Art by Lala Kasimova, KNOCK #8

A Profile of Benjamin Barlow IV, Lightning Farmer

[This article first appeared June 11, 1956 in the Topeka Chronicle. It was reprinted with minor changes in the textbook In Their Own Words: A People’s History of Two Centuries of American Empirical Philosophy (1788-1988), edited by K.L. Fulton and Charles Wainwright, Detroit Free University Press, 1988.]

I always been a lightning farmer, like three generations of Barlows before me. I don’t run a modern agribusiness like you find in the Alleghenies, where they strip-mine thunder, nor in New Mexico, where they barber whole passels of Mexicans each spring. No, sir, mine is 100 percent pure, certified natural, unadulterated Midwestern lightning, grown from the hair of my own kin and children of impeccable repute.

Great-Granddad got into the lightning business on account he was a long-distance cannoneer aimed at the Wilmette Valley in Oregon. Planned to stake out a homestead there. But he were flying with a discount company and the mortar that fired him from St. Louis was so criminally undercharged that he landed in the middle of Kansas. His supplies were loaded aboard another cannon that did carry clear to Oregon, so Great-Granddad was in a heap of trouble—not a soul for a hundred miles in any direction and him in the midst of planting season without a single seed. No quartz pebbles for to grow liver trees with. No vulture feathers for hacksaw bushes. Why, not even a handful of marbles for a poor man’s harvest of stained glass windows. Alls he had was locks of hair from his children back east, tucked into a little box of laurel wood that hung about his neck (and even that had been scorched by the gunpowder when he was fired off). But the soil of this great country is plenty fertile, so Great-Granddad took the burnt hair from that box, planted it in the ground, and waited to see what sprung up. Wasn’t three months before he had a bumper crop of lightning, bolts a-shooting out fromnewly sprouted hairvines to rend open the heavens. (For it’s a fact well known that lightning of all varieties strikes upward, from ground to sky.)

Now, old Benjamin Barlow Sr. wasn’t a man of especial scientific-mindedness, but it took him only a few brief months of study to work out the mechanics—how hair’s length muffles or loudens the thunder; how its color determines the time of the strike (blonde for mornings, brown for noon, and red for nine o’clock in the evening); how its burntness or freshness decides whether it strikes sharp and clean or washes wide through the clouds. He also discovered what’s come tobe known as Barlow’s Laws. First law is that hair sown in anger never blooms—plant a handful of premium three-guage blonde or ravenblack superfine beneath your enemy’s house and lightning never will strike it, for electricity refuses to meddle in human affairs. Second law is the hair must be taken from a child who’s not yet had a moment of sexual culmination. Pluck hairs from even a twenty-two-year-old bachelor and you’ll get nothing above static electricity—maybe a will-o-the-wisp if you’re lucky.

With no more knowledge than that, Benny Sr. made himself a millionaire. Of course it was easier back then, when children roamed in wild herds across the prairie, grazing on taffybushes and comfit weed. Great-Granddad could afford to shoot a half-dozen before breakfast, chop off their hair, and leave the carcasses to rot in the sun. With virginhair so plentiful, old Benny was soon supplying half the state with lightning, shipping out hairvines to Topeka and Wichita. A lucrative business, too, for there may be states bigger and more populous than Kansas, but none that love storms better, and it’s a mighty poor mayor who can’t provide his constituents with so common a luxury as a bit of Sunday thunder.
It were too good to last, though. Competitors flew in from all over the country by way of repeating howitzer, some from as far as Europe. The supply of children—even imported children—dried up and farmers had to grow and nurture them, too. Some searched for alternatives to pure virginhair. Turns out that tresses from slightly or infrequently culminated individuals, when mixed with the right proportions of herbs—quip, toss-a-penny and bee’s knee—produce lightning as well. It’s an inferior yellowish sort, rather than blue-white, but cheap as hell to grow. That trash has become so widespread a body can go years between seeing proper-colored strikes.

