Aubade of a Farmer

SPRING
Jeddo secures the plow into the spacious void left by his cow and donkey. A crisp clack shakes off the nightly dew and readies the soil for work. The machine takes a delicate detour as its few thorny claws impale the welcoming earth. Then, Jeddo shouts my name while I attempt to sleep in the darkness of a warm dawn, wishing the dirt had been a mattress and the stone a comfortable pillow. His beastly contour moves across the field, escaping the night and urging me on.
I am barely nine and thus deserving of my eight hours, so I rest my head on the stone. Yet, I realize my attempt is aimless; Jeddo’s shouts swell and persist. Their loudness lay heavy like my morning alarm, which now turns human and speeds to wake me. Alas, the earth is no bed, and I stand upright to toil. To be idle on a farm before sunrise? Nonsense!
“I’m here,” I raise my hand, hoping a shred of lost light would illuminate my fingers, but my voice was good enough.
“You don’t want the cow to eat those,” Jeddo collects my fingers and places them near my heart. He makes sure I study the calluses covering his thick knuckles. His pride is hardened skin and dirty fingernails, which remorselessly find their deceptive ways into most small talk and activities. There’s always a splutter of dirt in Teta’s labneh and on that old blue rug of our great grandfathers.
Now, we follow the path of the ancients. A blueprint Jeddo pondered over and mastered for seventy years, so the people in parliament could smoke tobacco.
“It’s a dance, really,” he tells me, “You don’t need sunlight if you trust the soil.”
The faint buzzing of morning flies occasionally breaks the silence. We plow through the soil, awakening earth’s pheromones in our endless churning. We cage a few droplets of this earthly dust, contain it in our veins, and feel it trigger every sensation, screaming about a fecund world that–lonely–asks for our friendship.
Meanwhile, worms begin to creep out and, surviving these beastly steps, acknowledge life’s exuberance by birthing an infinite population wherever the plow disturbs them. Jeddo leans, picks up pieces of the ground, and entrusts me with some. He points to the moving dots, many species dancing in the palm of our hands, rough and unwrinkled, all the same.
He lets the dirt go; the sneaking sunlight makes him wary. He almost fails to breathe trying to find that immortal enemy, which had brought his dance to a sudden halt. He tells me to step back while hailing heavenly curses at “these damned scorpions.” My eyes now trace Jeddo’s sunlit shoes as they urgently move back and forth. The hush becomes irritating; a few noiseless moments of loss and thick fog pluck every sense of peace. Instead, it’s his quiet apprehension all over, and (in a split second), chaos.
He knows what to do: In a transitory action sequence, he picks up a rock and rails it full force onto a spot near him. The loud peal of the stone slamming into another, a squishing sound between the two, stabilizes our adrenaline. I go closer to satisfy my mounting heartbeat and ease the blaring thump in my throat. I find a scorpion tail twitching, but no remains.
“Mohammad, sunrise!” Jeddo points to a boulder he wants us to sit on. We had missed the sun unveiling the sea that held Alexander’s raging ships against the weary Phoenician years ago when these arcane remnants, (barely seen from here), witnessed the streets of Tyr drown in floods of blood. Now, the sun uncovers the hidden landscape for green valleys intercepting greener mountains. And columns of silver, refracted from some miraculous stone, blind us for a second, forcing us to reflect on who had also enjoyed dawn’s death from here: Gilgamesh and Noah’s ship, perhaps even Jesus and Muhammad, all looked beyond and wondered, How dare Alexander defile beauty?
“Jeddo, why do you give our tobacco to the parliament?” I flip a rock with my foot and plunge my finger into the cold mud; a caterpillar dances up my arm.
“In exchange for money, son,” his stained fingers itch the chalky scruff covering his chin. It is ready to occupy his tiny eyes and bushy eyebrows. Teta would argue his scruff needs shaving.
“But what if they don’t give you money?” The insect caresses my arm, wanting the breath of sunlight. But I deny its eviction and force it back into the soil.
“Then, we farm the dirt and eat it.” 

