Chapter 3 - The Poison and the Fence line
The sun rose on Friday morning over a landscape that looked as though it had been scorched by an iron iron.
Every green thing in Dry Creek was gone. The grand oak tree in front of the town church stood bare as a winter skeleton. The cornfields were reduced to brown, jagged stumps sticking three inches out of the gray dirt. Even the grass along the creek bed had been eaten down to the mud, leaving the water brown, foul, and choked with dead insects.
At eight in the morning, two trucks belonging to the County Extension Office pulled up to the general store. Men in canvas overalls began unloading heavy burlap sacks marked with bright red skull-and-crossbones warnings.
"Arsenic bran!" the County Agent announced through a megaphone to the crowd of forty ruined farmers gathered on the wooden steps. "Mix it with molasses, water, and sawdust! Spread it along your fence lines by hand! It’s the only way to kill the ones that are hatching in the soil before they take what’s left of the winter wheat!"
Frank Higgins stepped forward, his eyes bloodshot, his hands raw. "Will it bring back my corn?" he demanded bitterly.
"Nothing brings back the corn, Frank," the Agent said quietly. "This is about saving the soil for next year."
Higgins grabbed three sacks of the poison, throwing them into the back of his farm wagon. He looked around at the desperate faces of his neighbors—men who had lost their crops, their garden patches, their winter feed for their milk cows. Then his eyes drifted west, toward the small ridge where the Martinez chimney was sending up a thin spiral of woodsmoke.
"What about Tomás?" Higgins asked, a sharp, ugly thread of resentment running through his voice. "He’s got three hundred wild birds roaming loose out there. What if his chickens eat the poison bran?"
The County Agent shrugged, adjusting his brimmed hat. "Tell him to keep them penned up. If a chicken eats arsenic bran, it dies in ten minutes. If a human eats a chicken that died of arsenic, they go to the hospital. Tell your neighbor to keep his flock on his own dirt."
Higgins didn't reply. He climbed into his wagon, slapped the reins over his tired team, and headed straight for the valley road.
By ten o’clock, the sound of metal shovels casting poisoned bran echoed across the ruined valley. The smell of sour molasses and chemical sulfur drifted on the hot morning wind.
Tomás was at his southern fence line, repairing a wire gate, when he heard the heavy clatter of Higgins’s wagon stopping on the public dirt road.
Higgins climbed down, holding a bucket filled with the gray, sweet-smelling poison mixture. His face was set in hard, bitter lines.
"Keep 'em back, Tomás," Higgins called out without a word of greeting, raising his arm to sling a shovel full of the toxic mash along the ditch that separated their properties.
"Wait!" Tomás shouted, dropping his pliers and sprinting down the incline toward the fence. "Frank, wait! Don't throw that near my line!"
Higgins paused, the iron shovel loaded with gray bait, looking at Tomás with cold, hollow eyes.
"The County gave us this poison to kill the hoppers, Tomás," Higgins said, his voice flat. "I got ten acres of dirt here that’s crawling with young ones. I’m spreading it where the law says I can spread it."
"If my birds cross that ditch and pick at that bran, it’ll wipe out the whole flock!" Tomás insisted, grabbing the top wire of the fence. "They’re ranging wide today, Frank! They’re hunting the grasshoppers through the brush!"
Higgins let out a short, mean chuckle. "Then coop 'em up! Put 'em in a box like you should've done from the start! You spent your last eighteen dollars on a fool’s errand while the rest of us were trying to grow real food for the county. I ain't holding back my farm’s protection just because you got three hundred pets running around in the dirt!"
Higgins swung the shovel. A wide arc of poison bran rained down into the dry ditch—less than two feet from Tomás’s property line.
Tomás felt a hot, blinding flash of fury rise in his chest. For three weeks, he had endured the laughter, the quiet jokes behind his back, the storekeeper’s smirks, and the cold shoulder of every proud farmer in Dry Creek. He had taken it because he was poor, because his pocket was empty, because hunger makes a man quiet.
But he looked behind him.
Fifty yards up the hill, a hundred young pullets were marching through the dry weeds, their heads bobbing, their bright eyes scanning the ground for movement. They were strong, healthy, and innocent. They were his family’s future, bought with the last eighteen dollars they owned on earth.
Tomás climbed over the barbed wire.
He didn't draw a knife. He didn't raise a fist. He simply walked straight up to Frank Higgins, grabbed the iron shovel by its handle, and tore it out of the older man’s hands with a single, furious jerk.
"Hey!" Higgins yelled, stepping back in shock. "You've lost your mind, Martinez!"
Tomás threw the shovel into the back of Higgins’s wagon with a loud, metallic smash. He stepped directly into Higgins’s space, his chest breathing heavy, his dark eyes burning into the older man’s face.
"Listen to me, Frank," Tomás said, his voice low, shaking with an authority that made the taller man flinch. "You lost your corn. I am sorry for it. God knows I am sorry for every man in this valley today. But you will not poison my ground. You will not kill my birds. If I see one handful of that gray dust on my side of this fence, I will come to your house, I will take your wagon, and I will sell it to pay for every bird I lose. Do you understand me?"
Higgins stared at Tomás. He had known Tomás Martinez for eight years as a quiet, soft-spoken man who bowed his head at the store and cleared his throat before asking for credit. He had never seen this man. He had never seen the fire that sits behind the eyes of a father who has walked to the very edge of starvation and refused to fall in.
Higgins swallowed hard, his throat dry. He looked at the heavy shovel in the wagon, then at Tomás’s hard, set jaw.
May you like
"You can't stop the poison, Tomás," Higgins muttered, though the rage had drained out of his voice, replaced by an uneasy caution. "The whole town’s spreading it. You can't keep them birds safe if the whole valley is covered in poison."
"My birds don't need your poison, Frank," Tomás spat, turning his back on the farmer and climbing back over his wire fence. "They are the poison."
