I pulled my father’s top left desk drawer open slowly, careful not to make a sound. It was a summer afternoon, and he was still out in the fields. I was nine. With the drawer halfway open, I saw his navy leather checkbook, the kind with ruled pages and a stitched spine, used to buy things like seed and fertilizer. I slid the drawer all the way out and found what I was looking for: the blue-and-white pack of True cigarettes, hidden in the back.
As the months passed, I checked often. Like a detective, I watched the cigarettes disappear, one by one, until a new pack replaced the old. The brand’s slogan—True has nothing to hide—didn’t apply here. My father had something to keep quiet.
The same drawer held other secrets: his mechanical engineering set from college, a black trifold case lined with blue velvet and sealed by two metal snaps. “Keuffel & Esser Co., New York,” the gold letters read across the flap. Inside were three compasses, two drawing pens, and a semicircular protractor. I opened it reverently and touched each tool like treasure. I never saw him use them. He’d only attended two years of college at Western Kentucky before coming home at his parents’ request. He’d done what was asked of him—just as he always would.
I never saw him smoke either. I never took one from the pack. If I had, and he’d found out, we’d have known each other’s secrets. Still, I wanted in. I wanted to be granted entry into my father’s interior world.
In 1973, tobacco was Kentucky’s leading cash crop. It was also our livelihood. My father built his dream around a vision of the family farm—with equal weight on both words. Tobacco growing was painstaking work, most of it done by hand. Each of us had a job. My grandfather drove the tractor down each row of freshly plowed dirt, pulling the setting machine. My parents sat on the machine’s seats, placing seedlings into rubber tongs that gripped and planted them in rhythm with the machine’s turning wheel.
My brother Jeff and I walked behind, planting the seedlings that missed the mark. We took turns using an old wooden peg to twist the roots into the earth. I liked the feel of bare dirt under my feet, the quiet satisfaction of work that mattered, even if it was the lowliest task.
Earlier that spring, my father and grandfather had burned the beds to sterilize the soil—one of many careful steps in the ritual of tobacco. They spread seed and fertilizer by hand, laid down straw, then covered the beds with thin cotton fabric. Their precision turned labor into something sacred.
To me, it made sense that I might smoke one day. Even if it didn’t match the strict moral code I was raised under—no rock music, no PG movies. Still, I noticed contradictions. My grandfather chewed tobacco. My uncles listened to John Denver and Eric Clapton. My mother and I belted out Helen Reddy in the car: I am woman, hear me roar...
That year, 1973, the world was shifting. My family huddled around the black-and-white TV and watched Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. I saw what was changing for women, and I wanted to be part of it.
Our farm was changing too. By the end of the decade, my father had transformed it from a small, family-centered operation into something larger, more industrial. He bought a commercial corn planter and a self-propelled combine, over Papaw’s objections. He sold the cattle. He calculated weighted-average costs. The tobacco barn now sheltered tractors and machines.
“Fence row to fence row” became the mantra. What had once been a patchwork quilt of grazing land and garden plots was consolidated. The fences came down. The past was cleared away.
That fall, when I was nine, my father loaded shelled corn into the two-ton grain truck for delivery. I asked to ride along. It was part of a plan—I wanted to ask him to teach me how to smoke.
In the cab of the truck, I gathered my courage. “Will you show me?”
He smiled—a quick, crooked smile, the kind you might flash if your little sister dared you to eat a sardine. Then he nodded.
It felt like permission. Like trust.
Time alone with him was rare. Our only one-on-one moments were on Sunday afternoons when I lay beside him on the orange shag carpet, my head resting between his chest and shoulder as he napped. With the windows open and a breeze drifting in, it felt like the world went quiet, like everything I worried about had been swept away.
At the mill, he pulled into the weigh lane and parked. After unloading the corn into the hopper, we waited while the workers inspected the grain. He reached into the glove box and pulled out a pouch of loose tobacco and a packet of rolling papers.
“You’ve got to learn to roll before you smoke,” he said, as if it were a practical skill—like tying a hook before catching a fish.
He showed me how to fold the paper, sprinkle the tobacco, roll it tight, and twist the ends. Then he placed the cigarette between my lips and lit it. He told me how to hold it—not too tight, not too loose—and how to draw in.
I had imagined feeling glamorous and grown, like the woman in the magazine ad with the sea-green jumpsuit and the long, elegant cigarette. I thought I’d feel like the girls at the lake who sneaked behind the clubhouse with their Eve cigarettes, laughing as they dropped floral packs into their straw bags. I thought my father and I would share a moment, and maybe I’d feel like his equal.
But that’s not what happened.
I saw unease in him. He kept looking out the windows, nervous. Maybe he knew a good father shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe he didn’t want to share this part of himself after all.
The cigarette burned. The taste was bitter, the smoke harsh. But I didn’t hate it. And I didn’t feel transformed. I was still a chubby girl in a rusty truck, outside a shabby feed mill, pretending to be something I wasn’t.
The surgeon general’s warning had been issued years earlier. My father never said it outright, but I knew he wrestled with the contradictions: growing a crop that could kill, raising it for the paycheck it guaranteed. But there was something addictive about a sure thing. Something hard to turn away from. He wanted the farm to succeed. He wanted to make his father proud. He wanted more.
So did I.
On my father’s land, I learned how to inhabit contradictions: the safety of the familiar and the urge to rebel. The pull of belonging and the desire to escape. The longing to be known and the instinct to hide. Maybe it was my first lesson in holding two opposing truths at once—and learning to live in the space between them.