One Mourner, But no Prayer for Tobacco

Source from:  By Amy Wilson HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER 12/13/2005

BURLEY SALE BECOMES A 'FUNERAL' ONE YEAR AFTER QUOTA BUYOUT She stood in the tobacco warehouse on the opening day of burley sales, as she had done for many of her 75 years. But this time, there was no fanfare, no governor, no commissioner of agriculture, no crowd of buyers and hum of sellers. There was just her and men with calculators. They told her what they would give her for her tobacco and she had to agree with the price or go home with her unsold crop. Not that it would be all that possible, really, to do the latter, given that she has six more barns full of drying tobacco to strip, sort and bundle. So Pat Thompson did something she never ever does. She cried. That was the right thing to do, she said. It was a funeral after all. The next morning, she got up at 5:30, like always, and an hour later was in the cold barn, ripping the chamois-colored leaves from the bottom of her stalks, shaking her head at the evidence of black shank, not noticing for one minute the rawness in the air or the perfume of a plant that has sustained her for, lo, these many years. She has decided it is her last year farming tobacco. She says the tobacco deal that ceased price supports and production controls has done what the changeable weather could not: make her quit. Guaranteed one price, she's been forced to take less. And it just doesn't make economic sense any more. Since her husband, John, died six years ago, the worry, which was once shared, now rests solely on her thin shoulders. It's a burden she is ready to lay down. "The end of an era," she called it, adding that tobacco quit her before she was ready to quit it. The end is hard coming because -- daylight to dark, for forever -- Pat has known what she will be doing when she wakes up, a routine that varied only with the season. Ever since she married a farmer 46 years ago, her life has been on tobacco time. Pat met John Thompson in early fall 1958 and got a ring before Christmas that year. She asked him when they'd marry. She said she was thinking June. He said, no, we're clearing hay then. May, she asked? No, that's when we're setting tobacco. April? We'll be weeding plant beds then. March? Don't hardly see it, he answered. They settled on February 14 because he was going to a final auction with his tobacco on Feb. 13. She had babies two years apart, and, after she got the last one into kindergarten, she went back to her empty house. Her husband asked her to move the tractor that day. "I said I don't know how to start it," she recalled, "and he said he'd show me. That was a mistake." She stayed in the fields alongside her husband from that day on. But she was not some delicate flower likely to be laid low by sunshine. She'd learned to cook on a wood stove in Shelby County between fieldhand work and a regular 2:30 in the afternoon, china-cup tea-time break with her grandmother under the apple tree. The day before she had her tonsils out at 16, she was handing up tobacco to be dried in the barn. She remembers when the electricity first came on. She remembers her house had the county's first phone because her daddy was a game warden. She remembers their first TV and how everybody took turns watching a Kentucky basketball game on the little 7-inch screen. She remembers years when tobacco fetched good money, better than all the other crops she ever tried combined. When the time came to pay for college for her boys, the family was without proper savings so John milked the cows and she made butter twice a day. She sold it for $1 a pound. This year, though, it was like somebody was trying to tell her something. The plants didn't grow in the greenhouses like they should in March because they didn't get enough good sunlight. They set the tobacco in May, but Versailles didn't get rain, so the black shank took hold. For three weeks, she irrigated day and night, then came six inches of rain. Nothing you could do but watch it fall. "You can gamble every day of the year," she said, "and never once leave the farm." The best times of her life, said Pat, are "when the stripping's through and the paycheck comes." But that's exhaustion talking in late November. Truth is, she said, she has always liked spring. "It's when the plants start to grow and you have hopes." Pat Thompson is not retiring to rock on her farmhouse porch and watch the traffic on the road to Lawrenceburg. She's thinking next year she'll go back to raising cattle, doing something she likes, though it was the thing that killed her husband. The arthritis in her hands aches in the cold. Her back is a constant torment. Her smooth skin, though blem by the sun, belies her age. "I'm going to be one of those stupid women who live forever." She says her boy, Rusty, has tried to explain the tobacco buyout to her. She trusts that it will be, as he says, a good thing. But still she worries -- because it is her custom -- about the farmers who have large loans on their property and need the tobacco to pay. Money, for farmers, is a constant grief. Pat Thompson said she and her husband never did believe in ever owing anybody anything. Which is why her funeral is already paid for. Enditem