One

The North Dakota sun came up late.
They were already in the beet fields and had taken up their hoes with the handles cut off so they could not be leaned upon to rest; had already eaten cold beans and slices of week-old bread from the meal pie pans nailed to the table to be hosed off between shifts of eaters; had already filled themselves on rusty water from the two-handled milk cans on the wagon at the end of the field; had already peed and taken a dump and scratched and spat and splashed cold water in their faces to drip down their necks.

Had done all of these after sleeping the short night on feed sacks in sleeping sheds near the barn; after they had come into a new day, then the sun came up.

The Mexicans always outworked him. They spread out at the south end of the sugar-beet fields and began to work, and the Mexicans always outworked him. At first he tried to understand how that could be. It was all so simple. They were to walk down the rows of beets and remove every other beet. The farmers- he always thought of them as farmers- planted more seeds than they needed, to ensure proper germination, and the seeds all came up and had to be thinned to allow the beets to grow properly.

So they worked down the rows, cutting left and right, taking a beet, leaving a beet, and it did not seem possible that one person could do it that much faster than another, but always the Mexican men and women, and even children, outworked him. Even when he worked hard, hacked back and forth without looking, worked in a frenzy until his hands bled on the handle, he could not keep up. Their white shirts always drifted ahead of him, farther and farther out like white birds flying low, until they were so far ahead they were spots and then nothing.

Rows of beets a mile long. Left and right for a mile and then turn and start back, halfway up to meet the Mexicans coming back.

Eleven dollars an acre. Four rows to the acre, a half acre a day, all day the hoes cutting, left and right, the rows never ending, and even trying to catch up with the Mexicans was not enough to stop the awful boredom of the beets.

The sun was hot when it came up late. There was no early morning coolness, no relief. An early heat came with the first edge of the sun and by the time the sun was full up, he was cooking and looking for some relief.

He tried hoeing with his left hand low, then his right hand, then leaning forward more, then less, but nothing helped. It was hot, getting hotter, and he straightened and spat and resettled the straw hat he had bought in Grafton. It had a piece of green plastic in the brim that looked cool but wasn’t.  He had bought the hat because all the Mexicans had them and he wanted to look like them, blend in with them in the field even though they were a rich dark colour and he looked like white paper burned around the edges. But the hat did not seem to fit right and he kept readjusting it to get the sweatband broken in.

It was the same with his hands. They did not break in. he had been working three days now, but blisters had rebroken and left pink skin that opened and bled. He bought leather gloves from the farmer who sold them the hoes. The farmer sold them hoes for three dollars and gloves for another two dollars and they had to pay a dollar a day for a sandwich and he had worked three days and had only hoed an acre. Not counting the hat, which he’d bought with money he’d found in his pockets when he ran, he had now earned eleven dollars, with three taken out for the hoe and three for sandwiches and two for the gloves and four and a half for three dinners, and fifty cents a night for three nights. After three days’ work, he owed the farmer three dollars. He did the maths while he worked.

`I pay eleven dollars an acre, ` the farmer had told him. `You can hoe an acre a day easy - eleven dollars a day. `

When he’d started hoeing he dreamed of wealth, did the maths constantly until the numbers filled his mind. Eleven dollars an acre, an acre a day; after ten days a hundred and ten dollars, twenty days the almost unheard-of-sum of two hundred and twenty dollars. More than a man made per month working in a factory for a dollar an hour – and he was only sixteen. Rich. He would be rich.

But after the first day when his back would not straighten and his hands would not uncurl from the hoe handle and his blisters were bleeding, after all that and two-fifty for food, and three for the hoe, and fifty cents for lodging, not to mention the hat and gloves, only a third of an acre had been thinned that first day, and he knew that he would not get rich, would never be rich. By the second day he was no longer even sad about not being rich and laughed with the Mexicans who would also not be rich but who smiled and laughed all the time while they worked. Now, on the fourth day, gloved, he just hoed.

He worked hard, his head down, the hoe snaking left and right. An hour could have passed, a minute, a day, a year. He did not look up, kept working until it seemed it should be time for a break, and he stood and looked across the field to the north where the Mexicans were small white dots, moving farther ahead as he watched.

`Shit. ` Swearing helped. His back ached and it wasn’t yet midday and he was thirsty, his tongue stuck to the sides of his mouth with the dryness, but the milk cans of water in the old pickup were a half mile behind him and he didn’t want to take the time to walk back for a drink. They would bring water at midday along with the dry sandwiches, when the sun was nearly overhead. Another hour to go. `Shit. `

Before bending back to the hoe – the `fuuwaucking hoe`, as the old Mexican who lead the group called it – he looked around the field, closely first at individual beet plants, then out until they blurred in green, and then farther out, around and out and up, in all directions. It was like standing in the centre of an enormous bowl that went green to the sky and then yellow blue into the gold-hot sun, the colour mixing with the heat in some way to press down on him, pressing, pushing, bending, driving him back to the hoe.

