Copyright © 2024 Brian Reisinger. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved. Chapter 5 Back-Breaking Work 1950s-60s: Becoming the Little Guy in an Ever-Changing World Only a dark set of curtains separated Jim from his father. Jim was eight years old and had been sent away--to live in town with his aunt, after Albert fell off the corn crib and cracked his back on the frozen ground. They didn't tell Jim why or that anything was wrong, and he got to play with his cousins. However, it wasn't long before he asked to go home, where there were baby calves to play with and clean country air. When they wouldn't take him home, he wondered why. He asked again, over and over, for a time longer than a young child could measure. Finally, one day, they took him home to the white farmhouse on the hill to see the truth. He stood before his parents' bedroom, that set of brown curtains concealing what they'd hidden from him. Jim crept forward and pushed through. What he saw on the other side was a world different from the one he'd left: his father, in bed, flat on his back. Jim stood there and stared. Then his mother grabbed him. "Get outta there." The curtains fell back into place, and Jim could no longer see his father. But the new world on the other side of that curtain remained--a world where his father's back was broken and where his family needed his help; where a little boy would work alongside the uncle and neighbor who came to help with the milking every morning and night, and alongside his fast and fearsome mother; where he'd haul hay bales and scoop corn and oats from a wheelbarrow to feed the cows, scrape the barn's driveway of manure, and struggle now with the rowdy calves he loved, to make them drink milk from a bucket; where the days were so long, Jim would miss too much school to pass out of third grade; where all the while his father laid in bed, shattered somewhere deep inside. It was a world where a boy would learn to do the work of his father, and not stop until he was grown himself, and then continue on. And nothing would be the way it was before. Excerpted from Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
