THREE
The days bled one into another and the work fed on itself
until he could not distinguish a change. He measured time in happenings, not
days or weeks.
There was the day of the snake. He was working next to a
small girl of eight or nine or ten, he could not tell. Somehow a rattlesnake
had found its way this far north and into the beets. The girl was hoeing and
the boy saw the snake and while he had never one before, he knew instantly what
it was and he froze. The snake was two feet from his right leg and he could do
nothing, but the girl simply reached across two rows with her hoe and with an almost
delicate flick took the snake’s head off. All without looking up, without
pausing, with no acknowledgement that the boy existed, she killed the snake and
moved on, missed one beet strike to kill a snake, then on, the small girl with
the straw hat on her head moving off down the row while he stood, still frozen,
watching the snake roll over and over, its pale belly writhing as its nerves
slowly died.
And the day of the Madonna. There was a woman he did not
know by name – he thought Maria but several of them were named Maria – and he
thought she should not be there because she was enormous with child. He had
seen pregnant aunts and some cousins and women on the street back in town but
none this large. She was of course beautiful, as he thought all the Mexican
women were, with thick black hair and dark almond eyes and skin the colour of
caramel and the pregnancy made her more beautiful in some way he did not
understand. He felt it was wrong for her to work in the field. There came a day
when he was not twenty feet away from her and she was bent hoeing and she
swore, `I Chinga!` Then he heard the
sound of liquid splashing and saw water running down her legs beneath her skirt
and she looked at the boy, through the boy at something he could not imagine,
and went down to her knees and then onto her back.
The boy screamed at the men and they saw her go down and
came running, one of them her husband or the man the boy thought was her
husband, and the boy moved closer to help, though he had no idea what to do.
In the end, there wasn’t much for him to do. It was not her
first pregnancy and she heaved some and lay back and heaved some more with two
younger women helping her and on the fourth heave or maybe fortieth – the boy
had never seen such pain on anyone’s face – a baby slid out, onto one of the
men’s shirts, to be caught by the women who were helping her. They wiped the
baby with another shirt and handed it to the woman and one of the younger women
said the words Santa Maria very
softly and here the new mother did a strange thing.
She put the baby on her breasts and covered it with her
hands so that the palms were over the baby’s eyed and she dug her heels in and
tried to push away, hiding the baby, and the boy felt she was embarrassed
because he had watched all of it and thought she did not want him to see.
`She is hiding the baby from us,` he said, looking away.
`From me.`
`No,` the old man said. `Not you. She is hiding the baby from the beets so that they will not see him and in that way perhaps he’ll never have to know the beets.`
`No,` the old man said. `Not you. She is hiding the baby from the beets so that they will not see him and in that way perhaps he’ll never have to know the beets.`
So he learned that they hated the beets as he did, and he
marvelled all the more at their humour, which was always there, and their
grace.
And so another week passed.
There came a day when he could bend to the hoe and chop in a rhythm that held a kind of grace and at the end of that day he looked up and saw that he had matched the work of his Mexican companions.
There came a day when he could bend to the hoe and chop in a rhythm that held a kind of grace and at the end of that day he looked up and saw that he had matched the work of his Mexican companions.
Soon after, they ran out of beets and they had to leave. But
there were many farmers with beets to thin and they simply walked down the road
the road a mile and started another endless field with rows that went up to the
sky and its hot sun and that gave them the ache-joy of work and new pots of
beans and meat and tortillas to eat.
The boy did not know how long it would last, did not care,
but centred on the work and the Mexicans as he would have centred on a family
if he’d had a family; if he thought of how it might all come to end he assumed
he would just go on with them.
One night the old man sat and smoked and told him of working
in California in the fruit orchards and picking lettuce and artichokes and the
boy nodded.