SUMMER
While the seedling grows and leaves begin to clothe her tall body, Jeddo awaits the white flower like a child’s first tooth. He hopes that she lives, her tobacco skirt undefiled by a perverted insect that feeds on the adolescence of nature. He hopes to see her proud, her head winking at the prominent sun, smearing nicotine buds along the rural coast.
And though he never smoked a voluntary puff of the magic he bakes, I doubt that he didn’t steal a whiff of the passing bee, dependent in her drowsy life on just-one-more nicotine rush. He tells us the same bee comes back and urges me to follow it, seeking the queen in her tree-hive. There, no doubt, I’ll find the gold mine of honey!
When his darling matures a month later, and with her an army of siblings ready to be picked, Jeddo harvests them. We (a family of six good workers and many more failures) sit outside in a circle of good mornings at a breakfast that counts as Jeddo’s third. His glee barely breaks a smile, though you see in his eyes a reluctant tear, tainting his hardened wrinkles with internal passion: nature paying us back.
He sits at the head of the rug cross-legged, inhaling the morning sun like long puffs of parliament cigar. Large bites find his mouth open. Mouthfuls of egg, pickle, and labneh storm in at once while the other hand reaches for the olive-filled plate and empties it. He studies the enormous tobacco pile that teasingly overwhelms the rug. Then he peers at the field and the naked tobacco strands longing in the field under us, his dentures grinding even harder because the job–the killing–is not over. I retreat from the rug and, feeling Jeddo’s gaze on me, open the bag of needles: among the stainless steel tools, my fingers find one covered with rust.
“Everyone gets a needle. Hajji, you take the rusty one,” Jeddo commences the rueful mission, remnants of that inexplicable tear now under his scruff and then wet on his red napkin.
Teta, being the expert and thus well-equipped to handle our rusted and poisoned equipment, moves over to the pile. She reaches for the largest tobacco leaf and stabs its healthy heart, where all the veins constrict on a nicotine-filled midpoint. Her needle is attached to a thread twenty centimeters long, which stores the leaves temporarily. So, she pushes them down this line, like John Steinbeck swiping his typewriter to the right, the neighboring paragraph about Okies already in his mind. When she concludes her short story of leaves standing next to each other, Teta adds it to the longer novel. She empties her needle into a longer silk string, which holds two meters of tightly webbed tobacco leaves.
Tobacco unfurls around us as if we’re terraforming our little jungles. It’s everywhere. It hangs under the rings of newly-wed fingers, where it breeds incessant rashes. It hides in the pockets of my older uncles, never daring to spread its smoke near Jeddo and his infamous gaze. It lives inside the lira and the work ethic of villagers. It becomes the final set Jeddo binds that, prematurely ripened, races its fate: The last leaves are strangely dry and red. Tobacco’s sacrifice, our money.
“Sunrise finds itself in these gold and dark patches.” Jeddo poeticizes his job.
“Praise God for you!” we retort, an automatic response about how God may keep him safe forever.
When all the weaving is done, the naked plant sees her children compressed in a stack above, right where the sun glimmers at its brightest and hottest.The many strings of silk take over the driveway, extended between wooden poles that hold the leaves as an offering to the raging sun. They sit there all day: a patch of leaves we’ve stolen, and now are forced to wither and wilt. Jeddo stands under the shade they offer, his shoulder struggling to rest snuggly against the piece of wood. He looks down at the empty land, that which he robbed and reduced to a field of sticks. Above him, the children sit in their silk lines, away from the maternal soil.
I stand in the kitchen window and realize this genocide we commit each year. These so-called children grow old quickly; their fading green is made abusively clear by a crimson touch plighting both edges of the tobacco line. Their color slowly turns into golden rust. Their texture turns brittle and parched. The center, weighed down by the shade, fights this death but ultimately loses to the burning season. An ashy red takes over and mutilates every last child.
A few hundred years ago, we blamed the Turks. They forced us to despoil the land. Yet, Jeddo follows their apathetic footsteps.
The whole year goes into this killing of plants.
