Clear Springs Read Free

dollars. The house, only six years old, was sturdy and attractive. The land was cleared and fertile, and it was only a mile from town, so trading at the town square or the feed mill would be an easy journey by buggy or wagon.
    At one time, much of the land of the Jackson Purchase was coveredwith tall grass. The Chickasaws had apparently burned it periodically to create grassland for buffalo. When my father plowed in the spring, he turned up arrowheads. The land is not delta-flat, but it’s not at all hilly either. It resembles rolling English farmland, both in the natural lay of the land and in the farming habits the farmers imposed upon it. It has small fields, and the fencerows are thick with weeds, vines, oaks, wild cherries, sumac, and cedars.
    The landscape is still changing. On the highway, not far from our farm, are a tobacco-rehandling outfit, a John Deere business, and a chicken hatchery. The little frozen-custard stand, fallen to other uses and then to ruin, stood there until fairly recently, but the motel disappeared long ago. In its place is a collection of grim little buildings, including the House of Prayer. With the Purchase Parkway close by, industries have located near the interchange. My birthplace is now at the hub of industrial growth in the county, and the road in front of the houses is now a busy connector to highways and factories. When the cars rush by (ignoring the speed limit of thirty-five) on their way to work, or when a shift lets out, my mother sometimes stands at the kitchen window and counts them. “That’s sixty-eight that have gone by in five minutes,” she announces.
    The farm now lies entirely within the Mayfield city limits. To the east, the subdivisions are headed our way. Behind the farm, to the south, we can glimpse an air-compressor factory. Just across the railroad, to the west, the four-lane bypass leads around town and to the parkway and to everywhere on the continent. Across the road, in a thirty-acre cornfield, which is like an extension of our front yard, is the landmark of the town.
    I call it the chicken tower. It is the feed mill that processes feed for all the chickens that fuel Seaboard Farms, whose chicken-processing plant is on the other side of town. Construction workers came in 1989 and put up the tower in continuous twelve-hour shifts, while my father watched in fascination. The thing rose faster than hybrid corn shooting up. A chain-link fence girds the field. A deer was caught on the fence almost as soon as it went up.
    The tower is a tall, gray concrete structure, without windows. It’s a hundred and fifty-six feet high. If you see it at dawn, it’s hard not to think about a space-shuttle launch. Adjoining the chicken tower are six cylindrical towers, attached like booster rockets. The architecture is unrelievedly functional. The word “Soviet” comes to mind. The tower has a framework of pipes crawling over it, and the six cylinders haveearned the nickname “the concrete six-pack.” These silos are a hundred and ten feet high. The mill hums, and big trucks come and go. It’s like a huge refrigerator running. The chicken feed smells a bit like the mash of a whiskey distillery. The chicken industry, proliferating throughout the South, extravagantly promises prosperity, and many local farmers have grabbed the chance to raise chickens for Seaboard. The plant hatches the eggs and makes the feed, and the farmers raise the chicks in houses built at their own expense. Then low-wage workers cut up and package “poultry products” when the birds are six weeks old and sporting their first full plumage.
    Beyond the chicken tower is the site where the Lyon quintuplets were born in 1896, and beyond that there’s the feed mill where my mother’s soybeans go, and beyond that is town. And then there’s the wide world I eventually left home to see.
    It’s summer now. I am back again. With Oscar, the family dog, I’m visiting the pond on a warm evening, feeding fish.