He had money now. He had his hoe and gloves and had come up
to an acre a day, and kept it all except for ten cents every four days for Bull
Durham tobacco and papers, which the farmer bought for a nickel and sold to
them for a dime. His pockets were jammed with money because he rarely went to
town and spent it, except for one brief trip to replace his tattered jeans. He
had adopted the fears of the Mexicans as well as their work habits.
`Everybody knows we are here,` the old man told him on
another evening. `They know we are not legal; we are like ghosts that they see
but do not recognise. As long as we just work and do not go into town or make a
difficulty we are all right and they leave us alone.`
And so the boy decided it would be the same for him. He
would just work and pocket the money and not make a difficulty and he did not
think past it.
The next farm only kept them busy for eight days and then on
to the next, where the boy fell in love.
He had of course been in love many times with different
girls in school, an aching love, a love of blue eyes and ponytails and bobby
sox and pointy new brassieres and teasing laughter and red lips and furtive
looks – a love that brought pain from the centre of his life. The girls didn’t
see him. None of the girls knew him or thought of him because he was not
popular and did not play sports or dress right and had drunks for parents. But
he loved them still; loved them with all that he was, loved Shirley and Anne
and Elaine and had dreams of them until his life was ruined and he ran off.
He had decided that he would go through life poor and with a
broken heart – well, less poor now that he was making good money hoeing beets.
Then they came to the Bill Flaherty farm.
It was almost time to stop thinning beets in North Dakota because the plants had grown too large and other illegal workers had worked other fields and there were none left. The old man had talked to the boy again of riding a bus out to California to work the fields there when in some way – the boy never understood how the Mexicans came to know things – word came that there was another local farm that needed beets thinned.
It was almost time to stop thinning beets in North Dakota because the plants had grown too large and other illegal workers had worked other fields and there were none left. The old man had talked to the boy again of riding a bus out to California to work the fields there when in some way – the boy never understood how the Mexicans came to know things – word came that there was another local farm that needed beets thinned.
They walked four miles down a dirt road, wearing their straw
hats with the green plastic brims and carrying their clothes and belongings in
feed sacks – the boy now had two pairs of Levi’s, an extra pair of tennis shoes
and a light windbreaker and two T-shirts, plus his hoe and gloves to carry –
until they saw a sign scrawled with black paint on cardboard that said:
THINNERS NEEDED
And they turned in to see an eighty-acre field of beets.
Eighty acres was not much; they had worked fields that were
so long they could not see the far end when they started, giant farms, and this
small stand would not take them a week working at their normal rate.
So the old man went to the house while they waited and soon
a short barrel-chested man wearing an old felt hat came out and looked at them.
He smiled and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice and said to the boy, `How
the hell did you get in with these
people?`
`I work with them.`
The man stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. `Makes no matter, if you can thin beets. I should never have planted the cussed things. I’ve got right next to twelve hundred acres of wheat and thought I’d try a little stand of beets. Big pain in the ass, all this babying and thinning….`
`I work with them.`
The man stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. `Makes no matter, if you can thin beets. I should never have planted the cussed things. I’ve got right next to twelve hundred acres of wheat and thought I’d try a little stand of beets. Big pain in the ass, all this babying and thinning….`
And s they stared to thin beets for Bill Flaherty and would
have gone in and out and been done and the boy would have gone on with them to
California and all the other places except that it rained.
There had been showers now and again that kept them out of
the fields for an hour or so because when the soil was wet it stuck to the hoe
and they couldn’t cut the plants off.
But now it rained, hard, for a full day and it took three
more days for the water to dry off the fields, three days of nothing to do but
sit and watch the sky and field and wait. The Mexicans were very good at it,
waiting, but the boy hated it after the first day.
It was not that the place was bad. Flaherty was as nice as
others had been mean. He went into town and bought a twenty-five-pound bag of
pinto beans and ten pounds of hamburger and twenty pounds of flour and gave it
all to the Mexicans to cook and eat while they waited. Everybody was well fed
and had fat on their lips and one night they had what the old Mexican called a fandango, which, the boy learned, was a
dance.