He cut left and right; cut and cut, the beet plants flipping off the shiny blade of the hoe, working again without looking up, giving himself to the beets until his back was hot with the sun overhead and he heard the grinding of a motor coming along the side of the field, and he looked up to see the farmer’s wife bringing food.

She was a thin woman, and she had a revolver on the seat of the truck, next to her, blue steel with a short barrel. There were bullets in the revolver. He had seen the small rounded ends shinning from the cylinder. She knew how to use the gun; he had heard her talking to her husband.

`I don’t want no Mexicans after my body, ` she’d said. `They come after my body and I’m going to shoot them and I know how to do it, too. I don’t give a darn about no Mexicans and no nasty beets, neither. `

 The farmer had nodded but looked embarrassed at the same time and he ate apart from the Mexicans, and the boy thought it must be because he was embarrassed about the gun but it might be because he got good food, thick sandwiches with meat and coffee, and the people working the hoes got week-old garbage for food.

He thought it was meaningless because the farmer’s wife was nowhere near as pretty as some of the Mexican women, who had thick black hair and dark eyes that lifted at the corner. Their bodies were full and rich, where the farmer’s wife looked rail-skinny and empty; none of the Mexican men looked at her but always away and to the side.

But she kept the gun close to her side when she came with the sandwiches. The Mexicans did not seem to mind the gun, or at least said nothing about it even when they were alone in the barn making beds with the feed sacks – unless they said it in Spanish, which he did not understand. Usually they spoke in English when he was around, except to tease each other and sometimes him, and he thought Mexico must be a very fine place because they were always laughing and joking and didn’t pay any attention to the gun.

The dollar sandwiches were made of week-old bread with a thin layer of peanut butter without any jelly. He would not have eaten one but he was so hungry he could not stand not to eat. Even with sandwiches he was hungry; the afternoon would go on forever if he didn’t eat.

There was a huge pile of the sandwiches on the plate set out on the hood, open to flies and bugs, and the farmer’s wife was happy to hand them out – always with the gun close by, of course – and she made a small mark on a piece of paper for each sandwich. Each mark a dollar against the money for hoeing beets. But he was the only one to take a sandwich.

The Mexicans came from the field, somehow always so clean that their white clothes made his eyes hurt. They had corn-tortilla burritos with beans in them and the boy envied them the beans and tortillas but was too shy to ask for one.

Each night near the sleeping sheds, the Mexicans cooked a large pot of pinto beans, except the called them frijoles. The pot was cast iron and big enough to cook five pounds of beans at a time. While the beans were cooking the men took turns finding bits of wood along the fencerows and in the brushy ditches to burn under the pot and the women put a piece of metal over another part of the fire and made tortillas with a sound that made the boy think of music.

They would take a small blob of dough from a bowl and use their hands in a slapping motion for rhythm, slap-push-slap-push, while they talked to each other, and somehow, they did not seem tired from the fields the way he felt tired each night.

Six, eight slaps and a small corn tortilla would fly out of their hands, fly like a round golden bird and land on the red-hot metal to hiss once and then fry, giving off a smell that seemed to come from the earth and from corn and from all the food the boy had ever eaten. One woman to make the tortillas and flick them onto the hot metal and another woman to use her finger and thumb and, as deft as any doctor, catch an edge of each tortilla and flip it. A flip so quick it made the tortilla dance, up and over and down on the new side to cook, and then, in seconds, off to be wrapped in a clean piece of cloth near the fire, where there was a stack of them, thin and tall and smelling of heaven.

During the day the men found the things to put in the beans. The boy did not always see what they found. Sometimes a root or other vegetable, now and then squirrels, which they killed with little leather slings and round rocks, once a rabbit, and twice some woodchucks that lived in holes along a fencerow and came out to chukker a warning when they went by. The woodchucks and rabbit they took out of their holes with a long piece of old barbed wire shaped like a crank on one end. They stuck the wire down the hole and twisted the crank end until the barbed wire wrapped up in the animal’s fur and then they jerked it out and killed it with a hoe, all done very quickly so they wouldn’t lose time thinning the beets.

All the men carried knives, sharp and clean, and some of them had switchblades. The boy had seen switchblades before but the Mexican men used them more correctly in some way, so that when they took a knife from their loose trousers and either snapped or flicked the blade open it seemed to become part of their hands while they neatly gutted and skinned the animal and wrapped the meat in a piece of sacking.

