Influencing Henry
by Lesley Morrison
My neighbor Henry ran a small farm. He grew spring wheat, barley and alfalfa on 300 acres along the edge of a fertile valley in Northeast Washington. His father, Angus, who had run the farm before him, was still living in the original farm house his father had built, but when Angus was taken out of commission by a hip replacement and then a long bout of pneumonia, Henry took over the day-to-day operations. It was now Henry who drove the tractor around the fields, dragging various implements behind it to till the soil or plant the seed, Henry who wrote checks for fertilizer and herbicides to the farm supply store, hired local boys to buck the bales, or tinkered with the combine’s hydraulics under his father’s watchful eye.
Henry liked to shoot the shit, as it was referred to, in the evenings after the tractor had been parked under the canopy next to the combine. He’d built a large board veranda off an old milk barn, one of the original farm buildings he’d converted into a home for himself, and when farming season began, some of the neighbors, mostly farmers from the same valley, would drop over in the evenings to sit on the veranda with a view over their valley. The lack of feminine order along with little regard for late hours or occasional over-indulgence made his place a popular gathering spot for the men after a day of work. They filtered in, each heralded by a cloud of dust as they parked a pickup truck in the dirt driveway and climbed out, a farm dog or two padding at their heels. With the persistent background of crickets and strains from a classic rock radio station filtering out through an open window, cheap cans of beer were cracked open, joints were passed around and the shit-shooting ensued.
It was dusk, one of the first warm April evenings of the year. I could already hear distant voices and laughter floating across the field in the still air as I walked down the road that separated my small property from Henry’s, the flanking pines dark sentinels against the fading light. Angus, Henry’s father, walked towards me from his house that sat further down the road, both of us drawn by the promise of companionship and libation. I raised my hand to him, and we met at the top of Henry’s driveway and walked down together.
It had been over a year and I still felt a little unsure of my place in this close circle of like-minded men, what with my university degree and lack of experience in some real-life occupation such as farming. I had replaced my most casual slacks with denim after some ribbing from the group. I soon realized that my opinions, although listened to politely, were not taken seriously, so I sat back and listened, allowing myself a few contributory comments or jokes in support of the general conversation.
It helped that Henry and Angus and I were naturally bonded by our bachelor status; my move into the old place up the road had been precipitated by my wife divorcing me, while Angus’s wife and Henry’s mother, Loretta, had died some years back, and Henry had never married.
Several friends had already arrived, Ernie and Glen, who fit the red-faced, buzz-pated, belt-buckled and cowboy-booted local stereotype, plus Reed, a diminutive hippie with a shock of grey-blond dreadlocks. He had come up from California to farm, and was always well-supplied with good weed. Angus and Henry had their own unconventional look; they wore the boots, but had high foreheads with hair swept back in a regal manner, Angus’s grey and thinning and Henry’s longer, with the grey just beginning. In Angus, I could see the man Henry would eventually become, and in Henry, Angus as a younger man. Both had a skull-like bone structure where the nose and chin and cheekbones appeared to slowly grow larger, rather than the flesh receding.
Someone had put a couple of six packs on the table and I wrested a beer from the plastic webbing and handed it to Angus, then took one for myself and settled into a deck chair, while Reed absentmindedly offered Angus a soggy looking joint, to which Angus, as always, shook his head. He tolerated the addition of marijuana along with the beer or occasional bottle of whiskey, but it was a bridge too far for him to partake at his age.
Reed extended the joint in the other direction and Henry took it, managing to hold on to it without seeming to notice he had taken several inhalations before passing it on. As scion to one of the original local farming families, lately deposing his father, Henry regarded his own position amongst the group with the importance it merited, never with condescension, but rather an air of benevolence.
Ernie was in the middle of a story of personal oppression; his wife had thrown a shoe at him earlier, something that had apparently astonished him, as he kept repeating it incredulously. When the joint was his, he took a huge drag and then exhaled with a loud sigh and settled back, darting a hurt look at Angus, who had taken the opportunity to change the subject while he was incapable of speech.
“Supposed to be a good rain this weekend,” said Angus, which was a signal towards a discussion about planting times.
