nonfiction
- elichvar
- Oct 14
- 8 min read
Recitation
by Ivor Chodkowski
Excerpted from Promised Land: Farm Stories from the Landscapes of Capitalism, a memoir in progress.
“This is the second time,” she said, delivering the words in a tone of factual accounting rather than as either a judgment or a disappointment. She seemed intent not to speculate and yet seemed to want to ask a question. She turned her hands a bit when she talked, the high tunnel production wrap-up of a full season of tomato leaf tar and cracking still showing on her thumbs and fingers, the backs of her knuckles. It takes fifty feet of picking to begin to gather noticeable tar on your hands and arms, first green on the tips and sides of your fingers and a glistening in the hair on your arms, then as you start in on your second and third hundred-foot row, your hands and arms are more black than green. I always think as I’d been told “cousin to tobacco,” the tars similar enough as I crush a ripe tomato, rubbing the pieces in with the sweat and dirt and along my nails and knuckles knowing the acid cuts the tar far better than soap.
On occasion, Kathy would tilt the world to one side a bit, introducing her husband to a customer and saying, “This is my husband, James, he just got out of prison for killing my last lover,” but she’d not really fool anyone. All of the vendors and most of the customers at the farmer’s market knew that James, large man though he is, was kind and quiet and most days had his hands full with Kathy.
Kathy was right as far as she knew. She’d not known that a wealthy pizza magnate bought most of the first farm I’d worked, sending the various parts of the farm I’d been on for three years, including my small part, into upheaval. The previous and concurrent inhabitants and friends of mine, Jim and Mary, lost out as well, as Mary’s mother decided on the sale on the same day Jim and Mary saw the buyer walking the fields in the distance. A man was mowing ahead of the buyer. In my mind, when Jim told me, I imagined the buyer’s expensive shoes and someone hollering the instruction, “Run along ahead so he’ll not slip and fall in the tall grasses.”
Kathy knew though that, second or third or not, I’d had to leave the farm up nearer to where she and James farmed in 2003. That farm had actually been the second we’d had to leave. I wondered at it being twenty years since this earlier displacement. We’d loaded our one old Massey Ferguson 165, a PTO-driven rototiller, a bush hog, and the bows and ground posts from our high tunnel onto a long flatbed trailer. We’d had to dig out the ground posts that we’d driven in with sledgehammers using a huge three-inch bolt that slipped into the open top of the steel post. Driving the posts had me in mind of a carnival when we erected the thing, each of us carnies driving the posts, squaring the space, dropping the bows, and waiting tentatively for the crier’s call we knew would never come: “the greatest show on earth,” or the greatest the earth might show as we imagined what we might become: husbands to plants, cultivators of soil, carriers of water, harvesters, sales people, would-be mechanics, whistlers, giants, musicians, shills, ringmasters, poets, and pitchmen.
We piled every other thing on the trailer we could, ratcheting down as the air grew colder and it began to rain: we piled on tens of thousands of square feet of floating row cover, hundreds of metal T-posts, some of them bent from the work of pulling them from the ground; we carried hoses and irrigation; we carried the irrigation parts in five-gallon plastic buckets, posts, emitters, tubing, connectors, wrenches, knives, PVC pipe, and cans of cement we hoped hadn’t already dried; we carried the weights we’d devised, concrete blocks and bricks; we carried sod staples that we’d used to secure row covers. Among what we piled on were our old farm clothes, stained, torn, repaired, and again torn; farm boots with holes and without, and rain gear that we knew, if it worked well, would only keep us dry.[1] We brought them knowing the cold would again come, our fingers all but clicking as they tapped together side to side in the cold and wet. While we hoped, we ratcheted down tools we knew were not sufficient: shovels, hoes, rakes, post-hole diggers, snips, knives, tape, and rubber bands. We brought what we had learned and we brought the how though we were sure it would have come even if we’d forgotten it, the mistaken and the correct, the singular and the multiple from our repeated efforts, like the weed seed we’d forgotten to scrape from the bottoms of our boots. By our sides, in the cab of the truck, we brought boxes and bins and buckets of vegetable, herb, and flower seeds.
It was the fall, early winter of 2003 and 2004 when we were turned out from the knobs of southern Indiana. It was the kind of day where the wet soaked and chilled us and kept us from shaking off the cold. We had loaded everything we had for the jump across the river where we would go on to farm an edge of one of Louisville’s last remaining significant pieces of agricultural land. My oldest son, Isaiah, had died on November 4, 2003, after three years living with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. In my mind I could still hear him answer when I called out to him. It was and is still simple, I call his name and he says, “yes,” his voice trembling a bit with anticipation and at times with firmness and most often with reassurance. Isaiah’s mother and I were in debt to credit card companies for over thirty thousand dollars, owed on a tractor, and were unable to work and also increasingly unable to pay for the farm work we paid others to do while we couldn’t.
