Loading promotion info...
Three Days to Blizzard, I Refuse Villagers' Vegetables
NovelShort
Completed
The weather report said heavy snow was coming within three days, so I brought cash back to the village to buy up vegetables. Once the picking was done, the villagers told me to hold off on loading the trucks. "This year's price has to be renegotiated." I smiled and pointed at the fleet of trucks I'd hired. "No problem talking price, but let them load up first. Time is precious right now." The villagers crowded in around me and flatly refused.
Chapters (4)
第1章
The weather service warned of a blizzard within three days, so I drove back to the village with cash to buy up the vegetables.
Once the picking was done, the villagers told me to hold off on loading the trucks.
"This year's price has to be renegotiated."
I smiled and pointed at the fleet of trucks I'd hired.
"Fine, we can talk price. But let them load first. Time's valuable right now."
The villagers closed in around me, refusing flat out.
"Fifty percent above the old price. Agree to that, sign, and you can haul it away."
"And if you won't agree, that's fine too. We've already reached out to other vegetable buyers, and they're offering even more than that."
I frowned at them.
"Do you people even know there's a blizzard coming in three days?"
Every one of them shouted louder than the last.
"You think we're stupid because we've got no schooling. A blizzard? That just means we can sell for more."
1
It was still bitterly cold that early spring when the weather service issued its warning.
【A rare blizzard will hit within the next three days. Everyone should prepare for the cold and freezing conditions……】
My father called, his voice rushed.
"The greenhouse vegetables are ready. When are you coming back to buy them?"
I looked at the report my assistant had just handed me and frowned slightly.
"Why don't you let them sell to someone else? At this price I'm honestly not making anything."
"You little brat, think you're too big for us now?"
My father flared up instantly, cursing at me at the top of his lungs into the phone.
"Back when you were in school, a hundred and twenty-three households, which one of them didn't chip in for your tuition?"
"Without all of them, would you have made it into college? Would you be where you are today?"
What was I supposed to say to that?
"Then would you please pass the word along. I'll bring the trucks back tonight."
My father grunted and hung up.
My assistant, Antonia Lambert, stood nearby, a little curious.
"Mr. Joyce, isn't the purchase price you're offering a bit too high? It's already forty percent over the going market rate."
Price, honestly, was never the thing I cared about most.
If I weren't afraid of turning them lazy and idle, I'd have no problem handing that money over for nothing every year.
More than ten years ago, Greenhill Village was nothing but hills, and more hills.
I was the first person from the village to get into college, and I became the hope of everyone in it.
The whole village paid for my tuition and my meals, because my own family couldn't scrape it together.
My father, the village head at the time, told me this.
"In this life you can forget anything you like, even me, your own father, but you must never forget the kindness these folks showed you."
I've never forgotten those words.
Every time they come to mind, my eyes still sting with tears.
"There's nothing more to say about the price. No need for any of that."
"Go get in touch with the fleet. Have them prepare for the cold and snow and set out as soon as possible."
That thing with my father earlier was just something I'd said off the cuff.
The point was to get him to step down as village head. He's getting on in years, after all.
Antonia answered and went off, smiling, to see to it.
At three in the afternoon, Antonia and I drove out and reached Greenhill Village ahead of schedule.
As we passed the village hall at the entrance, I glanced inside and had her stop the car.
"You take the car on to my place first. I'm going in to have a word with my father."
The old man was still sitting there in the courtyard of the village hall, as if he'd been waiting just for me.
"Mr. Joyce, maybe consider a softer approach. Try not to push too hard."
Antonia had been with me since the company was founded, and she knew all about the friction between my father and me.
I waved her off, walked into the hall, went up to my father, and crouched down in front of him.
"Is the heat inside too warm for you again? Or is this weather just not cold enough for your liking?"
My father let out a laugh at that, half in exasperation.
"You little brat, three days without picking a fight with your old man and you're crawling out of your skin, aren't you?"
"Go take a look at the greenhouse fields first. Everyone's waiting on you."
第2章
The year I finished college, the whole country was swept up in the rush to go into business for yourself.
I didn't take the government-office path my father wanted for me, and though I made good money, he never stopped grumbling about it.
Later I founded Greenhill Corporation and took every cent of the first year's profit.
I paved a road and leveled the ground for Greenhill Village, and I put up the money to build them their greenhouses.
For a hundred miles in every direction, Greenhill Village earned a second name: the greenhouse village.
It didn't just supply vegetables to the city. Its produce even sold across the state line.
