Hard Row

ers who rake the straw for mulch, and Seth’s daughter

Jessica boards a couple of horses to pay for the upkeep

on her own horse.

Today, we were all gathered at Seth and Minnie’s to

try to reach an agreement as to what the main money

crop would be. Outside, the weather was raw and wintry

with a forecast of freezing rain. Inside things were start-

ing to heat up. The boys planned to apply for a grant to

help make the changeover to a different use of the farm,

if they could agree on what that use should be.

It was a very big if and today was not the first time

Haywood and Zach had butted heads on this.

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Zach is one of the “little twins,” so called because he

and Adam are younger than Haywood and Herman, the

“big twins,” and Haywood does not like being lectured

to by a younger brother even if Zach is an assistant prin-

cipal at West Colleton High, where he himself barely

scraped through years earlier. Andrew and Robert are

even older than Haywood, but they listen when Zach

and Seth speak.

Seth is probably the quietest of my eleven older broth-

ers and the most even-tempered. I would never admit

to anybody that I love one of them more than the oth-

ers but I have always felt a special connection to Seth.

He didn’t finish college like Adam, Zach, and I did, but

he reads and listens and, like Daddy, he thinks on things

before he acts. Even Haywood listens to Seth.

So far today, we had discussed the pros and cons of

pick-your-own strawberries, blueberries, blackberries,

or grapes. Someone halfheartedly raised the possibility

of timbering some of the stands of pines. That would

yield a few thousand an acre but was pretty much a one-

time sale, given how long it takes to grow a pine to

market size. Daddy still mourned the longleaf pines that

had to be cut to pay the bills when he was a boy and

“Y’all can do what you like about what’s your’n,” he

said firmly, “but I ain’t interested in selling any more

of mine,” which pretty much scotched that possibility

since none of us wanted to go against him.

“Too bad we can’t grow hemp,” Seth said and my

brothers nodded in gloomy agreement. Hemp is a

wonderful source material of paper and cloth and our

soil and climate would make it a perfect alternative to

tobacco. If it had first been called the paper weed or

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something equally innocuous, North Carolina would

be a huge producer. With a name like hemp though,