The Blessed Potato Farmer

The sacred potato farmer, stands in his field and washes his hands in the thick rich soil he has mulched and tilled and tended. It is not yet ready to receive the seed-taters that he has in a large sack, that he carried on his back from the shed behind his smart little house behind the olive trees. He would rather live with the potatoes. People need potatoes as much as they need olives, yet potatoes get none of the glory olives do. Potatoes do not have a special blessing like the dates or the almonds or the fat green olives that are almost falling from the gnarled branches in the grove. He had considered growing oranges. He liked that roundness and their orange-ness. He liked the fact they were the color of the sun and had thick rinds to make marmalade out of. People need oranges, they need the juice and they need the sweetness, but they are not as useful as a humble potato. There is as much vitamin C in a potato skin as in an orange. He didn’t care if it was true, it sounded right to him.

You can’t put oranges in your stewpot, and oranges won’t keep you alive cheaply, and will not fill a belly who has nothing else but an orange to put in it. A potato will do you grand. A potato will fill the hole in your soul that appears when hunger sets in. Not the kind of hunger that says “I am nibblish for elevenses” or “I think I need a cookie with my cup of tea, I feel a little weak”. No. The kind of hunger that says, “I have not had a meal since yesterday evening. It is now today and the sun has gone up and down and I have been hauling a sack of seed potatoes across stubbly fields with a twisted ankle that I did while I was stupidly playing a game of basketball with a grandchild.” That kind of hunger can be rewarded and resolved with a potato. His experiment with lentils had not gone as well. They were surprisingly needy, like spoilt children. They were not fond of fields that had last grown potatoes. Vast plumes of kale, luscious heads of cabbages and happy carrots exploded from the ground he tended. Where ever he washed his hands in the soil, out sprang life and food and safety from hunger.

Children waited for hot potatoes, baked in his outside wood-oven, to be raked out with a paddle into a waiting tray of carrots. His brother had slaughtered a lamb. It was rotating on a spit as they spoke, all greasy and meaty and getting burnt round the edges. He liked the burnt pieces. He liked the tough meat. He liked to chew on it. Feeding lambs, as far as he was concerned, was a luxury, he used to joke it was a waste of potatoes throw a piece of lamb on top. Who needed more than a potato, after all! Were the children not satisfied with a drizzle of olive oil, a spoonful of hummus, a dollop of his wife’s tzatziki that he loved but that made him burp? It was a lunch he could get behind, a potato and a chopped salad with a squeeze of lemon juice and some of that fancy olive oil that his potatoes both loved and envied in equal measures. Still the lamb turned slowly and the embers glowed white.

He would not have the tzatziki but he would take the hummus. It would be rude not to have a taste of that meat, after everything his brother had done to tend those sheep. They had cost him a son, those animals. The boy had been out watching them, making sure they did not get into the kind of trouble that dumb sheep got into. He would have been better off watching potatoes than babysitting lambs, on that damn mule of his. A potato might have more sense than all of them put together. No. It would be unkind not to eat the lamb. It’s fat liquified and beaded on the skin and dropped sizzling into the fire.

A small child pulled at the sacred potato farmer’s tassels. He didn’t recognize it as belonging to him, but then he was not a shepherd of children. “Uncle E! Uncle E! Can I has a tato?” He liked the kid. The kid was not drooling over the lamb, but waiting to chew on the browned and blackened thick skin of the potato that he had perfected. They were no ordinary strain. He had taken a particularly sweet kind of waxy yellow seed potato that did not grow very well, and crossed it with one of those fluffy ones that did not have much flavor but the texture was sublime. No man ever got rich from farming potatoes, but if a potato was ever going to make any man rich, this one was. The child held out a paper plate that had a few scraps of that sweet carrot and raisin salad Miriam always brought to family get togethers. He must be one of her grandchildren. Looking at him, he did have her curly dark-blonde hair and those piercing hazel eyes that came from her mother’s side of the family. A thick burn scar ran down her left arm. She usually wore an equally thick dressing over it, but instead tonight it was glistening in the light of the fire and the outside fairy lights that her husband, Hersh, had strung about the place to make it look pretty for the women. The potato farmer both loved and feared these get-togethers in equal measure. He loved seeing bellies full of food. He did not much care for the talk or the gossip or the politics that would get hauled out once the wine had started to really get flowing.