In between trips to the hospital and in the run-up to Isaiah’s bone marrow transplant, we cooked. We cooked scrambled eggs and pancakes and toast and pasta and we ate the vegetables and salads we grew in the fields down the hill from the farmhouse, and we ordered pizza which Isaiah would delicately and assiduously disassemble, taking the green olives from the cheese and removing the cheese before replacing the olives. Isaiah would wake me in the middle of the night, have me cook, then release me, saying “You can go back to sleep now, Daddy,” the steroids he took in increments of weeks driving an unrelenting hunger.
We cooked and we read books. Isaiah’s mother and I read in shifts to Isaiah together with his younger brother Noah. Born on the floor in the bedroom in the little farmhouse where we lived, Noah only ever knew his brother while he was sick. Noah followed Isaiah everywhere not knowing that being sick mattered, and Isaiah, not knowing he knew more than his brother would ever want to know, held out his hand for Noah to follow.
Among so many books, we read Stuart Little over and over, so that, at one point, while driving home from the hospital, Isaiah began a recitation of nearly a full page from near where Stuart “placed the arrow against the cord of the bow and waited,” to when he shot the arrow into the cat’s ear, Stuart thinking and Isaiah exclaiming in triumph “this is the finest thing I’ve ever done.”
And, not to leave it undone, Isaiah wrapped the scene, slipping seemingly as he would from time to time into third person, saying, “Isaiah loves Arni’s Pizza,” or, “Isaiah loves blueberry pancakes,” and then fully inhabiting if not exactly “constructing the text,” as the reader response theorists would have it, saying “it was a tired little mouse that crawled into bed a few minutes later—tired but ready for sleep at last.”[2]
In my critical theory classes, I’d squirm a bit as I laughed to and at myself, imagining the writer running down the alley, upending trash cans and ducking under the limbs of untended trees, a cat startled from its nest of kittens and screeching as a can tumbles over exposing the tiny mewing babes, the writer still stumbling along in pursuit of who knows who, screaming, “my text is still unconstructed,” before tripping on the lip of a sewer cap and sprawling, blank paper dispersing over the width of the alley and in the weeds and untended curbs of the alley’s edges, the reader in this case having escaped uncaptured and, perhaps, uncultured if not just plainly unaware of the pursuit. And, yet, I had done it all the time with my boys, all three of them, Isaiah, Noah, and Eliah, partly reader, partly would-be hierophant, fully dismembering the premise of Curious George, writing over the man with a yellow hat, saying instead that George would be quickly and safely returned after a brief and self-indulgent experience on the part of the yellow-hatted man, the word “zoo” never again expected to land with anything other than a dull thud. Or I’d write over Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy and her hero Almanzo whose exploits with his parents and siblings were a part of a series of exhaustive and marvelous instruction manuals for homesteading, an only slightly removed and older version of what we now might refer to as cottagecore. Some of the instruction manual is still helpful enough. And nearly all of the book is still clear enough, including the book’s and the series’ support of the genocidal imperative of manifest destiny, among other significant and worthwhile lines of critique.
I would just skip over the racist shit and squirm in my chair, revising whole parts of books while offering myself the limp forgiveness of participatory textual development. Leaving the farm this third time after (“twenty years ago,” as Kathy reminded me somewhat pointedly) having beaten an ignominious retreat from more rural life, partly to town and partly to a third tenant arrangement I hoped would be temporary—it wasn’t some transition on the road out from feudalism. It was the same barely reconstructed peasant experience, just differently situated and somehow only tenuously connected with the possibility of choice, which seems just a game we like to play with ourselves.
End Notes:
[1] After Tim O’Brien. The Things They Carried. Penguin, 1990, 3-25. O’Brien’s extraordinary and otherworldly catalogue of “the things they carried” goes on for pages in its recollection of conscripted soldiers’ preparations for the Vietnam War and, as compared with Homer’s heroic preparatory catalogues in the Iliad, O’Brien’s are without glory. While the word “epic” is used loosely these days, O’Brien’s book earns the moniker while at once disassembling heroes and nation-building as epic tropes. For anyone with an admiration for catalogues (like me), this book is essential.
2 E.B. White. Stuart Little. Harper, 1945, 27.
Ivor Chodkowski was a farmer for thirty years before returning to writing. “Recitation” is a chapter from his manuscript Promised Land: Farm Stories from the Landscapes of Capitalism. His sons, Noah and Eliah, are twenty-five and twenty. Isaiah would have been twenty-eight. Ivor lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Abby, two dogs, and a cat. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon.