by Andrew Grey
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Foster said, and Javi nodded before closing the door. Foster waited until Javi disappeared into the darkness before turning around and driving home.
Chapter 1
A YEAR—the world could change a lot in a year. At least, Foster’s outlook had certainly changed after spending two weeks around Javi. He hadn’t done anything more than watch, but it had been enough to fire his imagination for months after the stunning young man and his family had left for their next job. Not that any of that really mattered now. Meeting Javi had spawned an awakening of self-awareness for Foster, but that had all been pushed aside. It didn’t matter now; so little mattered now. The choices Foster had hoped to have had all changed too.
“Foster, come inside,” his grandmother said gently from the kitchen door.
“I need to take care of the cows,” he said, even though it was too early for milking. He needed something to take his mind off the weight—like his shirts were all lined with lead—that had settled on his shoulders in the past three days.
“I’ll take care of it, Foster,” Mr. Armitage said gently. He had a dairy farm a few miles away and had been one of his father’s good friends. “Go on inside and see to the guests. Your mom and grandmother need you now.” He placed his hand on Foster’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about things out here.”
That was just it. Things out here were familiar and hadn’t changed. It was everything inside the house that had changed. But he nodded and turned anyway. “Thank you.” There would be plenty of chances for him to milk the cows. Twice a day milkings stretched out in front of him like a road heading straight through the middle of the rest of his life.
He pulled open the back door and went into the kitchen. The house was full of people all speaking in hushed tones. His mother sat on the sofa, talking quietly to one old family friend after another, a revolving place for everyone to pay their respects to the person left behind. He went in search of his grandmother and found her at the sink.
“Grandma, what…?” he said softly.
“This helps me feel like things are normal,” she whispered. “Go on in there and talk to people. They’ve been asking after you, and believe it or not, they’re here to try to help.”
“Dad is still dead, and it doesn’t matter what happens in there. He’ll still be gone.”
“Yes, he will, and I will have lost a son and you a father. But it helps to talk and to share stories. It’s part of the grieving process.” Her lower lip quivered, and Foster gathered her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder. Tears welled in his eyes, but they dried up quickly. He wasn’t going to blubber all over the place. He was the man of the family now, the one who had to see to it that his mother and grandmother were taken care of.
When his grandmother’s arms clasped around his waist, he stood still and let her take whatever comfort she needed. Foster wasn’t ready for comfort. All he kept seeing and feeling was how he wasn’t ready for the responsibility life had just dropped at his feet. But it was there anyway, and he had to pick it up and run with it. “It’s going to be okay, Grandma.”
“A woman should never outlive her children. It hurts way too damn much,” she said, and all Foster could do was nod in agreement.
“Katie,” his mother said from the sofa, and Foster guided his grandmother over and helped her sit down. He stepped away, and before he realized it, he was engulfed and brought into a conversation with a number of his father’s old cronies.
“They’re expecting the price of corn to rise again,” Greg Sharpton said. “That’s going to hurt like hell when we have to buy feed, and if the price of milk goes any lower, we’ll all be out of business.” He was in his midforties, and every time Foster had seen him, he’d always been full of gloom and doom.
“No one can predict the future,” said Mark Hansen, the youngest of the group.
“That’s easy for you to say—you grow your own corn.” Sharpton turned to Foster. “You do too.”
“Greg, we aren’t here to talk about the doomed farm economy,” the oldest man of the group, John Dulles, added. “Yes, things are a challenge right now. We can’t keep doing the same things and expect to have roses at the end of the day.”
“What are you saying?” Sharpton asked.
“Diversify. That’s what you need to do,” Mr. Dulles said. He was in his sixties and had done very well. How he’d done it had been a secret of sorts, and Mr. Dulles rarely said anything about his finances or his business. “I made a plan years ago, and it came to fruition.” He stepped away, and the others continued their conversation. Foster wasn’t really interested, so he stepped away as well.
He checked on his mother and grandmother, who were talking and seemed all right. Mrs. Dulles was sitting with them and had brought them plates from the grief buffet that had the dining room table groaning under its weight.
“I thought you could use this,” Mr. Dulles said, pressing a coffee mug into his hand. Foster looked into the mug and had never been so thankful to see beer in his life. “Have you made any plans?”
Foster shook his head. There hadn’t been time to think.
“That’s fine. You will.” He moved Foster to the side of the room. “You’re going to be flooded with people who have advice or are willing to help you by taking the farm off your hands. They may even throw what sounds like a lot of money at you.” Mr. Dulles sipped from his mug, and Foster wondered if there was beer in that one as well. “Don’t do it. The land you have here is worth a great deal. The fields are some of the best in the county, and the acres of asparagus are priceless. No one else has anything like that, and if they wanted to plant, it would take years before anything was ready.”
“But what do I do?”