Whatever else they put in the beans, the women always added some garlic and spices and red chillies, which they carried on a string, and the smell that came from the pot when they opened the lid to add the small animals or to stir the beans with a large wooden spoon while the steam worked out into the air, that smell was almost impossible for the boy to endure.

But he was shy and did not dare ask for the food even when he was standing in the hot sun paying a dollar for a sandwich that was covered with fly specks and tasted like crap handed to him by a woman with a .38 lying on the seat beside her.

As on the previous three days, the Mexicans moved off by themselves to sit and eat and the boy took his sandwich and sat away to the side and ate it in four dry bites, just getting it out of the way. The sandwich was only enough to make him more hungry and he lay back on the warm grass and fought buying another one because it would put him behind in wages and the thought of working this hard for a dry sandwich was insane.

`Here, eat this. `
The boy opened his eyes to see the oldest Mexican man, over forty, holding out two tortillas wrapped around cold beans. For a second the boy stared. He had been with them for three and a half days now and none of them and none of them had said a word to him.

`I haven’t got any money.`
The man drew back, his eyes hard. `It is not for money. For money I would let your skinny ass die. It is because you do not have any meat on your bones and you are young.`  He held out the burritos again. `Eat these.`

The boy reached for them. `I’m sorry. I’m new at all this. Thank you.`
`You are new at everything. It is because you are young.` The Mexican turned back to the others and said something in Spanish the boy did not understand and all the Mexicans laughed. But it was not mean laughter, and besides, the smell of the burritos stuffed with beans was overpowering.

He ate them in a few bites, swallowing the pieces whole, and his stomach growled and it was all done before the old Mexican had turned to leave.

The man said something in Spanish to the group and they all laughed again and then he turned to the boy. `You are like a wolf or a village dog. You eat quickly.`
`They were so good I couldn’t help myself.` The boy smiled. `I’ve been watching how you cook and eat and it makes me more hungry and the slop they feed us at night is awful.` Each night the farmer’s wife brought out a big pan full of shredded potatoes fried in lard – burned in lard would be more accurate – and more of the week old bread, and this was to be eaten with no salt or pepper from plates nailed to a picnic table with a roofing nail through the centre of each. `Awful,` he repeated. And for this he was supposed to pay another dollar fifty.

`Perhaps you should eat with us at night as well.`
`I…. don’t have anything. You all put something in the pot and I don’t have anything.`
the man nodded. `I see. That is a problem, is it not?` He thought for a moment, exaggerating it by rubbing the stubble on his chin with his hand.
`Perhaps there is a solution. Can you climb?`
`Pardon?`
`Climb – can you climb? We do not like to climb.`
The boy shrugged. `I guess I can, why?`
`There is a large flock of pigeons that come to the farm – perhaps you have seen them?`

The boy nodded. `They can fly around the barn. There must be hundreds of them.`
`Ah, yes. Those very ones. The patron’ – he spat out the word - `does not like the pigeons. He says they cover everything with their guduo. But pigeons are good to eat. So this works for both of us. The patron wants the birds gone and we wish to eat them. The pigeons can easily be captured when they roost and sleep in the evenings. The difficulty lies in where they sleep.it is in the barn’s rafters and we do not like to climb.`

The boy nodded again. `You want me to climb up there and get some pigeons tonight.`
`Exactamente. We are afraid of climbing but the pigeons are made of such delicate meat…`

The boy was sure he was sure he was lying. If they wanted the pigeons they would get them, just as they hoed beets, get them better than he could, probably faster and better. They were just trying t0 be nice and letting him feel that he was contributing to the pot.
`Sure,` he said. `I’ll do it.`

And then it was time to hoe again, working through the sun of the afternoon, always trying to catch them and not seeing them again until the Mexicans had turned at the end of the field and started back to meet him.

They hoed until just before dark when it was time to stand – the boy took for ever to unbend and straighten – and walk to the house and barn and shed where everyone slept.

This time the boy walked more with the group and felt some of the shyness leave and though they talked in Spanish they did not seem to mind him walking there and two of the young ones, boys not ten years old – who also outworked him – dropped back to walk with him. They were wearing those strikingly white men’s dress shirts, which were too large for them, and the tan of their skin looked rich next to the white cloth and he wondered why all the men where he came from called them such dark names when their skin was really so beautiful. He had seen almost no Mexicans until now.

He loved to hear these people talk, the words ending in questions, moving up to make music, and the women’s voices fitting into the men’s so it almost became a song.
As they approached the yard they stopped talking.