"Eugene's back! Come look at our crop, this year's growth is something else, unbelievable!"
"Come to my place first, look at mine first!"
"Would you listen to yourselves, eyes buried in a fistful of cash. The man's come all this way, at least let him get home and eat first."
The people working the fields in front of me were a new crop themselves, no longer the uncles and elders from back then.
My father planted himself there, waved one big hand, and everyone went quiet.
"Everybody, hear me out. They say the blizzard's coming within three days, but nobody knows which day."
"So starting right now, we pick. Every household sends who they can and pitches in however they can."
"We've got to get every last vegetable hauled out before that blizzard hits. No problem with that?"
"No problem!"
Spirits were high. After one cheer they scattered and ducked into the greenhouses.
I noticed a fair number of unfamiliar faces in the crowd, so I pulled my father aside and asked him.
"Dad, other years you always harvested it yourselves. How come you hired hands this year?"
He glanced at me, fished out a cigarette on his own, and I quickly gave him a light.
"Short on time, heavy on the work. Without a few extra hands, how would we ever get it done?"
I let out a small sigh and frowned.
"A week ago the weather service put out a blue alert. I called you then, and didn't you tell me everyone was already set to harvest?"
"The margin on vegetables is thin as it is. If they're paying hired hands on top of that, what money is left for them to make?"
"Now that's where you don't know."
My father looked at me with that expression of, you've still got things to learn, boy.
"Those people are all from the next village over. They're not taking any wages."
"But here's the thing. I told them if they want to put up greenhouses next year, you'll buy their produce too. That's no problem for you, right?"
"Naturally, the price would be a bit lower than for our own village. I made all that clear to them."
No problem?
That was one enormous problem.
But I had no intention of saying so to my father.
I'd built a company worth hundreds of millions. What hadn't I seen?
The sky darkened. I went home with my father for dinner and even had a few drinks with him.
"Don't come out later. Buying up the crop isn't my first time. I've got it handled."
My father nodded, reassured.
"Leaving it to you, of course I can rest easy."
Antonia walked me out. We'd gone a dozen yards before she lowered her voice.
"The truck fleet's here, but there's a new wrinkle."
"The villagers won't let us load the trucks. They say they have to wait for you. And there are some reporters on-site."
I paused, then quickened my step.
"Reporters, fine, let them come, we've never been short of those. But why won't they let the trucks be loaded?"
Antonia had no answer for that.
The two of us reached the fleet, where the high-powered floodlights were already set up.
Seeing me arrive, the fleet captain came over to air his grievances.
"Mr. Joyce, it's really not that we won't do our job. It's these villagers who won't let us load."
I clapped him on the shoulder and walked toward the villagers.
One of them, a middle-aged man, flicked his cigarette butt away, stood, and thrust out a hand toward me.
I was taken aback, but I still reached out.
The next second he was greeting me with a smile.
"Mr. Joyce, I'm Sam Finch's son, Bartholomew Finch."
"This time everyone's picked me to speak for them. I'd like to talk with you about the price."
第3章
Prices. What was there to negotiate about prices?
For a moment I was genuinely puzzled.
I pointed at the sky, which had already gone dark, and let a little urgency into my voice.
"Bartholomew, it's getting late. If we don't load the trucks now, we won't make it."
"Mr. Joyce, this really isn't something to rush."
Bartholomew said it gravely, and the villagers around him nodded along.
"Bartholomew's right. We've got to get this sorted out."
"You've been buying our vegetables cheap for all these years. Can't we even talk about the price?"
"I hear his company in the city is worth over a hundred million. And where'd all that come from, if not out of our pockets?"
A few ugly words rose up out of the crowd. I frowned slightly and turned to ask Antonia under my breath.
"What's going on? Is somebody stirring the pot? Or is a competitor behind this?"
Antonia's expression was odd. She nodded toward the villagers.
"You'd better just listen to what they have to say."
Bartholomew brought both big hands down in a chopping motion, and I could see the calluses on them clear as day.
His father, Sam Finch, was a lame old man, and even so, back when I was leaving for college, he'd handed over the last thirty dollars in the house.
Thirty dollars!
I knew better than anyone what that meant in those days.
"All right, Bartholomew. Say your piece."
Bartholomew gave a small nod, as if pleased with my attitude.
"It's been ten years now since your company got started, hasn't it?"
He rubbed his palms together, looking a little embarrassed, and then said something that stunned me.