“How are we so heartless?” I tell Jeddo, “Why do we grow plants just to kill them?” His eyes pin me with a deep growl that makes mine leave their place. My heart frantically pulses, reaching for the deepest unturned stone that still has tobacco residue clung to its bottom. His gaze roils in my veins and stings my abdomen.
“What do you know about death, son?” His index trembles as it points to a second farm over the hill, fracturing his scowl into morsels of fear and sadness.
“When a wild boar ravages a farm, it leaves nothing. And as winter gets colder and meat portions evaporate, a farmer can smear all the pig shit on his own dense and dimwitted face. He’ll brainlessly wonder how he’d escaped hails of missiles only to become the honorary village beggar.” He rests his eyelids on his palm; two flies soothe his dampened pinky. “So, we protected our farms in shifts until Abu Hassan and his kids heard a rustle on theirs. They shouted about what must have been five or six boars; now their weapons aim to halt any movement. When they let go, the pigs shoot back.”
Jeddo exhales a fervent sigh that slaps me—all our tragedies are true. The pain in farming, in draining tobacco, in fighting for life and health, in repressing the meaning of the fight, hide in him.
“When is the parliament guy coming?” I ask.

FALL
Jeddo’s basement reeks of history. Patterns of fading paint display hidden stories of a war-torn past, losing their white color as they meet the untiled floor. In one spot near the bottom of the wall, the color has grown so old and worn, uncovering three stones. The ceiling, too, cracks from old age, mirroring Teta as she led her children back when war clogged most nights. She would hum her frail lullabies, damning the roar of fire and bombing. Her tiny thighs would become mattresses, numbed under the children’s weight, under the false promise of sunrise–of an impossible tomorrow.
I imagine the moonlight spills on her weary face and soothes five sleeping children. She thanks God her infant doesn’t make a fuss and wonders how the earth had trembled. How propane had filled her wheezing lungs, how she’s almost blind but that growing fire had looked so clear, and how she didn’t fall down the stairs because her eldest helped her.
She blames herself for having horrible vision and condemns the blatant odor of war. Ash drowns the basement windows; its sharp stench makes breathing exhausting and multiplies soft snores. Her hand takes the eldest’s head and buries itself in thick, dark hair. I imagine her inhaling my mom’s consoling sweat; soft indexes take a tour of my mom’s visage because nothing is more comforting than the familiar.
I imagine them huddled there; Teta calms her children with worn-out folklore. And in the warmth of exhales that burned my mom’s fear, the color of the wall – that morbid white – melted.
I follow the path woven into the ceiling, which combats the labyrinth of tobacco cases: Wooden boxes block all outsiders. Yet, I find my way methodically and rest against the spot my family found solace in years ago. Breathing in tobacco blurs my mind, like dust easing its inhaler into a serene sleep. I slump in silence, befriending the earth even after its death, but the door knocks.
A gastric stew with little butterflies for flavor churns my insides. It’s the parliament reaper. He is monstrous. Stocky fingers clutch a long cigarette that touches his broad palm. A metaphor lingers under his unrelenting nails, dirt matching the hair between his knuckles in darkness.
Hair constitutes the larger part of his attire, as if a self-made pelt. His human wool hides all the skin, which burns red in places and mellows into a dark tan. His beard protests all style and cleanliness, shooting fuzzy strands down his neck and up his cheeks, threatening to occupy his eyeballs: all that on a rugged man who’s way too vast and tall.
His firm grip destroys the first case as he unwittingly rips the nails and breaks the wooden bottom, which forces the tobacco out across the floor. His big step leaches all life from our basement as it crushes the leaves; their beauty melts into the ether and hangs in the pregnant air, preparing for the first rainfall. I watch as he hauls our reservoir on his back, as we trade gold for water.
“Three at a time!” I announce my astonishment, my tone asking why everything has to be so fast.
“Yeah,” the parliament guy growls.
“Jeddo said I can take the final case to the truck.” I stare at the crushed remains; the rusted smell of tobacco should give me headaches. “Why are you so big? Is it because you have big parents?”
“Maybe.”
