By Ed Staskus

   “I started to help in the sugar beet fields when I was nine years old,” Angele Jurgelaitis said. “My sister Irena started helping me two years later when she turned nine.” The year was 1937 when the sisters worked together for the first time. Seven years later Angele was in a refugee camp outside of Nuremberg and Irena was on her way to a slave labor camp in Siberia. Angele was lucky Americans ran the camp she ended up in. Irena was unlucky Russians ran the camp she ended up in.

   “We worked with our father, who had a one-row horse-drawn puller.” Her father Jonas followed on foot behind the puller, picked up the beets, scalping the tops with a small machete, and dropped them behind him as he went. He recycled the heads for animal feed. His daughters brought up the rear, shaking dirt off the beets, and loading them into a side slat cart. When it was full Jonas hitched up and made his way to Mariampole, the nearest market town, where there was a storehouse and a train station to later take the root vegetables to a sugar beet factory. 

   Their other major crop was cabbage. They could harvest upwards of ten thousand heads an acre. When they cut the cabbage heads off of the plant they left the outer leaves and root in the ground. That way they got two crops. Jonas took most of his cabbages to Mariampole, too. The rest went into hanging baskets for soup.

   “My older brothers Bronius and Justinas helped handle the livestock. They did field work and repairs. Something always needed to be fixed. My younger brothers were still growing up. My father did everything outside the house and my mother Julija did everything inside the house. All of us worked around the clock at harvest time.” Most of the food and drink the family of eight ate and drank came from their own fields and pastures, although most of their sugar beets were grown on land they rented from a neighboring childless widow.

   The farm was along the flatlands of the Naujeji Gizai region hallway between Lake Paezeriu and Mariampole, although it was far closer in spirit to the lake than it was to the city. The land bordered East Prussia and Poland. Some farmers had tractors. Most farmers had draft horses. They preferred tractors, but the Great Depression had put a dent into what they preferred. Some big land owners had cars. Everybody else had a horse and buggy to get the family to church on time on Sundays.

   Jonas kept cows, pigs, and chickens. “We made our own bread and butter, made cheese, gathered eggs, and collected berries.” There were patches of wild blueberries at the edge of their fields. Although they didn’t have a cellar, Julija still canned pickles and beets and stored them in the well. “We raised our own pigs and my father killed them.” When the time came, Jonas selected a pig for slaughter, walked it to a clearing beside the barn, hit the animal hard between the eyes with a club hammer, and cut its throat. With the help of his two eldest sons he cleaned and skinned the pig with a knife, keeping a knife sharpener at hand.

   Once the skin was separated from the muscle and fat he cleaned out the guts and sawed the pig’s head off. After quartering the animal, Jonas found the hip joints and slid his knife into them, cutting off the two hams. He did the same thing when cutting off the shoulders of the pig. At the center, where the ribs are, he took whatever meat he could find. Julija made sausages, bacon, and cured slabs of pork with salt and pepper. Jonas had built a closet around the chimney in the attic of the house, which could be gotten to by ladder. There were no stairs. He smoked the pork in the closet, laying the meat on grates, opening a damper to vent smoke into the closet. “I was scared to death of the upstairs, of the fire up there, although the pig meat was delicious,” Angele said. “When we ran out of food, my father killed another animal.”

   The dining room was big enough for all of them at once. There were two long benches. There were no chairs. Angele always sat cross-legged when eating. “I was scared that a Jew would sneak under the table.” She was afraid he would bite her legs and suck her blood. “Everybody said the Jews had killed God and they drank the blood of Christians.” Fear and loathing of Jews was endemic in Lithuania.

   One of Angele’s chores was killing chickens for dinner. She didn’t like chopping their heads off, so she grabbed them by the neck instead and swung them in a circle around her until their necks snapped. There were barn cats and a watchdog. They chained the dog up at night. There were potatoes and fruit trees. They grew barley and summer wheat, putting in a barnful of hay every autumn. Sugar beets were Jonas’s number one cash crop, followed by cabbage. He grew some marijuana and tobacco behind the barn. He didn’t smoke marijuana himself. He smoked his homegrown tobacco instead, packed in a pipe, taking a break at the end of a long day. 