He had considered a vineyard when he was a young man, but he did not have vineyard money. The art and craft of growing good grapes for excellent wine appealed to the masochist in him. The intricate puzzles of hardiness and yield, gave way to worries about sweetness and tannins and taste. It was a symphony of possibilities, a buffet of problems, and despite all that could go wrong growing grapes for wine, and the pitfalls of the strange desire to see if he could crush them and bottle them and make something that didn’t make your toes curl, or that would be good for the table, or worth a blessing or two, he never quite gave up on the idea. Encyclopedias of wine making lined the walls of his bedroom. Potato farmers do not have studies with desks and bookshelves, but vintners do. They have gold pens and personalized cheque-books and accounts that do not have mud and mulch smeared on them, making your wife turn up her nose when it is time to work out how much to pay the tax man. In fact, thought the sacred potato farmer, he bet they even had accountants. It was better he stayed a potato farmer. It was just ego, after all that sent him to his reveries, that dream world that replaced potatoes with vines.

He wondered which of the women had swept the earth in a circle and stamped it down to make a forum for this meeting of the Family. One of the cousins had a son who was a lawyer over in the city. Another had a son who was training to be a doctor. Some taught math. Other’s trained parrots to speak English. One of them spent her time twisting silver wire and eilat stones into jewelry for Americans. Some of the children aspired to be tiktok dancers, others wanted to heal animals, but no one wanted to be a gymnast or play soccer. It was not a fault in them, but a fault in society which had trained children to have such small and insignificant dreams. Perhaps the little curly-haired darling who was chewing on a potato, burning both fingertips and tongue in the process, eschewing the use of a fork might have the big and bold dream of farming potatoes. He should offer to take him into the fields in the morning and let him throw in a few seed-taters. He had some carrots that needed pulling and those summer squash were looking good. Perhaps he could give the kid a dream that involved blue skies and puffy clouds, and potato pancakes with sour cream and apple sauce. He was going to make some tomorrow, the best latkes in the entire world. If that won’t make a kid want to be a potato farmer, nothing will.

“Hey, kid! What do you want to be when you grow up?” He looked into the child’s hazel eyes, eyes that held so much innocence and joy and hope within them. The child looked back at him, not blankly, but more preoccupied with his tender tongue and the cooling effect of carrot salad. The child’s father looked back at him, him the farmer of potatoes, protector of carrots, and lover of rainbow chard, despite the fact it was decadent, and the Potato Farmer recognized the man, as someone whose wedding he had once gone to, about twenty years back. He had given them a sack of potatoes and never received a thank you letter. The man was wearing slacks and a blue tee shirt. He had a crude tattoo of a dagger on his left arm. Now he remembered, the stupid girl had gone and married a military man, not a farmer. Whichever way you looked at it, she was going to get her heart broken a million ways before those breakfast latkes even finished cooking in the pan. The man answered for his son: “Anything except grow potatoes, I guess!” He said it with a sly grin and a small smile. A few crumbs of potato were stuck in his beard, and he was chewing on a piece of lamb that did not want to be swallowed without a fight.

Without a word, the potato farmer took his plate away from him and threw it into the fire. There was no need for words. This man would never eat another potato that came from this ground again. He would not have a taste of a carrot, nor a scrap of kale. There would be no turnips in his stew. No rutabaga in his casserole. Not a scrap of onion to flavor his life, nor his good garlic to make his blood run thin in his veins. It was going to be all lamb for him from here on out. The child’s eyes grew large. He held onto his potato for dear life. It had salt and pepper on it, and some of that hummus that was so creamy because someone’s mother had picked all the skins off the chickpeas, and soaked them and boiled them and pureed them with so much rich tahini that it was more of a sauce than a paste. Chickpeas were not as finicky as lentils, thought the Potato farmer, perhaps he should try them next season. The thought made him smile. He wondered how the shoots would look in the field and how much water they would need.

The potato farmer stepped back as the man took a swing at him, stumbling over the leg of the wrought iron table that had taken so long to paint white because the paint did not want to go into all the crevices of the twisted iron. Paper plates and plastic wine glasses scattered onto the ground. People started getting up and moving. Someone grabbed his shoulders and another couple of men ushered away the drunk man who would never eat another potato in his life. This is why he did not want to be a grower of grapes, a maker of wine! This was the reason he wanted to grow potatoes, he thought to himself! Look at the fools men make of themselves, look at their brutish behavior. No one ever got drunk off a … He stopped and laughed to himself, as he remembered the bottles of potato vodka that were stacked up neatly in his shed. Moonshine, of course, but the best Russian-style moonshine a man could ever wish for. The kind of thing that could put hairs on the chest of a baby.

