A story

The sun was brisk and burning on Jonas’ shoulders as he bent over his work in the clay-ridden soil that consumed this long coastal valley. He leaned up to stretch his sore back, taking in the thirty acres that were his life and had been his father’s life before him.

“A farmer can’t be faint of heart,” his grandfather had once told him, “But the land repays you, boy, if you give it all you’ve got.” Jonas had learned that a farmer’s payment had little to do with monetary wealth, but he had come to consider his grandfather’s words truth. With just he and his wife, Annie, on the farm, their pains were more than enough for them both. As he knelt over his work, Jonas heard a faint breeze toil gently around the tall grasses as though it was speaking to him. It filled his spirit with the strength he needed to finish the field.

Jonas didn’t hear about the plans to build Highway 57 through town until a man wearing a black suit and pasty white skin knocked on his door and asked for the thirteen acres they would require through his fields.

“No, thank you,” Jonas told him and shut the door. But the man returned with more government people in more expensive suits who cajoled and preached and threatened him. Finally when the men were nearly defeated by Jonas’ obstinate refusal, one of them in the back stepped forward waving a paper like a victory banner in Jonas’ face. At the top of the page was printed, in bold, swirling font, “5th AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” These were pages and pages of explanation about how and why the government could take Jonas’ land and they gave him a week to read them. Jonas read every word. The government men returned in a jovial mood, willing to be friends now that Jonas had surely come around, even if he had been rude and unaccommodating at first.

“Public good,” the man in the black suit misquoted, and nodded his head, certain that now finally, Jonas understood their altruism. But Jonas still didn’t understand. It hadn’t been for the public good, for example, when Eastern Port had been attacked from without and the government hadn’t sent the military because it might incite war. The bombed wreckage of the three square miles around the port was like a dark hole burned out of the country’s landscape and it whispered across the nation the message that they hadn’t until then been able to convince the public of. It whispered that the government’s modern role was regulation, not protection. And Jonas suspected that the Constitution was as good as lost in the wreckage.

“Your signature, sir,” said the official, clearing his throat, and Jonas’ hand, signing away the deed to his grandfather’s land, didn’t shake.

“Drought,” he told himself. “The drought of ’74 dried up the entire farm, not just thirteen acres.” The only solution then had been to work harder. And Jonas did work harder, now, as he had then, until the exhaust from the motors and the shaking ground from the incessant traffic permeated across the remainder of his land and the crops curled up into black rolls, like ashes, and the farm was ruined.

Jonas was 45.

“Only 45,” he said to his wife when he told her he’d have to get a job in town.

“Only 45,” he told himself the day he left his home and walked onto his first building site. And he put the thirty years he had devoted to the land behind him.

When Jonas was 47, he was allowed to become an equipment operator.

When he was 50, he became a mason.

By 55, he was foreman, and had never been paid as much money before. He tried not to notice the farm, overgrown, and still patched with black from the old ashes, and it wasn’t too painful because hard work was what he had been taught, and as long as he was doing that, and providing, he knew he had everything a man should have.

It was for the debt, at first, the national debt, that they raised the taxes.

And then the schools, because there were more kids now, and they were entitled to college, not just grade school.

The hospitals needed it next, but not the hospitals, really. The insurance companies needed it because healthcare was a right, not a privilege, but some people couldn’t afford it.

And this time, a tax-collector came to the door and waved a form in Jonas’ face.

“Wrong tax-bracket, sir,” he said, “You filled out the wrong form. You’re in the upper bracket now.” And Jonas found that this meant that he paid for twice as many doctor visits for people he didn’t know.

And then one day Annie died. Jonas’ Annie. And he finally knew what heartbreak was. The muscle inside him seemed to be ripping out of his chest like the roots of an ancient tree that has survived hurricane and blight, but finds – at the last – that time itself is more than it can bare. The tears fell down his face in rivulets, running the course of each work-worn wrinkle on each long cheek as he knelt by her coffin. For three days straight. Until, on the fourth day, his forehead resting on his arm against the coffin, he heard the preacher whispering to a sympathetic parishioner.

“They say this kind can be treated, if it’s caught fast enough,” the parishioner said, “But each day counts with these things.”

Jonas knew then that it wasn’t the cancer that had killed Annie. It had taken them eleven months to get her an appointment with an oncologist. When Jonas raised his head, his eyes were dry, even as he watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Foreign ground. Because family burials on private land were no longer legal.

Eventually, business moved away from that bustling city on to another, as business will. Route 57, that ran across Jonas’ thirteen acres, was all but abandoned. He watched people roll out of town. First the truckers and workers; then the homeowners and their families; then the business-owners and public officials. Each parade of cars fancier, shinier, than the one before. He recognized the tax-collector leaving in a convertible.

Jonas was left on what was left of his farm, supporting his countrymen through forced charity what he would have given them freely out of his own hand. And that was how it was. That each good, hardworking man worked for naught. That his neighbor – whom he would have liked to befriend – was ashamed to show him his face, for for each new motion of laziness and ineptitude that he committed, his neighbor worked harder and more futilely than before.

They called it kindness, fairness, humanism, that each man might live unconditionally granted the rights with which he was born. But it was just a more vicious kind of injustice.