   “I let the young men smoke their weed and get silly,” he said. Jonas got silly in a different way. He brewed his own beer and krupnickas. Julija didn’t smoke or drink. She kept a close eye on her husband. He kept a close eye on her, never smoking his pipe in the house. She suffered from tuberculosis, coughing and running a fever, and wasn’t long for this world.

   Making home brew is the simplest thing in the world. Sumerian farmers brewed beer from barley more than 5,000 years ago. The Codes of Hammurabi, which were the laws during the Babylonian Empire, decreed a daily beer ration to everybody from laborers to priests. Laborers got two liters a day. Priests got five liters a day. In the Middle Ages Christian monks were the artisanal beer makers of the time. Since Jonas had water, malt, hops, and yeast within easy reach, he had beer within easy reach year-round.

   Krupnikas is a spiced honey liqueur. The Order of Saint Benedict whipped it up for the first time in the 16th century. It can be spiced with just about anything, including cardamon, cinnamon, and ginger. If they had them, farmers added lemons, oranges, and berries. Honey was essential, although not as essential as a gallon or two of grain alcohol. There was grain as far as the eye could see, and everybody knew somebody who made moonshine, so making krupnikas full-bodied was never a problem. Lithuanians still pour it down on holidays and weddings. Everybody likes a warm snort of it in the dead of winter, whether they have a cold or not.

   Next to the lowlands of central Lithuania, the carbonate soils of the west are the best. That is where Jonas was. More than half of the country’s land area was farmland. Most of the rest of it was meadow and forest. What was left was where villages, towns, and cities were. The agrarian reform of 1922 promoted farmsteads. Landless peasants got some acres of land, if not a mule. Most holdings, except those Polonized, were between five and forty acres. The Poles were Lithuania’s rural aristocracy. Jonas had been a landless peasant before the land reform. He got twenty-some acres of his own and rented more of it. 

   During the interwar years more than 70% of the population depended on agriculture for its livelihood. In the 1930s Lithuanians fed themselves and were the source of 80% of the country’s export income. Lithuania is roughly two-thirds the size of the state of Maine. The small country was the sixth-largest butter exporter in the world at the time.

   Jonas didn’t know anything about the legality of cannabis. He didn’t know it was called “Sacred Grass” three thousand years ago in India. He didn’t know Queen Elizabeth in 1563 ordered all English land owners with sixty or more acres to grow it or face a five pound fine. One year later King Philip of Spain ordered cannabis be grown throughout his empire from Spain to Argentina. George Washington cultivated it at Mount Vernon and smoked it when his teeth hurt too much to bear.

   Biology doesn’t care if it’s sugar beets or marijuana. Biology doesn’t judge anything to be good or bad. The only thing that matters to biology is survival and reproduction. It is our constructed reality that does the judging. After World War One some nations began to outlaw marijuana. It became seriously illegal in the 1930s. The United States led the way. Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, turned the nativist as well as racist battle against marijuana into a war. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he said. He believed it had a bad effect on the weak-minded “degenerate races.” He was especially worried that white women might smoke it at parties and consort with the wrong kind of man.

   “Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, and Filipinos,” he said. “Their satanic music, jazz and swing, result from its usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, and entertainers, and many others. I consider it the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine.” The secret Coca-Cola formula contained cocaine from 1894 until 1929. It was why children could walk five miles to school, uphill in knee-deep snow, jumping barbed wire fences. 

   The town of Gizai sits at a crossroad. There was a small school, church, police station, hardware store, and a coffee shop in the 1930s. “We went to church every Sunday and my father went to the store whenever he needed a tool or something he couldn’t make himself, When he took us along he treated us to candy at the coffee shop while he drank coffee and had a slice of lazy cake, gossiping with his friends.”  

