SUMMER OF TAB

I learned to kill a chicken with my bare hands that summer, on the way to becoming a man.

Once you caught one, you’d grab its neck and twist until the head came off. Then you’d drop the body, which would run around the yard spewing blood until there was no more left. After you brought the carcass to the porch for plucking, the dogs would come and clean up the mess.

It was women’s work, like everything that happened at the top of that hill. My Uncle Walter and Aunt Hallie owned the farm. My parents had parked me there while they were shopping for a new house. It was my sixteenth summer, and we were moving once again, this time from New Jersey to Louisville, so that Mom could help her parents die.

Dad had slapped me on the shoulder and said, “The farm will be good for you. Work hard, get into shape.” I eyed his big stomach. Look who’s talking, I thought.

The first morning on the farm, we all had a big family breakfast together, and then Uncle Walter and Cousin Charlie got into the battered green truck and drove down to the fields. I was left with the women. At least I was spared the cooking and cleaning up in the house.

I sat on the porch looking out; the morning was fresh and moist. A cherry tree framed the view down the hill, neat rows of crops lined up in green geometry. After a while, Aunt Hallie led me across the flat dusty yard between the house and the barn. As we got to the open door of the barn, Hallie turned to me and said, “OK, hon, this is where we work.”

The low morning sun invaded the cracks in the old board walls, cutting the cool gloom of the cavernous space into stripes. The floor was brown dirt, uncovered except for a dusty canvas tarp where Aunt Em and Cousin Igie were sitting on little stools, working and talking and drinking Tab. Tab was just out, and it was a miracle. You could drink it and it would make you skinny. I really wanted to be skinny again. A radio blared out from the other side of the shed. It was gospel music. These women were all Baptist teetotalers. That would have to go, I thought.

Igie was in her thirties, and she looked like Gale Storm. She wore a blue and white checked halter-top and jeans that were cut off above the knees. The flesh at the back of her tanned arms jiggled as she dusted off a beefsteak tomato that was bigger than her hand with a flannel rag. Old Aunt Em looked like the witch in the Wizard of Oz, maybe it was the name. Her wrinkled face had never been pretty. Her nose was round and too large, and she had a mole on her chin. Her scraggly gray hair was hidden under a bonnet, and she wore an apron over a cotton wrapper that fell to the dusty ground.

“This here’s your spot, Nicky,” she said, leading me by the hand to another little stool on the canvas tarp.

Just before noon, Aunt Em and Aunt Hallie would go fix lunch, while Igie and I gossiped and laughed and changed the station so I could listen to rock and roll, singing along when the Beatles came on. Lunch was always a banquet, fried and piled high. After saying grace, the men ate steadily without words. I could smell their sharp sour dirty sweat from across the table. After they ate, they smoked and talked about crops, and money and Richard Nixon.

They went to rest on porch chairs covered with brightly flowered chintz. I did too, not like the women, who finished up in the kitchen. I would try to read; that summer it was Faulkner. I never got far in a book before nodding into a midday nap before the hottest
shift of the day.

After a few weeks Charles invited me to get up early on Saturday and go with him to market, just the two of us. On the road by 5 a.m., truck loaded with perfect bushels of eggplants and cucumbers and those enormous tomatoes. Charles smoked Camels as we drove through the dark early morning. He answered questions, but did not volunteer any stories of his own. I liked it.

The next Monday, Charles told me I would not be going to the shed with the women. “Get in this truck, boy,” and I did. And so I left the Tab and the women and the radio to pick cantaloupe and eggplants from the fields, hoisting boxes into the back of the old green farm truck. With the other men.

Day after day of man’s work wrought what no amount of Tab could ever do. My baby fat, that’s what Dad called it, my boy fat and my slightly enlarged boy breasts became hard, leaner, manly. I felt taller, ready.

Ready for the Saturday nights with my cousin David and his friends. He drove a Plymouth Fury, and there was rock ’n’ roll and Southern Comfort. I road shotgun all over town like a real cool cat.

For some reason, I never told anyone much about that summer. All I know is that I liked it. I liked being skinny. I liked being with the men in the fields and the guys in the Plymouth Fury, the rock ‘n’ roll and the Southern Comfort they had. I hoisted the melons, killed the chickens, rode and drank with my cousin, it all happened so fast.

In late August we moved to the new house and I started my junior year. I was not in New Jersey anymore, and I was no longer a boy.