When Miguel started tilling their front yard, it confirmed his mother’s fears. Working in the chicken factory had made her son crazy.  

“Don’t worry Mama. Just wait until March, then the stench will disappear.” Since her husband’s death, his Mom had ceased cooking, sitting each day at the kitchen table, running her fingers over the woodwork of her deceased husband. She sat with the impassioned face of the bereaved; sunk, overburdened by sadness. Miguel believed she needed nature’s cure: sun, air, oxygen and clover, an aromatherapy though he never called it that. He trusted nature a lot more than her doctor’s antidepressants. To read their side effects, hair loss, suicide, facial tremors–gave him his own case of jitters. 

He’d gone to the library and done his research reading that decomposed clover was a neutralizer, capable of masking the most fetid of smells.

“So you think some weed is going to help me?” she asked.

“Not weed mama. Clover. Like you had at home.”

“As if you remember. You were four years old.”

“Well. I remember when the air wasn’t full of chicken shit.”

Air conditioning would have helped with fresheners on the vents. The racks at the truck stop were full of them–basil blue velvet, sleepy jasmine, sassafras awakening. But his mother hated AC believing it had contributed to her husband’s death. Before coming to Georgia, Ramon had never been sick. He built barrels, curving the planks by hand, his shellac skin fathoms dark.  Working in the heat, sleeping under the stars, he never coughed, not a fever or headache.

But in America machines cut barrels. The labor office sent him to the chicken factory.  After ten hour shifts, he would trudge home to sleep beneath the air conditioner. A miscalculation. Until Ramon coughed up blood, no Torres had ever had pneumonia. When he died, attached to a hissing alien sucking his spittle into a glass jar, surrounded by enough white coats that it looked like a heavenly choir, his mother ran home and shoved the air conditioner out the window. Within hours neighbors had carted it off. When Miguel saw the gaping hole in the window, he knew what she had done, and he didn’t blame her. Grief has made many people crazy.

Now the neighbors were bitching about the tiller’s engine which grunted and sputtered well into the night. But what gave his neighbors the right to complain? Not the Stewart’s with their cacti, dandelions, pigweed and foxtails. To run through their yard meant a sock full of bristles, and God help any child that ran barefoot. And how could the Ramirez’s complain with their car graveyard, naked hulls of Fiats and Volkswagens lying about with a Jeep jacked up on blocks like an oxidized sacrifice–bumpers, axles, hoods, ball joints, cracked windshields used for target practice, a celebration of riotous metal. His family had one of the few spots on the Sand Ridge that held loam. Come spring, the seed would sprout, giving the neighborhood and his mother an oasis among the shit infested hills. 

Sitting on the steps, drinking from tall neck bottles, his neighbors calculated the likelihood of an explosion. Maybe he’d hit a gas line? Didn’t craziness run in families? And working in the chicken plant was known to separate workers from their senses. Like Ernest who decided to swim to the Gulf, brokenhearted because his wife had left him for a 28 year old accountant who couldn’t change a tire if his life depended on it. Ernest, who had been a finalist for the Olympics, losing out on the last day of qualifying by less than a second. At fifty six, he stripped to his shorts, and started swimming from the boat dock, one hundred and forty six miles to the Gulf, a doomed attempt for in 45 miles stood an hydraulic dam. When his son went looking for him–a drone instructor who found no trace, most assumed he had drowned.  Probably in the first ten miles, the dive team said, dismissing the pleas of Ernest’s daughter who claimed their father was a 97% Olympian and could have easily reached the dam. Instead, they threw out their grappling hooks around the boat ramp, reeling in a Westinghouse washing machine, four bicycles, five Dollar General carts, but no Ernest. 

*

In the factory Miguel wore a mask. But it irritated his face. No one reprimanded him when he removed it. Miguel battled nausea as wave after wave of gutted chickens rolled on the conveyor towards him. He discarded the bruised, pockmarked and deformed, and those that looked asymmetrical, undersized or with growths, chucking them into a pile as he swallowed his vomit. To throw up meant finding a pink slip taped to his locker. 

Exhaust fans hummed at each end of the warehouse. Wearing respirators, cleanup crews hustled about, hauling their nozzles, steaming the floor and machines, sending blood and guts into underground vats which emptied into a sewer. Every worker wore a hairnet, vinyl gloves, white smock and rubber boots up to their knees. In a month, he could count at work on one hand the number of people who smiled.

A few townspeople complained of the factory’s odor. It was built north of town taking advantage of the southeasterly winds, but sometimes they shifted and assailed the city with the stench of chicken shit. In such tight times, the local officials had accepted the tradeoff: suffer the stink for jobs and a solid tax basis.

