The Farmer's Daughter

The summer sun glared down on me as I worked in the fields of Old Man Miller’s farm. I was muscling around bales of hay, no t-shirt on ‘cause it was too hot for that. Hell, it was too hot for the jeans and boots I was wearing, but unlike my shirt I wasn’t going to take those off, so to get through the task at hand I thought of Amanda, my girlfriend who was living back in Atlanta. She was a beautiful light-skinned girl with jet black hair that cascaded down her back, curling from the nape of her neck to her beautiful little waist. 

I’d still be with her if my parents hadn’t decided that we had to move to Marksville, Georgia, a small town of about 400 people located in Green County at the beginning of the summer. I didn’t want to go. I had told my parents that moving would ruin my chances of a football scholarship, but my dad took the liberty of looking into the football here and found out that almost all the football players here get scholarships to top ivy league schools because Marksville is a football town. Regardless of my failed first attempt I fought and begged and pleaded, and ultimately I lost the battle and ended up here anyway. So, after all my attempts to keep me in Atlanta failed I reluctantly moved with them here and got a job with Old Man Miller for one hundred and fifty dollars a day so that I could save to visit her in the winter. 

And that’s how I got here, I thought, exasperatedly. I wiped the back of my gloved hand across my forehead to wipe away the sweat rolling down my face and examined my completed work. All the bales of hay were right where Old Man Miller wanted them to be, and now it was time for my break. 

The sun was hot, I was sweating like a pig, and I needed a cool down, so I grabbed my shirt off the fence I had laid it over and walked into the woods at the end of Miller’s property. It was an old abandoned wood with dried vegetation covering the ground and cracking with every step I took. 

Half a mile into the wood there was a clear blue stream that cut through the center of a small round clearing. Everyday on my break I came to the stream to cool off. I stripped down to nothing but my boxers and tossed all of my clothing on top of a rock, then stepped into the perpetually freezing water. 

The cold was welcome after hours of hard labor under the smoldering sun, but I never stayed long, there was no reason to. I just came to cool off, soothe my burning skin and then return to the farm house for lunch. 

I sat dormant for a few minutes, allowing the cold to do it’s job, then once it was done I dipped my head in the water to cool my cheeks and exited the stream. As I re-dressed myself I thought about what I had to after lunch and listed it off. The fence needed fixing, and it had since I started working here, but there was always so much to do around the farm that neither I nor Old Man Miller ever got around to it; peaches needed to be picked so Mrs. Miller could make her famous peach jelly for the fourth of July party that Friday; and the cows had to be brought around once the fence was fixed. 

As I walked out of the woods, dry plants cracking beneath my feet I noticed Old Man Miller dressed in his tattered overalls and red plaid shirt in the distance, surveying the hay I’d moved. He must have been looking for me because he rarely ever left his tasks with the animals just to visit. 

I stepped out of the wood and onto the green grass, calling to him as I made my way over to where he was. He looked up to me and nodded in acknowledgment of my presence, but said nothing to me until I reached his side. 

Old Man Miller was a good man, so I had no problem doing anything he ever asked me to do. In fact, I had thought about quitting a million times but never did because I couldn’t stand letting him down. 

“You went for a dip in the stream again?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, I knew. He could tell from the way my shirt stuck to my wet torso, but I answered anyway because I felt I had to.