It is strange, how so many people can be talking, saying so many things all at once, but none of them get heard. He had the strange ability to block everybody out around him. He didn’t want to listen, so he simply didn’t. The world was silent around him, mouths moving, lips contorting, people flailing around in slow motion, the lamp light flickering like one of those old stop-motion cartoon shows he loved so much as a child. The noise and the fury rushed back in filling the void of the silence, it happened like a flood or a tidal wave, all at once. It was so overwhelming he forgot about the potatoes and the fennel in the oven, and the thick sprigs of parsley he had chopped up. He forgot about the rosemary and forgot about the thyme. He forgot about the little boy who loved his potatoes and he forgot for a moment about his daughter who had left for America without a backward glance, and only called him when she needed him for something. He was a footnote in her life, and she in his. When she was little she would sit in his lap. His hair was brown back then and long too. He had good hair and a good beard and a good life. They would read about vineyards and France, and Italian canals and English detectives. They would grow chives in pots and he would drop potato pancake mixture into pans of hot oil, and serve them to her with apple sauce but no sour cream. Sometimes they would catch a good fish and he would bake it with almonds. They would walk hot streets and he would waste money on ice cream and plastic toys that she never really loved anyhow. She pushed around a little red cart with her dollies in it. Her mother always worried about her wandering in the fields, even if she took the dogs with her, but that is what mothers are for.

The pain in his chest was bothering him again, but it always did when things got too frantic. Potatoes were more his speed. The Family were back to buzzing over spilt wine and covered dishes. One of the ones he didn’t particularly dislike came over and filled his glass with wine, and brought him a plate of lamb, with all the burnt pieces he could wish for arranged neatly around a small dish of parsley, coriander, chopped chillis, vinegar and oil. The young man sat next to him. “Those potatoes are so good, they might make you rich…” The younger man smiled as he stroked his chin and patted his belly.

“Who needs lamb when you have potatoes that could make a lion roar in happiness!”

The Potato farmer, turned his head. “Who is saying this about potatoes! Potatoes are just potatoes! At least we won’t starve this time around!”

“This time round? Since when did we starve?” The young man’s eyes were glassy with wine. The potato farmer patted the younger man’s arm.

“Come with me. I’ve some vodka in the shed.” The younger man hauled up the stocky farmer of potatoes and arm in arm they walked together towards the little red shed with the padlock on the door. The Potato grower, blessed as he was in many ways, flicked on the uncovered light bulb and shuffled towards cardboard box, taped up with brown tape, and labeled “Don’t”. He pulled out a corked bottle of clear liquid, pulled the stopper free and passed it to the younger man, who smelt it, almost let himself be caught thinking twice, and then tipped up the bottle to his mouth, taking a cautious swig of the firewater, then involuntarily coughing. The sacred grower of potatoes patted the back of the younger man, and laughed, straight from his belly to his ears.

“Good?”

The younger man nodded. “You do remember my name is Larry, right?…And yes…it and I am both good.”

The grower of potatoes pulled another bottle from the box, turned off the light at the switch, shut the door, padlocked it, slipped the key into his pocket and guided the young man whose name he did not care about, back to the little party. He could walk that path with his eyes closed, which was a good thing, since he had neglected to take a flashlight. The younger man pulled his cell phone from his pocket and shone a light on the path. The potato grower winced.

“Put that thing away!” The potato man was half growling, half laughing. The potato vodka had put him in a good mood, just like it was meant to.

The Family were laughing. Joking. Celebrating nothing in particular and then again everything they could think of. They were living. They were eating. They loved and were loved, and he loved them too. He loved them more than potato vodka, more than sweet carrot salad, more than Miri’s hummus with all the skins peeled off the chickpeas. He loved them more than the land he stood on, more than the taste of fresh parsley in vinegar and oil with lamb to dip in it. He loved them and they loved him and his potatoes and his grouchy ways.

As he opened his left eye, the right one swollen shut, permanently he suspected, the farm and the supper and the sweet boy with the curls and the young man he wanted to share a whole bottle of moonshine with, they all disappeared. All he had before him was a concrete floor that ran with blood and piss and the shit of a dozen people, and a mattress that was a health hazard more than a comfort, and that crawled with lice. He knew they would miss him when they ate his good potatoes, the ones that were sweet yet fluffy. He knew they loved him, and he loved them. He could almost taste the vodka on his lips and closed his eyes once again, and drifted back to the field, back to the farm, back to his life and away from the living death he breathed in with every inhale and that he breathed out with every cautious exhale that sent even more carbon dioxide out into the room that had no fan. In his hand he felt the knobbly oval-ness of a potato, and lifted it to his mouth, chewing slowly on the air, pretending it was a potato, making it into a reality by the strength of a memory he treasured like his shed with the bottles of moonshine, that everybody knew about but everybody pretended didn’t exist. He wondered, selflessly for a moment, if they might be persuaded into fooling themselves that he did not exist at all, that he was a figment of their imaginations, but he suspected that the potatoes were too real for that. They would not let him be forgotten.

A piece of string hung from the olive tree. If he pulled it the whole thing might unravel, so he shut his eye and went back to the field and worked to fill the bellies of the hungry who always did need a potato more than they needed an orange and he was happy once again.