After work, after shedding his boots, coat, hairnet and gloves, after cleaning his nails, scrubbing his skin and shampooing his hair, idle pockets of viscera still remained. The fetor had camped inside his nose: his sinuses bottomless caverns never to be fully expunged.

The factory nurse suggested saline spray. Miguel tilted his head back and squeezed into each nostril a baptism of water. The back of his throat itched, his eyes burned and his ears clogged. Time and again he punished himself only to have the odor return, mocking him, playing hide and seek.  

He thought about quitting and starting his own business. Locally, several enterprises– restaurants, pest control, lawn maintenance– had succeeded. The Ortiz brothers had cornered the pine straw market. “Crazy what rich people are willing to pay to avoid weeds.” The work was hard: raking, hauling, baling, delivering, mulching on hands and knees while the homeowner watched from the shade. The brothers offered to cut him in for a mere 3k but the problem was his mama’s heart, a leaky tricuspid which required vasodilators and quarterly cardiologist visits. If her condition wasn’t so serious, Miguel could have taken her to the clinics where the nurses provided basic care—an aspirin, listening to her heart with a stethoscope, patiently explaining her condition. But for the uninsured, those clinics were a death sentence. So to keep his mama alive, Miguel gutted chickens and accepted his benefits. 

He guided the tiller, full throttle, the tines chewing, spewing out sand, broken glass, soda cans, and reams of exhaust. The tiller bucked. Miguel gripped, his forearms knotted, sweat dotted his forehead. He leaned forward, all one hundred and thirty pounds and steadied. He used fence posts up ahead to lay straight lines. Chunks of sod spun behind him, filling his nose with decadent black earth. He remembered a story of how loam had saved his mother, who as a child had ingested rat poison. His grandparents forced her to drink glasses of slurry until finally she heaved out the poison.   

After finishing the rows, he parked the tiller and admired the serrated landscape. A shirtless teen wandered by. “You should turn this into a mini-football field.” Ardonzo with his lean, bronzed body, but always in trouble because he refused to go to school, fantasizing someday to be a professional football player.

“You loco,” he said, “Like your mama.” He danced just out of the reach of Miguel’s punch, avoiding a thrashing, knowing that Miguel after fighting the tiller was too tired to chase him. “Another day,”said Miguel. “Even you must sleep.”

“Even when I’m asleep I will be faster than you.”

Miguel picked up the sack of seed, ordered from a Midwest supplier, dumped it into a waist sack and then slowly flung the seeds north-south and then retracing his steps, east-west, covering the ground. He raked the dirt then wet it with a hose. So what if his neighbors thought him crazy? His home had a concrete foundation–not an open crawlspace. His windows had screens. His car cranked. He repaired cracked window panes. He shingled his roof. No dogs or cats had babies under his house. He didn’t get drunk or shoot beer cans in his front yard. He would never surrender to despair. His father had taught him poverty wasn’t about money. When they went to church, they did not sit in the back row but up front with the bank presidents and teachers, doctors and lawyers. They didn’t hide their paltry tithes in envelopes. If his father could only give a few dollars, so be it.

Miguel turned on the sprinkler before dawn, before the water police patrolled on their scooters. In the midst of drought, water was a scarce commodity. The landscapers told Miguel how the wealthy paid the fines to keep their bermuda and zoysia lawns plush. Developers had built those subdivisions miles from town, believing they could protect their children from the factory particles. And that’s what smells were, microscopic guts and blood and shit traveling on the winds into the sinuses of prom queens and white gloved cotillions.

Miguel knew if the affluent or anyone ever visited his factory, they would become instant vegetarians. The blade slitting the jugular, the mounds of glistening viscera, would sever any appetite. When a society paid workers to gut their animals compassion disappeared. In the old days no one brought a gun to school. No one killed their parents with as much forethought as shuffling a deck of cards. Watching his father’s hand shake just before jutting the knife into the goat’s jugular taught Miguel everything he needed to know about mercy. Watching his father cradle the goat’s head as it died, was all he needed to know about compassion.

But when anyone could walk into Wal-Mart and buy packaged sausage and never have the slightest awareness of what they held in their hands, they risked losing their souls. Miguel wasn’t opposed to killing animals, only to the mindlessness of consumers who believed that buying sanitized offerings made them blameless.

But one day all that would change. The days were getting hotter and while the rich slept under the protective hum of their HEPA fortified air conditioning, the creeping stench kept growing. “What’s that smell?” their child would ask and their parents knew better than to say what had found them.

Over time the first shoots appeared. Earlobe shaped yellow flowers scattered across his yard. The clover could not grow fast enough. Miguel fertilized, followed the instructions on the package, but soon a strange plant began to take control. A tiny mimosa looking tree arose, its limbs bulging with pods. Pulling the weed only spread its fruit. Herbicide meant suicide. To kill the weed would kill the clover. 