The farmer’s woman was at the wooden table with her large pot of lar-fried shredded potatoes. She smiled a thin smile when they walked by  and some of the Mexicans smiled back but many looked away, and the boy did as well. He had been the only one to eat at the table last night and tonight he would et with the Mexicans and the woman with the gun could blow it out her skinny ass. That was how he thought of it literally, blowing it out her ass except that he added the word skinny – blow it out her skinny ass.

The Mexicans went to the sleeping shed and started chores. Some started the fire under the beans. Two men went with a basin to a water barrel and came back with water to wash and all the men and women washed their hands and dried them on a feed sack hanging from the wall. Two women put the piece of metal for tortillas on the flames and started working dough in a bowl next to the fire while the metal became hot.

The boy waited until they were done and the older man motioned him and he washed his hands as well. `We will eat first,` the man said, smiling, his teeth even and white. `And then we shall see to the pigeons.`

When the farmer’s wife saw that the boy was not coming to eat the potatoes and dry bread she took the pot back in the house and the old Mexican laughed.
`She will make her husband eat that. He won’t crap for a week.`
There was a large stack of tortillas in the cloth wrapping and the Mexicans formed a line, the old man taking the boy with him. As each person came to the cookfire a woman there took two tortillas, ladled beans into them, expertly rolled them into burritos and handed them up from the fire.

The garlic smell had the boy salivating long before he came to the fire and when he took the tortillas and thanked the woman she laughed and said something in Spanish he did not understand and pinched the flesh on his ribs.

`She says you are to skinny to love,` the old man told him. `She does not mean love as a mother loves.`
The boy blushed and thought of his mother and the blush grew worse and he mumbled something and moved to the side of the shed under the eaves to eat the hot burritos. He thought he had never eaten anything so delicious, even Thanksgiving dinners at his grandmother’s when she cooked like they had on the farms when she was young and there was so much food the table sagged. He compared many things to her Thanksgiving dinners. Not just food but other parts of his life as well, parts before he had to run. He had bought a new Hiawatha bicycle with a chrome tank and horn and with spring shock absorbers on the front, and he thought of he bicycle in comparison to that meal – that the bicycle was as good a bike as the meal was good food or that his Savage .410 single-shot shotgun that he’d bought by setting pins by Ray’s bowling alley was as good a shotgun as that meal.

Of course, all that was behind him now. He’d left the bike and the gun and a box of treasures he’d found and saved over the years when he’d gone off to find a new life for himself – and those were all things of his childhood. Now, he thought he had only to work and be a man, although he missed the shotgun and the bicycle and some of the treasures, like the arrowhead buried in a piece of bone that he thought was a human leg bone but wasn’t sure. Even that was gone in his new life, and now what he had to compare to Thanksgiving dinners were the beans and tortillas, and he felt they were the most wonderful thing of all, even when he was done and leaning back against the side of the shed.

The old man came to him and offered him a sack of Bull Durham tobacco with wheat-straw papers on the side.

`Thank you.` He rolled a cigarette clumsily. He’d learned to smoke in the bowling alley and had been inhaling for over a year, since he was fifteen, but he was accustomed to tailor-mades and hadn’t rolled many Bull Durhams. The paper had no glue and had to be licked several times before it stuck, and when he lit the cigarette with a match the man gave him and dragged deeply, nearly the whole cigarette burned up. He inhaled and held it, ashamed to be coughing slightly, and nodded. `It’s good.` It was harsh and hot and seemed to tear his lungs apart, but he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. `Tastes good.`

The old man hesitated, then sighed. `I must as k you a difficult question before we take up the matter of the pigeons.`
`What is it?`
`You understand I would not ask such a question except that it is important to us.`
`What is the question?`
`Do the police look for you?`
`The police?`
`I know, I know. One does not ask it lightly. But we came across the border in the night and rode the night buses to get here. If the police are searching for you they may find us as well and give us some trouble. That is why I ask. To avoid the trouble.`
`Oh.`
`Do they? Do the police look for you?`
`I don’t know. I didn’t do anything wrong except run off…`
`You left your family?`

He did not think of them as a family. They were a man who drank until he pissed his pants and people saw him walking down the street with piss running down his leg and puke on his shirt and laughed; and a woman who lived in the bottle and had tried to do the thing – the thing- to him in the darkened room. He could not, would not, think of them as a family. `I just left, is all. Ran off.`
`Will your mother and father not look for you?`
He shook his head. `I don’t think so. I don’t know.`
`Ah. So it is best if we watch for  time.`
`They would not know where to look, where I’ve gone.`
`Just the same, if they tell the police that you have run off, they may think of looking for you here or there. So we will prepare ourselves.`

