Chapter 37

Just A Little Guy

Owen Murphy thought he was dying. He seemed now to live his life in the big lounger in the front room, confined there by gravity and weariness. He felt as though he had shrunk into his own bones. Over the months he had watched the powerful flesh of his hands and forearms wilt to dry stalks tented over by a thin membrane of mottled skin.

What happen to me? he wondered.

He often woke in the earliest hours of the morning, recently this spring, at the first songs of a determined wren outside.

"Just a little guy..." said Owen aloud, as he listened to the buzzing song so rattlesnake-like that he imagined the tiny bird nesting for millennia in tree cavities too small for reptile predators to invade, yet all the while craftily stealing the snake's warning sound to protect itself from larger birds.

That's me, he thought, just a little guy in a big world trying to stay alive, avoiding most of the snake bites, all except the big one...

The faint gray light in the room shifted to pale gray-blue as the wren sang on. Owen pulled the sheet and blanket covering him aside and managed to use the flat-sided white hospital jug without making a mess of it. Alexander emptied it each morning and returned it to its place under the lamp table. He could hear Alexander fixing coffee in the kitchen now.

"Keep on, Dad!" he would say, "You're going to beat this, I know you are!"

Owen wasn't so sure. Farmer's cancer. He knew others who had it. Leroy Franklin worked at the elevator his entire life. He died last summer of this non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He'd even gone to Mayo. John Daugherty over in Benton Township got it, too. He was still kicking. Raymond Johnson was dead. Early Wilson died of prostate cancer. Little guys, just working guys trying to raise families and set aside a little for retirement. They did, too. Sent kids to college -- most of them moved away, though. Who wants to farm nowadays? Not many... A few, like Alexander came back. Some got big, buying out all the small neighboring places, leasing ground, hauling equipment around. Going like there was no tomorrow, racing from place to place in their big pickups, four-wheelers that boiled the white limestone gravel dust behind them in clouds of who knows what.

The light in the room shifted from blue to golden yellow. The ceiling began to glow. A pickup raced by the house. The gravel had a more solid sound from recent rain, more than fine right now; but last year there was never enough. Back and forth, the seesaw of plenty and poverty, the life the small farmer. Owen wondered how Alexander was going to hold out a lot longer on the farm. He figured they had to be living on what was left of the life insurance settlement. That couldn't last. Then what?

Meanwhile, who would win the race between the weeds, the insects, the fungi? Not this farmer. From DDT to 2,4-D to atrazine to methyl bromide, chlordane, dieldrin, heptachlor, and many more, I, Owen Murphy, have used them all, he thought.

The weeds get stronger. The bugs get more and more resistant. The water, the soil, the air fill with more and more poisons. Where does this end? What happens to the little guys? Owen sighed.

Alexander turned the corner into the room with a cup fresh of coffee and started chattering away at him, as if by force of a child's will to raise his failing parent.

"Hey, Dad! Good morning," he said. "Try some of this. It's good coffee. How did you sleep? You gotta keep on, ok? Listen to that wren, would ya?"

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Next...Chapter 38

Thanks for these resources:

Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment. 1997. Perseus Books.

World Health Organization (WHO). The World Health Report 2002.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 37 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network and The Upper Basin Chronicles © 2003 Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 37.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.