Made in America

i>? Chapter 1 This Is Farm Life You can go see your family now," the man told my dad. He had long white hair and cowboy boots, a flannel shirt, and some blue jeans on. My dad looked him up and down. Why is the janitor telling me that I can go see my wife? he wondered. It was 1973, and even in rural Hillsboro things were a little kooky. "Who was that?" he asked my mom when he entered her hospital room. "He's the on-call doctor," she told him. "Dr. Draper is away at a football game." Dad shrugged. He was more interested in seeing his newborn twin sons. They say there's a lot you can do in five minutes. You can change a tire, eat a sandwich, or choke out Frank Trigg (again). But that October 13, I wasn't doing anything but a whole lot of crying in the five minutes between my birth and that of my twin brother, Mark. "The doctor says they're fraternal," Mom said, "but I think they're exactly alike." But just because we were alike didn't mean that we weren't going to be rivals. I say that everybody with any sense knows that being born is a race, which means that I won because I was first. But Mark tries to argue that it's a test of stamina to see who can hold out the longest, so he won. The next day our parents took us back to our farm on the outskirts of Hillsboro. Hillsboro is a small farming town in central Illinois, an hour or so away from St. Louis and home to about five thousand people. The town square is just a spot where four streets intersect in front of an old courthouse, and the sign above the video store reads video store. There's an Orpheum movie theater, one bookstore, one hotel, and a Subway restaurant that has both Mr. Pibb and Mello Yello. The tallest structures are silos and water towers. More people chew tobacco than smoke in Hillsboro, and just about everybody wears blue jeans, white sneakers, and white socks. When the radio announcer mentions how the girl's high school basketball team is doing that year, we pay attention. We own guns and hunt. We don't worry about someone breaking in through a window, because they can just open the front door. The people in Hillsboro who don't believe in evolution aren't jerks about it. Most everyone is friendly, both in the sense of being amiable and in the sense of knowing things about you. There's an idea city folk have that everyone in a small town has a secret. It's true that there are things that people don't talk about openly, but those things aren't hardly secret. The Hughes farm was around fifteen hundred acres when Mark and I were born. Our older sister Beth was still living at home, but Dad's daughters from his first marriage, Annette and Evelyne, were older and had moved on. Our house sat on a hill, so if you stood next to it and looked around in a full circle, everything within eyesight was our property. We had fields of corn, beans, and wheat, and we raised chickens, turkeys, horses, and cows. One day Dad asked Mom, "Why are we burning our money when there are two perfectly healthy milk cows up there?" Baby formula was expensive, and Mark and I went through two cases a week. "I'll just milk them, pasteurize it, and give the boys whole milk." From then on, the Hughes twins were raised like cattle in a lot of ways. Quickly, my parents realized that bringing up Mark and me wasn't going to be like bringing up Beth. One day when we were two years old, Mom and Dad did the farm work, got done late, and came in tired. They had recently remodeled the house, which was a lot of work on top of their usual load. They sleepily ate their supper, fed us, and then put us to bed. At two in the morning, Mom heard a sound and went to the kitchen to investigate. She returned to the bedroom and woke up our dad. "You're not going to believe what they've done," she told him. The kitchen had a refrigerator with a freezer on the bottom. Mark and I had gotten into it, pulled out the butter,Hughes, Matt is the author of 'Made in America ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416948834 and ISBN 141694883X.