Mr. Branson, a retired county farm agent, counseled patience. “Clover is hardy. Let it do its thing,” he said and then to what was really on his mind. “So how is your mother?”

“She manages.”

“To have raised such a fine son, she has done more than that.”

He was an optimist, this one. After Miguel’s father died, Mr. Branson waited six months before asking Miguel’s mama out. The pan struck him below the eye. If she had thrown it full force it would have broken his nose. Three months later, he tried again. The steam iron hit him in the knee. He limped around for a week, an object of scorn and ridicule, Don Quixote of the Sand Ridge. Not wishing to be permanently disfigured, he offered no more supplications. That is, until now. Seeking his advice, Miguel had re-awakened the sleeping romeo.

“Do you think…” he asked.

“She still grieves.”

“A year is a long time to be without a man.”

“How would you know?”

“The women I married. They were grateful.”

“Grateful is not love.”

“For some it can mean as much.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Such a big factory where you work, you can not find a woman?”

How to explain? What would be more horrible than taking a woman to bed only to confront the fumes? Was it possible for a man to be so traumatized, he could lose desire forever?

“Work is work.”

“Don’t wait forever. The more you are out of the game, the harder the game becomes.”

The clover recovered. Soon he had a sea of yellow blooms, dancing softly, caressed by wind. Sweetness stirred him out of bed each morning, the cloying fragrance of childhood: his father’s workshop floor covered with wood chips, their whitewashed house surrounded by clean sheets fluttering on a clothesline. It was nice to dream again. A beautiful wife perhaps. A home with slate tiles and yellow stucco walls. Paying the Ortiz brothers to cut his lawn. His children waiting for him to come home, his pockets stuffed with licorice. Anything was possible.

But Miguel wasn’t a romantic, his heart broken too many times. What woman would live with him and his mother? And he couldn’t walk out on his Mama, her mind given to fits and starts—lately, he’d caught her mending her deceased husband’s pants. Another time she set three places at the table. “Papa is running late, isn’t he?” she asked. He studied her face. The eyes staring at the door. It was as if she knew but could not face that truth. Each time a car passed, she opened the blinds to look. “Where is he?” It might be hours before she snapped out of it. What would he do if her mind never came back?

He hadn’t the money for the private care facilities and the state-run homes were snake pits. The Journal had exposed corruption throughout the industry. The poor were left to the mercy of the owners. Geriatrics brought out the worst in people, orderlies who hated the bedpan emptying, the piss stained sheets and body washings, the humiliating stink of old age. He could not bear to see his mother in oversized pampers, strapped to a wheelchair, beaten under pillows and left to stare at the walls.  

One evening, Miguel prepared her supper. “Come mother to the porch.”

They sat, the sun setting, bees flitting from flower to flower, crusted with nectar, the clover thick. Far off, a radio played. They could have been in her homeland. He half expected to see his father walk up the road, pull off his boots and wash under the spigot. She leaned back in her chair ignoring her plate of red rice and beans.

“I remember the harvest. We’d take our melons to market. Your father was not much of a bargainer. They’d practically steal from him but he never complained. He was a good man. He’s dead isn’t he?” Before he could answer, tears began sliding down her cheeks, her grief burst by a sweetness carried by the wind. She went inside and lay on her bed for hours. Gradually, the sobs subsided. Miguel wondered if he had done something terrible. Had the clover finally pushed her over the edge? 

Finally, she went to the bathroom. Looking into the mirror, she said, “I have become old.”

“You are only fifty-one.”

“I look like a hundred.” She pinned her hair behind her ears. “I had pure skin. There was a man here a while back.”

“Mr. Branson.”

“What did he want?”

“He told me how to fix the clover.”

“Did he ask about me?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Maybe later.”

“Do you think he will return?”

“A man like that cannot take no for very long. Even if it kills him.”

A few weeks later a tap on the door startled both of them. On the porch stood Mr. Branson, cradling a bottle of red wine, his suit freshly pressed, hair and nails trimmed. “May I come in?” he asked.

“You may,” his mother said.

That evening she cooked flautas de puerco, rolling the flour to make the tortillas, simmering the roasted pork in the same pan she had used to maim him. And to Miguel’s surprise, his mother drank a couple of glasses of wine. 

He left them alone and went onto the porch.

Lately, he had stopped dreaming of the teeth of the spinning saws, the garroted necks and the hands that squeezed them. Screams no longer startled him, his heart trying to burst through his chest. In the kitchen, the wine worked its magic. His mother laughed to another of Mr. Branson’s silly jokes, while Miguel breathed in the clover’s cure, grateful, released for now from burdens that would make many a good man crazy.

– Duke Stewart