`I’m sorry.`
The old Mexican shrugged. `Many times the police don’t bother even when they see us. It is only that we must be ready.`
`I could leave.`
`Yes, there is that. But they might look wherever you go as well as here – you might as well stay. And too, if you go, what do we do for the pigeons.`

The boy smiled. `I forgot about that.`
It was dark and the beans had settled in for the night and the boy wanted to sleep more than anything, wanted to hide from the day’s hoeing in sleep, but the old man led him into the barn.
`They are up there,` he whispered.
The barn was really more of an equipment storage shed, an enormous metal-roofed building with latticed-steel curved girders to hold the roof up and looked more like a hanger than a barn.

At the peak the rafters were an easy thirty-five feet off he dirt floor and it was there, where the girders curved over the top, that the pigeons roosted. They flew in the open doors on either end of the building in the evening and settled in the top curve of the roof for the night.

The boy moved to the side of the building where the girders came down to the ground. He could not see up into the peak but the girder curved up and away, and he took hold through the struts and started to climb. He’d loved to climb trees when he was younger and was quick and light, and at first it was easy climbing. But soon the girder curved overhead and he was climbing virtually upside down and finally he stopped, hanging amid the sleeping pigeons. He let go for an instant and reached for one of the pigeons and tried to catch it but slapped at it instead and it fluttered away in the dark.

`It is necessary for the pigeons to die for us to have the meat,` the old man prompted. `You must release your hold with one hand and contain the pigeon.`

By now the boy was hanging with his arms and legs poked through the girder. He could let go with one hand and hang on with the other and one knee, but only just, and as soon as he let go his body seemed to want to fall.

`I can’t do it,` he called down.
`Ah, well, if you can’t, you can’t.`

The disappointment in the man’s voice seemed to rise in the dark barn and it became more important than ever for the boy to catch the pigeons. He took a breath, heard a pigeon cooing on the rafter over his head, and he let go of the girder with his right hand and snatched the bird from its roost.

He caught the pigeon by one leg. As soon as he grabbed it the pigeon began flapping, trying to get away and becoming more frantic as it fought, panicking the boy, who hung onto the bird with one hand and realised that he would be hard pressed to simply stay in the rafters, let alone do anything with the bird.

 The old Mexican seemed to read his mind. `For the bird to drop you must kill it first. Wring the neck. Other wise it will fly away.`
`I can’t -`
`Ah, well if you can’t you can’t.`

Somehow the boy clawed the pigeon back up to the rafter, shoved his arm through a hole in the girder, hung by his elbow and snatched at the bird’s head with his hand. On the fourth try he caught it, twisted it hard and jerked and felt blood and pigeon shit fall in his face and mouth. He dropped the dead bird, sputtering, `Shit!`

`I have the bird,` the old man called up. `it is a fine bird, plump and round from all the grain it finds here.`
`I’m coming down.`
`But there are many mouths. One bird will not go very far. Surely since you are up there already you might stay a while and get more birds. See how they become calm waiting for you?`

And he was right. When the boy had grabbed the pigeon the rest of them had fluttered and moved over on the rafters, but as soon as he dropped the dead one they settled and went back to sleep. He moved a bit on the rafters and grabbed another one.

This time it went much better. He caught the bird by the body so it couldn’t flutter and disturb the rest, hung by his elbow and one knee through the girder, broke the neck and dropped it all in one motion.

`Good,` the old man said. `That one was dead as it hit my hand.`
Then another, cleaner this time, the first feel of the warm bird in his hand when he snatched it from the rafter, two, three quick heartbeats and then the snap of the neck and the bird dropped; then another, and he was into a rhythm now. Swinging with his arms and legs hooked through the rafters, grabbing a pigeon and snap-wringing the head until the pigeon flapped in death, and then down, to drop to the waiting old man below.

`Excellent,` the old man said. `You are of an excellent nature at this -`
It was here that the boy fell.
He became sure of himself, too sure, was thinking, Hell, I’ll take them all, every pigeon up here, take them and feed the whole group. They’ll all eat meat tonight and then the girl, he thought, the girl who had walked near him and smiled with white teeth, that girl will think –

He never decided what she would think. Just as the word came into his mind his hands came loose and his leg straightened and he dropped, plummeted, holding a pigeon in his hand, fell like a stone until he landed flat on his back, on the dirt floor, and there was a splash of some colour in his brain that he couldn’t remember later and then nothing. Not pain, not sound, not a thing.
Nothing.

---