“Take stock of what you have, both good and bad, confirm your financial position, and then diversify. Sharpton will say farming is an art, but he’s full of it. Hansen will tell you it’s a science and that you should watch weather patterns and crap like that. But farming is a business, and you need to run your farm as a business. Cash flow, accounting, all that. You have products to sell and you need to get the most from them. Some people, like me, go big and produce on a large scale. I have quality product at a low cost per unit, and I command a good price for my chickens as well as the eggs.” He looked around. “We also sell at some farm markets. People come every week to buy what we have, and they pay retail for it. Don’t underestimate how much that can save your ass.”
“I can’t take milk to market,” Foster said.
“No. But you can take other things that will generate cash. Think of the farm as a business first and make your decisions that way.” He looked over at the group of men still carrying on their discussion. “I can’t tell you what you should do, but if you want some advice later, or just want to talk, I’ll certainly listen.”
Mr. Armitage came over and nodded to Foster before joining their little group. “The herd is fine, and the barn is all set for tonight’s milking. The dairy came and I supervised the testing and loading of the milk. They’ll be by again tomorrow, of course.”
“Thank you.” Foster was definitely more than a little out of it at the moment. He sipped from his mug, the hoppy brew bracing him and helping to open his eyes.
“You need anything, you let me know. This is a large place to run on your own,” Mr. Armitage said.
“I appreciate the advice and the offer,” Foster told him. “I’ve been doing a lot of the work for a while now.” He took another drink. “Dad had been slowing down a lot over the past few months. I thought it was him getting a little older and stepping back to let me run things.” He swallowed. “Now we know it was his heart.” The damn fool hated doctors and hadn’t gone, even though his mother had asked him to go many times.
“Well, we’re all here for you,” Mr. Armitage said and shook Foster’s hand before gathering his wife and saying good-bye to Foster’s mother and grandmother.
“Farmers help each other, but nobody is g
oing to work your land for you,” Mr. Dulles said. “And you know as well as I do that Frank Armitage has had his eye on this farm and land since your dad refused to sell it to his dad when your grandfather passed. There’s a lot of history in this room—some good, some not. You hear me?”
“Yes. What about you? Do you want the farm too?”
“No. I have my business. And yes, I’d buy your farm and turn most of it into fields where I could grow feed. That’s what I need, but that isn’t the best use of this particular land. So I don’t have my eye on your farm the way others do.” He clapped Foster on the shoulder. “Don’t concern yourself with any of that. You worry about running your business the way it needs to be run. You’re young, but you have a lot of experience in your mother and grandmother.” He smiled slightly. “I’m going to get another piece of that chocolate pie before it’s gone.”
Foster thanked him and stood alone after he’d walked away. He drank the rest of the beer and thought about going in search of some more to take the edge off.
“Foster,” his mother called gently, and he went over to her. “I forgot to tell you that those people are coming in two weeks, the ones who picked for us last year. Your father must have made the arrangements.”
“I’ll take care of it.” He patted her hand. He still had to go through all his father’s notes to figure out what plans he’d made and to pick up on what was yet to be done, and this was just another item to add to his list. But first he had to get through what was left of this day.
An hour later, Foster said good-bye to the last of the guests. His mother and grandmother appeared ready to fall over. “Thank you, Mrs. Dulles, for all your help.” She’d packed away the last of the food that had been brought and then said good-bye.
Finally. Foster pulled off his tie and loosened his collar. “I’m going up to change and then take care of the milking.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No, Mom. Go and put your feet up, rest. The past three days have been way too hectic.”
“There’s too much to do.”
“But we don’t have to do it all today.” Foster hugged her and then went up to his room. He changed into jeans and a light long-sleeved shirt. Then he went out and let the first group of cows into the barn. They went right to their stalls, and Foster cleaned their udders and began putting on the milking machines. Powered by compressed air, the machines did the time-intensive work, with the milk flowing directly through pipes to the collection vat. His job was to keep the milking machines moving. He had a limited number, so he transitioned them every five minutes or so until the cows were done. Then he shifted the girls out of the barn and cleaned up the inevitable mess with a shovel and hose before bringing in the next group. The entire process took about two hours, and by the time he got back to the house, he was exhausted.
“Go up to bed,” his mother said, but Foster instead went into his father’s office to try to make sense of the records and where the farm stood financially.
The herd records were easy to find. His father had kept detailed records of all injections and treatments as well as parentage and so on. The financial records were another matter. It took more digging to find what he was looking for. As he was looking, he also found a life insurance policy that he hoped like hell was still paid up. He set the policy in the stack of things he needed to talk to his mother about.
Finally he got to the bank statements and was shocked. There was money in the bank—not a lot, but some. Probably enough to get them through to the fall. But it was the debts that shocked him. The farm had a mortgage, which didn’t surprise him, but the others did. Even credit cards.
By the time he couldn’t stay awake anymore, he had a really good idea of just how bleak their overall financial health—not just the farm, but his family—really was. What scared the hell out of him was that this was what he knew about. There had to be more he hadn’t found yet.
Concerned and scared, but too tired to think straight, Foster went upstairs and got into bed. It would all be there in the morning, and he’d need to work out how to pay all the debts off.