   On the farm everybody slept on the ground floor of the house. The bedrooms were three side rooms. One was for Jonas and Julija. One was for Angele and Irena. The third room was for the four boys. There was no electricity. The house was lit by kerosene lamps. The dining room was the biggest room. It was lit by a bulbous kerosene lamp that was raised and lowered from the ceiling by a pulley attached to a counterweight. Everybody washed their meals down with tea. Jonas bought tea from a German smuggler rather than pay the taxes levied on it. In the winter the fireplace was stuffed with wood and turf. The elder boys had the responsibility of making sure it never died out November through March.  Once a year a chimney sweep came with ladders, brooms, and brushes. The sweep used a long rope attached to a weight for pushing out the soot.  

   Jonas was a slave to the work of his pens and fields, It was all he knew.  He never took a day off. It would only have meant more work the next day. “I knew growing up I never wanted to be a farmer when I grew up,” Angele said.

   In Washington, D. C. Harry Anslinger could blow smoke with the best of them. “Under the influence of marijuana men become beasts. It destroys life itself,” he declared. He called for a nationwide ban. Just in case anybody had missed the point, he added, “Smoking it leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.” He got the Marijuana Tax Act passed in 1937. The Nixon administration dreamed up the War on Drugs. The next president brought out the big guns. “I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast,” President Ronald Reagan said. His First Lady consulted her astrologer and they came up with a snappy slogan. “Just Say No!” When asked what she meant she said she wasn’t talking about H-bombs but about marijuana.

  Jonas couldn’t afford a washerwoman, so Julija did all the laundry. She put a tripod inside the fireplace and heated water in a copper kettle. After the clothes were washed she rinsed them in another kettle. She used a mangler to get the wrinkles out. It was a wooden box with rollers like a wringer that squeezed and smoothed water-soaked clothes. She hung clothes on a line to dry. In the winter she hung them in the attic. When she was done she didn’t need home brew or marijuana to help her relax. She took a nap the minute she was done.

   Julija passed away in 1941. She had been in and out of a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kaunas. The disease was the leading cause of death in the country. When she decided to go home for the last time it was to die. Jonas built an addition for her, which was a small bedroom with a window. He built a new bed and stuffed a new mattress with clean straw. He moved their wedding cask to a back corner. When the end was near he built and stood a coffin up outside the bedroom door. Julija was buried in the local cemetery two months before the German armed forces invaded.

   Jonas passed away after the Russian armed forces took the country over and collectivized everybody’s farms. It was 1947. The authorities told him he could keep one cow and one pig. They didn’t care about his chickens. They told him to stop growing marijuana and tobacco. All his crops had to be delivered to the state and the state would pay him whatever they thought was appropriate. He had differences with them about it, but what’s a simple man to do? What he did was sicken and die of a brain disease. Who wants to be a slave of the state? His farm disappeared down the Soviet Union sinkhole.

   Lithuania criminalized cannabis in 2017, many years behind the times. The country was going against the grain. Almost everybody else in the world outside of China and Russia was decriminalizing it as fast as they could. They were sick of the drug gangs and lost tax revenue and prisons bulging with one-time losers. By then everybody knew marijuana didn’t make anybody sex-crazy or lust after blood. The country pivoted four years later and decriminalized small amounts for personal use. Growing any amount of it remained illegal. God forbid a seed in your personal Mason jar sprouted and flowered.

   Jonas was a plain man with only a handful of overriding concerns, doing what had to be done, leaving the rest to take care of itself. His concerns were biological, not cultural. He didn’t care about the wider world. He cared about his family and their twenty acres. He might have mulled matters over on his front porch, drawing on his pipe to get it going, but probably would not have paid too much attention to whatever factual fictions the state promulgated regarding his farm and crops. He believed heart and soul in his liberty. He wouldn’t have survived for long the next forty five years of the post-war Baltic world.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

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