Antonio’s on the phone with his wife on the couch, laughing and smiling as she shows him pictures of a field of sunflowers back home in Mexico. He wipes away sweat from his face with a white cloth. The 100 degree Kentucky heat sneaks its way into the aluminum-sided home, a cat lays outside the front door eyeing the inside carefully every time its open, praying that one day she will be let inside with her kittens. No name, she has no name, Pedro laughs as he pours the melted ice out of his cooler on the front porch. No name jumps out the way, before slowly walking over and licking the brown puddle once we look away. But the handouts don’t include air conditioning, just scraps of leftover food.

Food that Juan is cooking on the stove, a mixture of chicken, vegetables, and tomatoes for tacos. The sun paints the window above the eyes a bright white, the Reynold’s Wrap aluminum foil wrapped tightly around the stove to keep it clean absorbing all the light and bouncing back across the dining room, hitting the can of BB pellets on the out-of-commission pool table and the trigger of the bright blue gun on the dining room.

“Just for fun, just in case,” Juan laughs, looking at the unloaded BB gun.

It’s lunchtime for Antonio Gonzales, Juan Gonzales, and Pedro Martinez, three migrant farm workers who call this bunk-house their home on the Yazel farm in Berry, Kentucky. The house sits as a vanguard to acres of tobacco, which grow, thrive, and are harvested under the gloved hands and sun-squinted eyes of the Mexican H2A workers from May to December. There are four rooms. A kitchen with all the normal appliances, a dining table, a couch, and a pool table. Signs are posted on all of the walls outlining their rights as migrant workers and rules their employers must abide by, as well as the responsibilities they have during their work here, including a stapled description of the work requirements and expectations at the Yazel farm. A notepad sits on the table with a pencil, the time sheet for the men. They write in their start and stop hours at the end of each day. Next, a bathroom with a single toilet, sink, and shower. Then a small room with a washer and a dryer, two large containers of detergent sitting on top of the dryer. And a large bedroom, with each Antonio, Pedro, and Juan getting their own piece partitioned off by curtains. Inside each curtain is a mini-bedroom: a bunk bed, a dresser, a mirror. Antonio keeps the stickers from his clothes and attaches them to the wooden bed frame. A fan on high points toward his bed, a wooden chair covered in a towel holds his medications.

Lunchtime is when Antonio, Pedro, and Juan speak with their families. While one person cooks, the other two retreat to Whatsapp video calls and text chats. Today, Antonio takes the couch, Pedro wanders outside to the barn, laying down and calling home while staring at the tobacco overhead.“Tomorrow, Antonio cooks,” Juan tells me as he shakes the sizzling vegetables on the pan, a piece flying out and landing on the white bandaging that stabilizes his wrist. Each of them do this for their family back home - the dollar is stronger than the peso and their minimum wage of $15 for 7 months supports their loved ones back in Mexico. All three of them have children, with Juan and Antonio having the youngest kids.

“It’s getting harder as they get older,” Juan tells my translator app. Juan grew up extremely poor, his father had a heart condition which led to ten years of no work. He isn’t only supporting his wife and two girls, he is also supporting his mom and dad. Kentucky wasn’t the first job for any of the three. Juan started in Tennessee, picking oranges and working in construction. Kentucky’s better than there, he says, but its hot everywhere. Overall, they are disinterested in talking about the work they do. It is a given, not better, not worse, than any other work. It is a necessity, and their time here revolves around the plants sprouting just feet away from where they lay their heads. Everyday, they work tobacco, not hating it, not loving it, solely accepting the opportunities and lives it affords their people back home. None of them smoke.

Every single tobacco plant, of which there are thousands on this land, will be touched by the trio four times from seed to harvest. Around the house are two barns where the dried tobacco leaves hang, an acrobatic stunt that requires the men to walk along the wooden framing left exposed near the ceiling. On any given day, their work might require rhythm, the removal of the tobacco flower midway through the process, a pink beacon at the top of the plant which they rip away as they walk down the aisles, left, right, left, right, five done in 10 seconds. Strength, it might be strength, the metallic spear on the end of a wooden stick they stab the plants and stack them on it like a clothesline before carrying the 10-pound sheath to the trailer where they lift it above their heads to fit on the rack, hundreds of times in a single day. The three spears versus thousands of plants. It’s a war of attrition, a skirmish everyday the sun rises in August. The score is counted in discarded plastic water bottles, and I can count over 25 just in the bed of the truck. A day might begin at 7 in the morning, it won’t end until the moon starts its reign over the sky.

The sound track is thunder, afternoon showers that seem to come everyday over the hills, they stare in anger above as Spanish radio floats out of Antonio’s pant pocket and gets covered as its waves float their way to the sky by his voice, Banda and Mariachi. I can’t make out the song, and it feels wrong to interrupt and ask. He continues to sing, a lullaby to the stabbed plants, an offering to the blackening clouds.