This was an oft-returned-to topic, and like all of their favorite discussions, the conversation followed a well-worn track. At this point I knew the answers as well as the rest of them.
“That there’s the trick, getting in the seed before a good rain,” offered Reed, starting them off.
“A good soaker,” said Angus, “That soil needs to be saturated.”
“But not too much rain, a’course,” added Ernie, “You don’t want to flood them seeds out.”
“It’s all in the timing,” pronounced Henry. “They got to have a good hold with the roots, and down deep enough to withstand a dry spell.”
Each point was brought up with slow relish and nodded over sagaciously, when the sight of the rising moon, gibbous waxing, brought to my mind a line from a book I’d read long ago.
“People used to plant by the moon phases years back,” I said, as a break in the conversation occurred, “before satellite weather forecasting.”
The group, who had a scornful view of college learnin’, as they called it, and most things government-run, with exceptions for farm grants or subsidies, took immediate interest, eager to hear this insight from the good old days, and I found myself with a captive audience for perhaps the first time.
“This was from a book that was written about life in the late 1800s, and it had a farmer saying he liked to get his crops in before the new moon,” I told them. They ruminated over this with nods and thoughtful grunts at first, then began the airing of opinions.
All were happy to give the idea their full attention, except perhaps Angus, who grew cooler towards it the more that Henry showed interest, probably due to a long-going contention between them over farming methods. When Angus was too unwell to run the farm, Henry had seen his chance and insisted that if he was to take over, he wanted to run things his own way, and Angus was forced to agree. To Angus’s dismay, Henry, one year in, was already dabbling in organic farming, encouraged by Reed’s enthusiastic stories of extra profits, so Angus was very sensitive to any further siren song that might fall on his son’s ears.
“Well, I might have heard of that,” mused Glen. “If I did, it had to be from my granddad.”
“If I’d-a heard of it,” said Ernie, “It would have been from old man Johnson; he had a lot of stories from their family farm back in Wisconsin.”
After each had taken a turn in reflecting where they might have heard of it, if they had heard of it at all, Angus, clearly getting annoyed, retorted, “If it was all that great, everybody would have been passing it down. I sure never heard of it.”
I decided to play devil’s advocate to see if I could draw the conversation out a while longer, as I was gratified to have introduced such an engrossing topic.
“You’re discounting the influence of chemical fertilizers in the 20th century, especially after WWII, when they really needed to increase food productivity.”
This got a wary affirmation from Angus, a devout disciple of the chemical manufacturers, although he was suspicious of my direction.
“The government had a big operation to manufacture ammonium nitrate for explosives, and those facilities were still in place. They knew it could be used as fertilizer, so there was a big push for the farmers to use this method.”
Except for Angus, none of them had been around at that time. However, the chemical was familiar to them, if not its origins, so they were still nodding, but I could sense that their patience with being educated was flagging.
“Also, since the gravity from the moon influences the tides, it’s obviously a powerful force. Maybe it has some effect on the water table or something like that.”
They were starting to look restless, so I quickly wrapped up, hoping I hadn’t overplayed my hand.
“With the advantage of hindsight, we can choose from the best of the old and new farming methods. Just something to think about.” I shrugged, disqualifying myself from any sort of endorsement.
Regardless, the bit about the moon had hit home with Henry. In a burst of inspiration, and possibly equating visibility with available mass, he hazarded, “Well, as the moon grows to full it can sort of pull…” here he rose to his feet and raised his arms expressively… “the sprouts up out of the ground with gravity!”
Henry’s declaration, along with the general impairment of his audience, was pithy enough to draw appreciation and even some applause, and that, along with his father’s obvious disapproval, convinced Henry that he wanted to try it. Although he had intended to plant the following day in time for the rainfall predicted over the weekend, he at once began talking through the logistics, and the conversation shifted to speculations about the next new moon, which eventually, with some laborious mental computations and counting on fingers, was pronounced by Ernie to be in two weeks, give or take.