Chapter 2
THE NEXT few weeks didn’t make things easier.
“Mom,” he said softly as he sat at the dining room table where his family had eaten for generations. It was old, heavy, huge, and as much a part of the family history as the rest of the farm.
“Your father had insurance,” she said.
“Yes, and he left you and me as the beneficiaries, just like you and Dad added me to the farm a few years ago. But he’s also been borrowing and spending on credit cards, and unless we use the life insurance money to pay them off, we’re going to be eaten alive.”
“How much is there, really?” she asked, and Foster passed over his calculations. “Forty-three thousand dollars?” She seemed as floored as Foster.
“I went online and looked at the past bills. There are things on the bills like last year’s Christmas presents, and winter coats at two hundred dollars each.” He passed over the bills. He was beginning to wonder what he’d find if he went into his mother’s closet. “What have you been doing?”
“I go into Grand Rapids once a month and—” She stared. “I didn’t know. He never showed me the bills.”
“No. He just paid the minimum. He wanted to make you happy. The thing is, we have to pay all these off. So the hundred and fifty thousand from the insurance is one-third gone, like that. There’s also the mortgage and the line of credit against the farm. We can’t pay the mortgage off, but there’s another fifty thousand in second-mortgage debt. So there goes another third. The rest we’re going to need to make sure we don’t slip back to where we were.”
“Oh God.” She put her hands over her face and began to cry.
“We’ll be all right, but we have to be smarter.”
“What should we do?” she asked.
Foster had given it some thought. “First thing, we’re going to enlarge the garden, and I’ve found out there’s a farmer’s market in Grand Rapids each Saturday. It’s well attended, and Mr. Dulles said he could help get us in. That means we’re going to have to plan what we grow and sell a lot of what we produce. That will help with cash flow.”
“Who’s going to go?”
“You and Grandma. You can drive, and I’ll have everything set up for you. It’s one day a week, and it will get you away from here.”
“What was that about me?” Grandma Katie asked as she joined them.
“We’re going to sell our vegetables at the market. Foster thought you and I could do it,” his mother explained.
“You bet your ass we can do it. I told my son we should have been doing that years ago, but he wasn’t interested.” There were times when Foster loved his grandmother. “We didn’t build this farm to see it fail.”
“But what about getting through the winter?”
“Harriet,” his grandmother snapped. “We’ve got enough food put up to feed an army. Yes, we’ll need some for ourselves, but we always have extra that we give to friends and pass on. Now we’re going to grow more and sell all the extra.”
“I think we’re going to sell as much of the asparagus as we can, too. Dad was getting almost a dollar a pound for the whole crop, but in the store it’s three to four dollars a pound. So we can take some of it to market and do well at two pounds for five dollars. I doubt we can sell the whole crop that way, but I bet we can sell enough to make some real money.”
“Now that’s thinking. When Harley planted those fields, he was thinking long term and knew he could make some money with it. They’ve been paying off for years,” his grandmother said.
“And they will this year too.” Foster was glad he had their support. “I was also thinking that you used to make cheese. I remember it as a kid.”
“Yes, I used to, but I haven’t in years.” She looked up at him. “Honey, I’d love to try, but I don’t have it in me any longer. I’ll teach you how, though.”
“I’ll learn too,” h
is mother said.
“I know this is going to be added work for us, but we’ll be doing it for ourselves. Lately it seems we’ve been selling our products to a supplier or wholesaler, and the prices have gotten low enough that Dad wasn’t able to break even. We have to somehow.”
“What about sweet corn?” Grandma Katie asked.
“I planted a couple rows along the edge of the field closest to the house, like usual. When the harvest time comes, we’ll use some and sell the rest.” Now that he had an idea of how they could make extra money, he was ready to throw himself into it. “I don’t know how much we’re going to make, but if we don’t try, we aren’t going to get anything.”
“Okay,” his mother said. Clouds had begun to roll in, and she turned to his grandmother. “I think you and I need to get out to the garden. If it’s going to rain, then the seeds need to be in the ground.”
“I’ll be right out. I’m going to make the garden as big as I can.”
Lord help them all if this didn’t work out. Vegetables were hard work, and with three of them instead of four, they would be stretched to the limit. His mother and grandmother would do what they could, but he’d have to make up any shortfall. He had no illusions about that. But he had to try because giving up wasn’t an option.
Foster checked his watch and went out to get the additional feed for the herd. He delivered it and then helped his mother and grandmother in the garden. He tilled up an area that hadn’t been used in a few years, so it had set well and was a chore. Then he started raking while his mother got her tomatoes planted and his grandmother planted her leafy veggies. They’d planned the garden in patches, and by the time thunder sounded in the distance, they had made really good progress.
“Hold off a little longer,” Grandma Katie said as she looked at the sky.
“What about melons and pumpkins?” his mother suggested.
“Too fussy and we never get a good yield. Let’s stick to what’s always done well for us,” Foster said, and his mother nodded her agreement.
