowly down each plowed row of the tobacco patch. Attached to the tractor was the setting machine, manned by my parents in the two built-in seats. They would place one seedling after another in rubber tongs attached to a central wheel. As the wheel turned, the tongs closed, carrying the seedlings downward and plunging the root into the ground.
My brother, Jeff, and I walked up and down each row behind the machine. When my parents would occasionally miss the rotating tong, they would gently toss a seedling onto the soft dirt for us to plant by hand. We took turns twisting the leg of an old wooden L-shaped peg into the well-plowed earth, sending the seedling down to do its work. I liked feeling the ground underneath my bare feet and knowing I belonged to something bigger, something helping my family, even when doing the lowliest job.
Months earlier, my grandfather and father had prepared the tobacco beds by piling dry sticks and brush upon the land and setting them ablaze. Doing so sterilized the soil, eliminated weeds and killed bacteria that causes disease. They carefully plowed and raked the burned soil until it was soft and smooth and then spread a mixture of seeds and fertilizer by hand across the earth. A protective layer of straw came next, followed by a layer made of light, cotton fabric. Each step was precise and executed with devotion, elevating the process to the level of ritual.
Since my family grew tobacco, it made sense to me that I could smoke, though smoking was in opposition the strict moral code to which my family adhered. I pushed up against this code, which included no rock music and no films that weren’t G-rated. Yet I noticed the nuances, like the fact that my grandfather chewed tobacco. I liked the music that my uncles—my mother’s brothers, who were nearing age twenty—played: The Beatles, John Denver, Eric Clapton, Blue Swede. In the car with my mother, she and I belted out with Helen Reddy, “I am woman, hear me roar…,” as the song blared from the radio. My family huddled in front of our black-and-white television set in our small den and, with 90 million people worldwide, watched Billie Jean King defeat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. That Thursday evening in 1973, I knew I was watching the role of women change.
I also witnessed major changes on our family farm. But by the end of the first decade of my life, 1974, my father had transformed our farm from a family-centric operation to one that relied more heavily on large machinery to scale production, changes that denoted a time filled with love and loss, expansion and contraction. Over my grandfather’s objections, my father had invested a commercial, triple-disc press drill corn planter. He bought a new, self-propelled combine, a large machine used to harvest grain, and studied methodologies to improve his weighted-average, per-acre costs. Cattle were sold. The tobacco barn sheltered large machinery, in addition to tobacco.
It was also the year that “fence row to fence row” planting of corn was the new mantra coming out of Washington. From the mid-fifties to the early-seventies, our farm’s layout had looked like a patchwork quilt: fenced-in plots of land with defined sections for the dairy cows, here; the tobacco beds, there; grazing pastures, here; and the central axis of the farm, there. The patchwork sections were erased when fences were ripped out—the most significant mark of transformation.
One fall Saturday morning when I was nine years old, my father filled his two-ton grain truck bed with shelled corn to take a load to the mill. I asked to go with him, the first step in my plan to ask him to teach me how to smoke. Sitting in the cab of the truck, I bolstered my courage and made my request. He agreed quickly with a slight smile, one an older sibling might wear after, say, a daring a little sister to eat sardines. His permission for me to partake in his secret made me feel big.
An outing by myself, with my father, was exactly where I wanted to be. The only time we spent together alone was on Sunday afternoons when I would lie down beside him on the orange shag carpet in our living room where he liked to nap. I’d slide in close, and he’d wrap one arm around me so my head could rest between his chest and his shoulder. When a breeze would flow in through the open windows, the outside world would fall away, like a gentle tide sweeping away all my problems.
When we arrived at the mill that day, my father pulled into the designated lane and stopped the truck over the receiving pit, an opening at the ground’s surface covered by grates. After he dumped the load of corn in the mill’s hopper, he parked in the lot while the mill workers inspected samples of the corn for insect damage or mold. My father opened the glove box and took out a package of rolling paper and a small, muslin bag of loose tobacco. He said he thought it would be good if I learned to roll a cigarette before I smoked one, like learning to catch a fish before eating one.
He showed me how to hold the thin, delicate rectangular paper, sprinkle the dried tobacco bits down one side, fold the paper carefully, and slowly roll it up. He twisted the ends and let me place the freshly made cigarette between my lips, giving me step by step instructions about how to hold it (firmly but lightly) and how to draw in air when he lit it.
I had looked forward to this father-daughter moment. I thought I would feel as cool as the waif-like woman I’d seen tramping across the double-paged magazine ad in her slim, sea-green jumpsuit, a long cigarette dangling from her fingers. The fancy-free look on her face told me that she answered to no one. She was all glamour and glee, the opposite of how I saw myself. I had thought I would feel grown up, like the girls at the swimming lake who sneaked behind the clubhouse and smoked long, slim Eve cigarettes and returned to their blankets, spread out on the grassy hillside at the lake’s edge, and tossed the floral-designed packages into their straw bags. Most importantly, I thought, somehow, my father and I would feel like equals after sharing the ritual.
But none of that happened.
I sensed embarrassment in him, as if he knew that a good father wouldn’t teach his young daughter how to smoke. He kept checking out the truck windows, like a criminal on the lookout. After taking a few drags, no transformation occurred. I was still a chubby farm girl sitting in a rusty truck outside a shabby feed mill.
I’m sure he hoped that I’d hate the taste and the harshness of the smoke drawn into my lungs, and that this debauchery would be a one-time thing. I rather liked it.
The surgeon general’s warning had been issued a few years prior to my rolling up and smoking with my father, and he often hinted at his inner struggle with producing a crop that could kill another human. Yet, the addictive nature of a sure thing—a guaranteed income—and my father’s determination be successful success kept him raising tobacco.
On my father’s land, I learned both the serenity of isolation and the longing to break boundaries, which was maybe my first experience in holding two competing energies within, wondering which would win.