Rock of Ages by Howard Owen

ran away to be with his grandfather. They haven’t really stayed in touch over the years, but something’s clicking. Maybe, she thinks, shared blood.
    Some of it, she supposes, is the farm.
    She teased Kenny gently about his love of farming the week she arrived, wondering if there possibly was a more unlikely way to get rich.
    â€œYou know what they say,” she’d told him. “The way to make a small fortune is take a large fortune and go into farming.”
    â€œOr,” he said, “you could teach English.”
    â€œI guess we’re just not genetically disposed to make money,” she said, then blushed as he offered an uncertain laugh.
    But what to make of Justin? He never showed any desire to get dirt under his fingernails until he was past 22, but he has come home from Guatemala with what Georgia not-so-secretly hopes are only temporarily different priorities.
    Of all things, they taught him just enough about agriculture to make him dangerous and sent him out to show native farmers how to build better storage bins for their grain so the rats wouldn’t eat it. This seemed wrong to Georgia, when she first heard of it, in so many ways. How arrogant for the Peace Corps or anyone to come into another country and presume to tell people who had been farming the land since well before Columbus that they had been doing it all wrong. How ridiculous to send a sociology major from the University of Virginia, born and bred in the suburbs, to break the news to them. How outrageous that they couldn’t have him teaching them English or something he actually knew.
    â€œBut, Mom,” Justin had written, “some of it they are doing wrong. We can learn a lot from them, but they can learn something from us, too. And if they don’t have grain, they have to starve or give up their land and move to some shantytown on the edge of a big city, where they’ll be worse off than they are here. Besides, I’m teaching them English, too. Or at least their kids.”
    So, Justin came back with more of an affinity for the land than Georgia has ever been able to conjure. To her, the farm was something to escape. There was no poetry in the land where she worked as little as she could, dreaming of a day when her world would be all tidy lawns and suburban streets and rooms that smelled like books.
    Once, the last summer before college, her father asked her to take a ride with him in his old pickup. He was going out to look at the lush acres where he was making a good living growing strawberries, blueberries, cantaloupes, watermelons, and a wide variety of other food that enticed city people from Port Campbell and travelers off what was then the closest road leading to and from Florida. It is land from which Annabelle Geddie and her son, Blue, still prosper, according to Kenny, “in spite of what they tell you.”
    It was June of 1966, and everything was thriving. There had been enough rain but not too much, and early summer had been mild by North Carolina standards. He drove them over the fields, through dirt lanes crisscrossing the land, waving and occasionally chatting with the men and women working there. He stopped the truck beneath a lone shade tree, a sycamore, beside the creek.
    â€œListen,” Littlejohn McCain had said to his daughter, after they had sat there for several seconds. “Just listen.”
    Georgia listened, and then shrugged and looked at her father.
    â€œWhat?”
    He seemed genuinely disappointed that she couldn’t hear it, too.
    â€œIf you sit real still,” he said, “you can hear things growing. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there’s a hum almost, underneath everything else, like the land is alive.”
    Georgia was only wishing by this time that the truck had a radio, and air conditioning. They were starting to attract mosquitoes and gnats.
    She really did try to listen, though. She wanted to at least humor her father, whom