Here is a good place to note that these repeated conversations had also taught me the risks of not planting at the right time. If you don’t get the seeds in during a fairly narrow range in April, soil temperature and weather permitting, you are much more dependent on the weather during harvest time – the wheat needs a stretch of hot dry days in August to ripen properly. You can’t harvest wheat that is not fully ripe and dry as it will mold in the granary. If you can get it in the ground early enough, the chance of it completing its full growth cycle before August, when the best harvest weather typically occurs, is greatest. Otherwise, you might find yourself in September, when that stretch of hot dry days with no moisture is less likely.
Angus was visibly unhappy with the new plan. He sometimes visited me in the mornings for coffee, and he showed up every morning for the next two weeks, growing more and more agitated each day over Henry’s inaction until he was practically wringing his hands. “There’s two important times in the year when it comes to farming,” he told me daily, “And that’s the planting and the harvest.”
He tried, but all his efforts to change Henry’s course were in vain. He could look uncomfortable, he could make suggestions, but he couldn’t make demands anymore.
Watching Angus’s discomfort had begun to instill twinges of guilt in me, and at the next shoot-the-shit session I hastened to say that even the character in the book had said this was just a superstition, and I couldn’t guarantee any rational reason or effect. But Henry had adopted the method so passionately that nothing could dissuade him.
The soaking rain came and went, and the moon blossomed to full and then shrank night by night until it was gone. Henry was ready. He planted his wheat before the new sliver of moon appeared and worked on adapting his other planting. He had a calendar with the phases of the moon pinned up on his wall. He started quoting the minimal forecast information in the Old Farmer’s Almanac, an annual magazine of former renown amongst its readers that had slowly lost its sway and shrunk to a slim pamphlet, full of advertising and trite generalizations. Henry had gone full-on prior century, and sang the praises of this natural, back-to-nature approach with many recriminations about modern scientific-based methods during the shoot-the-shit sessions until most of his audience, who had sensibly stuck to their current practices, started to drop off.
It rained off and on, but the wheat wasn’t where it should have been in May, and then in June there was a stretch of hot weather that dried the fields out too early, but Henry was obstinately optimistic. “It’ll turn around on the other end,” he swore, “I’ll have the best crops in the valley when it’s all said and done.”
Of course he lost the crop. It never did fully develop and withered in the field. His alfalfa yield that year was a few scattered bales. Even in the face of this obvious debacle Henry clung like a limpet to his new approach. He was stubborn that way, some would say pig-headed. He was certain it would eventually pay off, or so he told us. But things never went quite right after that disastrous season and it’s hard to keep up payments and put money back into new parts and equipment when that annual paycheck isn’t there.
Angus died several years later with the farm he’d built into a profitable enterprise much diminished, and Henry followed him a year after that with a sudden onset of lung cancer, possibly from early exposure to herbicides. The farm went back to the bank, and I ended up buying some of the adjacent acreage and equipment at a reduced sum and starting a Christmas tree farm, an idea that had come up at one of the shoot-the-shit sessions.
A few years after Henry had passed away, I was going through some old cartons I’d never unpacked and discovered the book I’d been thinking of that night on the porch long ago. I thumbed through the yellowed pages and found the passage. I read: “I was determined to get my crops in before the full of the moon… superstitious I know, but still…”
Later, as I stood gazing out my kitchen window across my field that had once belonged to Henry, I felt a heightening of the undercurrent of guilt that I had never quite been able to put behind me. But for my misquote, Henry would have noted the alignment with his intended planting time and then probably forgotten all about it.
However, as they were fond of saying in that valley, it was an ill wind that blew nobody no good, and the sight of tidy rows of spruce and fir in various stages of growth mollified me to some extent, as did the sheaf of contracts on the table with several local and city tree lots for the coming holiday season.
BIO
Lesley Morrison dabbles in speculative short fiction, experimenting with different genres and voices. Her most recent story was published in an anthology titled These Dark Things, from Briar Press NY, in October, 2024. She has published stories in Luna Station Quarterly, Pif Magazine, horror anthology From the Yonder II, The New School’s DIAL magazine in NYC, and Canadian magazines TransVersions and On Spec. She recently fled NYC for Oahu. You can connect with her at https://lesleymorrisonspeculates.com.