They cooked and ate early and cleared away a place in a
machine shed for a dancing area and one of the Mexican men had a guitar the boy
had not seen before and another used a harmonica and the music mixed with the
summer night in some way to make it seem more than just a guitar and harmonica.
Soon many of the Mexicans were dancing, the men one way and the women another
way, round in circles, and the old man pulled the boy into the shuffling dance
around the centre of the machine shed in the pale light of one bulb hanging
from the high ceiling.
At first the boy did not feel the music and simply stepped
as they stepped, but then it took him and he was moving his feet to the guitar
and harmonica and trying not to stare at the circle of women dancing because
they had all started to perspire through their damp white shirts and some of
them were not wearing undergarments and it was then, just then, that he saw
Lynette.
Bill Flaherty had heard the music from the house and brought
his wife, Alice, who was large and round and seemed to be all smiles, and his
daughter to watch the Mexicans dance. His daughter was named Lynette and the
boy saw her and could not think.
She had long dark hair and an oval face and deep brown eyes
and was perhaps seventeen and tall and slender and moved to the music as she
stood next to her father and watched the Mexicans dance.
And me, he thought, I am here and she is watching me as
well, but he could not tell if she even noticed him. She stayed a few minutes
and went back to the house and Bill and Alice followed her a little while
later. The next day the ground was dry and they went back to hoeing, and
nothing more happened.
Except that the boy could not stop thinking of her, of
Lynette, standing in the pale light watching them dance. When they finished the
eighty acres and Bill paid them, the Mexicans started to walk down the driveway
and the boy followed, his hoe and feed sack his shoulder. But Bill stopped him.
`Where are you from?` Bill looked off at the beet field.
`I’m with them.`
`Yeah, I know. But you’re not a Mexican and I thought… well, let’s try it another way. Can you drive a tractor?`
`I’m with them.`
`Yeah, I know. But you’re not a Mexican and I thought… well, let’s try it another way. Can you drive a tractor?`
The boy had driven tractors on his uncle’s farm, had
ploughed and disced and even drilled seed, but he merely nodded.
`I need help here, for the rest of summer. Someone who can
drive a tractor. I’ve got a bunch of lease land I’ve got to work up and get
ready for winter wheat planting…`
And here a picture of Lynette entered the boys mind. He had
been thinking of going on with the Mexicans because he was feeling like a man
of the road now, with some money in his pocket and another hill to get over – a
phrase he’d heard in a country-and-western song – but the clear picture of
Lynette came into his mind and he opened his mouth and said, `What would it
pay?`
Bill looked at him and back out across the field and dipped
a pinch of snuff into his lower lip. `Five a day and food including Saturday
and Sunday if you want to keep at it.`
`That comes out at thirty-five dollars a week.`
Bill nodded. `A hundred and fifty a month if you work straight through.`
¬I make eleven dollars a day hoeing beets.`
Another nod. `When there are beets to hoe. But when it rains or the beets are done, so are you. I’m offering steady work here for the res of the summer.`
`That comes out at thirty-five dollars a week.`
Bill nodded. `A hundred and fifty a month if you work straight through.`
¬I make eleven dollars a day hoeing beets.`
Another nod. `When there are beets to hoe. But when it rains or the beets are done, so are you. I’m offering steady work here for the res of the summer.`
Again Lynette was there – a clear picture. The boy nodded.
He’d seen her exactly twice, she was at least a year older than he was and yet
he could not stop thinking about her. `When do I start?`
By this time the Mexicans were at the end of the driveway
and he thought to run after them and say goodbye but he stopped, thinking of
Lynette, and then they turned the corner onto the road, walking in all in white
to the next job, and were gone and he did not see them again and would never in
his life see them again.
He walked with Bill back into the yard and it was in this
way he came to work a steady job and to fall in love for the first time.
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