The last and smallest case must be the heaviest. I try lifting it with both hands, but my shoulders disapprove. I pull my knee upwards (so that the box can rest on it) and hop out of the basement. Outside is chill. Coldness speaks its language in nature’s reluctance as the bird forgets to chirp, the tree fails to dress, and the tobacco bag gets too heavy. Beads of sweat ruminate in the nooks of my forehead; my legs, accepting their fate, collapse and let the tobacco loose.
Ahead, Jeddo’s straight posture takes my attention: Something in his fixedness makes my tears flow; I gasp sporadically as he reaches for me. First are his steady steps, then the long stride, then a smile that grows past his wrinkled eyes and laughs at me. Ahead, the parliament truck makes the first turn, grows smaller, then disappears.

WINTER
Were it not for the sunrise painting the land a red velvet and the moon looking so full and pregnant and promising, I would’ve cried. And were it not for mom waking to bad news, racing to catch Jeddo’s last breath and save him, I would’ve felt something. But the car doesn’t start: My uncle, that infant who didn’t fuss, quivers on the phone.
Now, red velvet depletes into gray as the sun wanes and hides behind a thicket of clouds. All the light seems to disappear, closing the curtain on a wary observer whose interest had driven him to believe Jeddo is gone. But, as the boiling teapot whistles and the fog whispers delusion, I know he is lurking in some field, letting the soil kiss his cheek, and little ant colonies chafe his skin–that Jeddo is well.
I pour tea into the cup with the broken handle. I sip the sugarless fluid and burn my tongue so that one more thing is tasteless. The screaming mounts in the other room and becomes muffled. My dad’s shouting, my mom’s crying, my uncle’s fatigued wheezes fade into the wailing wind while the cloud grows. The play is over; Jeddo has to be alive.
But a wave of cold sweeps through me, and the cup’s temperature–it’s warm delusion–is comforting. My mom enters the kitchen and takes the cup away; the instant cold freezes me in my place. Her feelings dance up my arm like that caterpillar from six years ago. She hugs me tightly. Her murmur is clearer than the loudest scream: He is dead. Yet, I feel nothing.
She cries on my shoulder. She cries when we leave the house, when we reach the car, and when the engine rumbles. I knew she hoped the battery would give out–but the machine never fails you. A tractor overpowers a donkey, and Jeddo is not here to claim otherwise.
The machine moves out of the dark garage and into a darker world, which remorselessly writes conclusions: The clouds give birth.
Cars pile up the long driveway, so we walk under the rain. Forceful downpour cascades from Jeddo’s entrance. Relatives console my mom; people I never knew wipe her tears and hold her hand. But I plod forward, peering to the left, where the tobacco farm grows in later seasons. Now, the rain stains its ruined tobacco petals.
People fill Jeddo’s house. Black drapes every corner; mud shakes off the bottom of shoes and sticks to the carpet. I shake a hundred hands like I’m the one who died. Yet, broken faces contrast mine because I don’t waste any tissues. Perhaps I’m still shocked. Perhaps I remain shocked after we bury Jeddo, for grief missed me.
Later we sit for dinner: No one has to call for Jeddo or feed him. You look for the silver lining and satisfy yourself because, at least, his poor vision won’t get poorer. You think of the last few months, how you kissed his soft cheek and hoped he would finally remember you. And how you would have talked with him so much more if you could, but this is better for him–for us.
Later still, your uncle tells you about the greenhouse he put up and offers a tour. You gladly accept and welcome the rush of nature: pine, spruce, thyme, and even cactus. You harbor the mingling flavors very deep inside, so now you remember Jeddo when you open the refrigerator or go on a hike.
“What’s that?” you ask sort of rhetorically.
“The tobacco?” Your uncle continues, noting your confusion, “We collect the flowers after each harvest, then we grow little scions out of them–those can withstand the real land and heat.”
You go closer and find a large sack of the white bloom Jeddo loved. Their waning texture is comfortable between your fingers: It invites you to cultivate them. You laugh at how, despite its wrinkles and worn feel, you enjoy it. You remember kissing Jeddo’s cheek felt the same.
“You mean this starts in winter?”
Now you weep.