prompt: field
He tried farming. Twice.
The first time was a year or two after he'd left home. The crew he'd been running with had a brother who'd got paroled, so they didn't need the green kid anymore. He'd rolled off his bunk at the boarding house just in time to see their bucket of rust skimming out of sight at the edge of town. A wizened old man had liked the set of his shoulders and the muscles cording his upper arms and hired him on as a farmhand for the summer.
He'd lasted all of six weeks. It was hot, dusty, back-breaking, blue-streak-cursing, underpaid, underfed, underappreciated work and he'd taken maybe too much of a shine to the farmer's great-granddaughter than he ought to have done. Plus, it was more than an hour each way to walk to the nearest tavern (and the beer tasted worse than horse piss) and not worth the trouble. At the time, Jayne thought he would go feng le if he'd stayed.
Almost thirty years to the day he'd left that farm and hitched a ride to the next nearest moon, he tried again.
He wanted to run cattle on the land but there wasn't much left for livestock after all the credits they'd spent on repairs to the house. There was also the tiny problem of he didn't know what to do with a gorram cow except move it from one pen to another, so his idea didn't get much farther than the wishing stage.
So, he grew stuff instead. Green stuff that he didn't know how to pronounce the name of, some dozen or so rows of taters, and every kind of leafy growing thing he still refused to eat if he could get away with it. The crops didn't do too bad the first couple of years, and though Jayne took the credit for it, everyone in town knew he was just the muscle around the place.
When the rains set in and didn't let up for months at a time, they switched their crops from taters and roots to rice and a delicate watery something-or-other that fetched up to forty times its weight in gold. Then came the drought, and everything withered up and blew away when his back was turned, it seemed. They were lucky enough to be sitting on a natural spring of some kind so they couldn't get run off their property the way some of the others in town had, but that was the end of his farming. He'd lasted all of a half-dozen years.
Stopping his neighbors from getting run off was the first time he'd tried real law-making, though. He hoped he wouldn't have to do it again.