But that’s the price of progress. A smalltime operation like mine can’t compete. No chance at the big contracts on fork and sheet lightning. Mostly I cultivate small artisanal thunders—bone-cracker, kettledrum, Winchester ’41, Tallahassee squib. It pays the bills, but fine thunder ain’t nothing more than a plaything to the rich these days.

I worry what the future holds. I have eleven children, nine of them still with their hair short-cropped. Though one or two take after their old man, most seem determined to get off the farm, through schooling or kite jockeying—whatever it takes—and that makes me easier at heart. But I wonder sometimes if they’ll look back in middle age and cogitate on their early years, those summer days when they stood on the porch, feeling the cool wind rise and slash the humid afternoon, and then the skirling of rain and abrupt flicker of lightning bluer than starlight. For there’s nothing so refreshing as a homegrown storm and nothing so sobering. It would do a powerful lot of good for every American take in a bit of homegrown lightning from time to time. It would straighten up those who need it. But that’s wishing on a cirrus cloud. Only thing to do is plant another crop and pray I can hold off the bank one more year.

The Rummagers

Five toasters, four of them chrome. Bookends shaped like wagonwheels. Fisherman’s floats.
Her grandparents were rummagers, I’ve been told, up at 6am Saturdays to ferret out yard sales and strike before lunch. Did they imagine they’d end up packed off to the nursing home while their granddaughter’s boyfriend mops behind the refrigerator and separates the garbage from the junk?
What can’t be thrown out must be sold. It’s a law of nature, the rummage returning to the rummagers. The old man would howl—he can’t button his shirt, but remembers what he paid in 1985 for that plastic light-up mirror. Wouldn’t take a cent less today, which is why the sale must be conducted without his knowledge.

Sometimes I wouldn’t mind his help—pricing is the hardest part. What number to put on an electric razor I’d be frightened to use myself? On a jelly jar filled with buttons? A cardboard box of burnt orange earthenware marked “second best china”? (They never ate off it, the cupboards filled instead with plastic bowls deformed from microwaving.) A voltmeter, stamped 1920, heavy wooden case and metal latch—$100? Free with purchase?

What to make of these people I’ve met only twice. Non-smokers, but empty cigar boxes heaped nine high on the workbench. In the medicine chest, a tube of K-Y Jelly smaller than my pinkie. Ivory soap bars, three-quarters used and desiccated, hidden among the bathroom closet towels. I cannot make the detritus add up.

Tear up the carpet and sweep the dust from the cracks of the parquet floor beneath. Strip the mahogany bedroom set painted with gloss white paint when “antiqued” furniture was in style. Turn down the television, the volume set to maximum, which was cheaper than hearing aid batteries. Stack together the sentimental favorites, which will live the rest of their lives in limbo. The collection of coffee mugs from around the globe. A ziplock bag of black-and-white snapshots, captions penciled on the back—“Rickshaw ride, Kyoto”, “The Mad Russian, Cpl. John Sobizki of Youngstown, Ohio”, “The latrine.” A greeting card from Ed to his new wife Estelle, postmarked Japan’46, with a cartoon Negro child in overalls and straw hat, who says, “Ah ain’t nothing but a po’ boy, and ahm feelin’ oh so blue, ah can’t do a single lick o’ work, cuz ah sho am missin’ you.”

It makes me think of my twelfth birthday, when my mother told me about a photo-essay she once saw: pictures of the poorest quartile of a hundred countries, each represented by a family that had piled everything it owned outside its home. Senegal, Mexico, Indonesia, Guam. The American family’s possessions, scanty as they were, stretched endlessly, pushed the people out of the picture.
I have found here today a device to pull the tops from strawberries, 200 wooden coat hangers and a green ceramic owl that is a nightlight. The boxes spill from the garage and I have not yet even touched the attic. We shall be done in by plenty.

Tom Miller has  been as a  travel writer, marathon runner, map editor, EMT, and English teacher. He lives in Pittsburgh where he is finishing a novel, The False Histories. His work has appeared in Notre Dame Review, the McSweeney’s website, and the horror anthology Dark Distortions.

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