"For ten years you've leaned on Greenhill Village's vegetables to build your company up to a valuation over a hundred million, and made yourself a well-known name in the city."
"I've got that all right, haven't I?"
I wanted to deny it, but looking at those plain, honest faces, I found myself nodding instead.
Bartholomew's face lit up. He pointed at the dozen-odd heavy trucks in front of us.
"You can haul the vegetables today, and I guarantee the produce out of those greenhouses is top quality, no problem there."
"After all, Greenhill Village got its start on this. We can't let our name go bad."
"It's just that everyone talked it over, and in the end they put me forward to raise one point. One very, very small point."
Bartholomew held up his little finger, and a bad feeling settled in me.
"The price on all the vegetables, on top of what it was before, goes up sixty percent."
I frowned. Bartholomew acted as if he didn't see it.
"Of course, that's the price for outsiders. You're a college man who came out of Greenhill Village, so naturally you can't be lumped in with them."
"So we talked it over a good while, and for you it only needs to go up fifty percent."
"Mr. Joyce, that price is fine, isn't it? We're still looking out for you, aren't we?"
In that instant I felt the urge to turn and walk away.
But there were still a few familiar faces in the crowd.
Only now they looked so strange to me.
Where Greenhill Village's greenhouse hub had come from, they knew better than anyone.
"Bartholomew, this isn't really right, is it?"
I chose my words carefully and didn't tear off the mask right there.
But the moment I finished, someone in the crowd shouted.
"What's not right about it?"
"You feeling like your conscience won't let you earn a little bit less?"
第4章
Honestly, part of me wished that were true.
But I was the first person from Greenhill Village to go to college, so to say the village made me wasn't exactly wrong either.
"Whoever shouted that, no need to hide. Come out and say it to my face."
Even so, I let the displeasure show as I called out over the crowd.
"You say I'm shorting myself, that my conscience should bother me. You got any proof of that?"
The man turned his head away. Bartholomew laughed it off and held out a cigarette.
I hesitated, then took it and lit it off his lighter.
"Bartholomew, it really isn't that I don't want to raise your prices."
I explained it to him, and I meant every word.
"The Greenhill greenhouse hub is known far and wide. But known for what? You all should understand that better than I do."
It was the road I'd donated back then, free of charge, that gave Greenhill Village any way out to the world at all.
So from the very start, my father held every villager to a strict standard.
Whether growing the vegetables or selling them, the prices had to be transparent, fair, and honest.
"A reputation is built up little by little. You pull a stunt like this today, and tomorrow who's going to dare come out here to buy?"
"Tell me, isn't that how it works?"
Deep down, I still believed in them.
"Everything you say is right, Mr. Joyce. But we're just country folk. We don't follow all these big ideas of yours."
Bartholomew spoke up again in that thick local drawl, and this time it grated on me in a way I didn't expect.
"You're a city man now. Maybe you can't see how hard we work out in these fields."
"Dead of summer, dead of winter, we don't dare take our minds off it for a second!"
"And even then, all year round we clear thirty, maybe fifty thousand. Not even enough for a girl's dowry."
"If you won't meet the price, then I say we just call this deal off."
I'll admit it. I'd underestimated them.
This little routine, retreating to gain ground, they were playing it smoothly.
If nobody was coaching them from behind the curtain, I didn't believe a single word of it.
"Bartholomew, all this stirring you're doing here. Have you asked your father about it?"
At the mention of his father, Bartholomew's face went a little uneasy.
"That makes no sense at all. We're the ones farming the land. You saying we need his permission now?"
"Today, I'll just lay it right out here."
Bartholomew's temper was up now.
"This price goes up whether you like it or not. Say no, and it goes up all the more!"
"Otherwise, we just don't sell!"
I watched him in silence, and the villagers around him started egging him on.
"Bartholomew's right, no raise, no sale!"
"We're a famous greenhouse hub. Everyone else is begging to buy from us!"
"You ask me, we just sell to somebody else. Don't even bother talking to him!"
One after another, they piled on until there wasn't room for me to get a word in.
Smoking Bartholomew's cigarette, I just sat down on a stone block off to the side.
Antonia bent down and asked me quietly.
"Mr. Joyce, should we get your father to come over?"
I waved her off.
"Don't you dare call him! Today I want to see just how far they'll take this."
My father's heart wasn't good. If they worked him up into something serious, a small matter would turn into a big one.
Bartholomew was still soaking up everyone's flattery when a furious shout rang out from far off.
"You little brat, you looking to get yourself killed?"