Chapter 8: The Blisters on the Stone
For the first eight weeks, Julian was a broken machine.
His muscles, softened by years behind executive desks and luxury steering wheels, screamed with agonizing pain after eight hours of hauling eighty-pound grain sacks in the sub-zero cold. His hands blistered, tore open, bled, and slowly calloused over under the rough burlap.
The farmhands did not mock him, but they did not speak to him either. They treated him with the quiet, detached courtesy reserved for strangers who had yet to prove their worth.
Donald—the veteran farm supervisor who had known Julian since he was a boy—stood over him on the second week as Julian collapsed onto a wooden crate, gasping for air.
""Your daddy used to clear forty sacks an hour, Julian,"" Donald said quietly, chewing on a piece of hay. ""Not because he wanted to show off, but because he knew the families down in the hollow were waiting on the meal to bake their bread for Sunday.""
Julian wiped the sweat and flour from his stinging eyes, looked up at Donald, and slowly stood back up on his shaking legs.
He gripped the next burlap sack, hauled it onto his shoulder, and carried it to the flatbed truck.
Every night, he returned to the small, freezing cabin, built a fire with wood he had split himself, and fell asleep with his boots on, his mind completely emptied of corporate mergers, court filings, and social status.
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For the first time in his life, he was too tired to lie to himself.
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