第 3 页

Their truck was parked beside it, and another canvas of some sort had been rigged over its bed. It was anchored with baling rope staked to the ground so that the truck couldn’t move without first getting unhitched. Their old trailer had been partially unloaded, its boxes and burlap bags scattered on the grass as if a storm had hit.

Mrs. Spruill was tending a fire, hence the smoke. For some reason, she had chosen a slightly bare spot near the end of the yard. It was the exact spot where Pappy or my father squatted almost every afternoon and caught my fastballs and my curves. I wanted to cry. I would never forgive Mrs. Spruill for this.

“I thought you told them to set up out behind the silo,” I said.

“I did,” Pappy answered. He slowed the truck almost to a stop, then turned into our place. The silo was out back, near the barn, a sufficient distance from our house. We’d had hill people camping back there before-never in the front yard.

He parked under another pin oak that was only seventy years old, according to my grandmother. It was the smallest of the three that shaded our house and yard. We rolled to a stop near the house, in the same dry ruts Pappy’d parked in for decades. Both my mother and grandmother were waiting at the kitchen steps.

Ruth, my grandmother, did not like the fact that the hill people had laid claim to our front yard. Pappy and I knew this before we got out of the truck. She had her hands on her hips. My mother was eager to examine the Mexicans and ask me about their traveling conditions. She watched them pile out of the truck as she walked tome and squeezed my shoulder.

“Ten of them,” she said. “Yes ma’am.”

Gran met Pappy at the front of the truck and said, quietly but sternly, “Why are those people in our front yard?”

“I asked them to set up by the silo,” Pappy said, never one to back down, not even from his wife. “I don’t know why they picked that spot.”

“Can you ask them to move?”

“I cannot. If they pack up, they’ll leave. You know how hill people are.”

And that was the end of Gran’s questions. They were not about to argue in front of me and ten new Mexicans. She walked away, toward the house, shaking her head in disapproval. Pappy honestly didn’t care where the hill people camped. They appeared to be able-bodied and willing to work, and nothing else mattered to him.

I suspected Gran was not that concerned either. The picking was so crucial that we would’ve taken in a chain gang if they could’ve averaged three hundred pounds of cotton a day.

The Mexicans followed Pappy off to the barn, which was 352 feet from the back porch steps. Past the chicken coop, the water pump, the clotheslines, and the tool shed, past a sugar maple that would turn bright red in October. My father had helped me measure the exact distance one day last January. It seemed like a mile to me. From home plate to the left field wall in Sportsman’s Park, where the Cardinals played, was 350 feet, and every time Stan Musial hit a home run I would sit on the steps the next day and marvel at the distance. In mid-July he’d hit a ball 400 feet against the Braves. Pappy had said, “He hit it over the barn, Luke.”

For two days afterward, I’d sat on the steps and dreamed of hitting ‘cm over the barn. When the Mexicans were past the tool shed, my mother said, “They look very tired.” “They rode in a trailer, sixty-two of them,” I said, eager, for some reason, to help stir things up. “I was afraid of that.”

“An old trailer. Old and dirty. Pearl’s already mad about it.”

“It won’t happen again,” she said, and I knew that my father was about to get an earful. “Run along and help your grandfather.”

I’d spent most of the previous two weeks in the barn, alone with my mother, sweeping and cleaning the loft, trying to make a home for the Mexicans. Most of the farmers put them in abandoned tenant houses or barns. There’d been a rumor that Ned Shackleford three miles south had made his live with the chickens.

Not so on the Chandler farm. For lack of another shelter, the Mexicans would be forced to live in the loft of our barn, but there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt anywhere to be found. And it would have a pleasant smell. For a year my mother had gathered old blankets and quilts for them to sleep on.

I slipped into the barn, but stayed below, next to Isabel’s stall. She was our milk cow. Pappy claimed his life had been saved in the First War by a young French girl named Isabel, and to honor the memory, he named our Jersey cow after her. My grandmother never believed that story. I could hear them up in the loft, moving around, settling in. Pappy was talking to Miguel, who was impressed with how nice and clean the loft was. Pappy took the compliments as if he and he alone had done the scrubbing.

In fact, he and Gran had been skeptical of my mother’s efforts to provide a decent place for the laborers to sleep. My mother had been raised on a small farm at the very edge of Black Oak, so she was almost a town girl. She actually grew up with kids who were too good to pick cotton. She never walked to school-her father drove her. She’d been to Memphis three times before she married my father. She’d been raised in a painted house.

Chapter 3

We Chandlers rented our land from Mr. Vogel of Jonesboro, a man I’d never seen. His name was rarely mentioned, but when it did slip into a conversation, it was uttered with respect and awe. I thought he was the richest man in the world.

Pappy and Gran had been renting the land since before the Great Depression, which arrived early and stayed late in rural Arkansas. After thirty years of backbreaking labor, they had managed to purchase

from Mr. Vogel the house and the three acres around it. They also owned the John Deere tractor, two disks, a seed planter, a cotton trailer, a flatbed trailer, two mules, a wagon, and the truck. My father had a vague agreement that gave him an ownership interest in some “I these assets. The land deed was in the names of Eli and Ruth Chandler.

The only farmers who made money were those who owned their land. The renters, like us, tried to break even. The sharecroppers had i he worst and were doomed to eternal poverty. My father’s goal was to own forty acres of land, free and clear. My other’s dreams were tucked away, only to be shared with me as I grew older. But I already knew she longed to leave the rural life and is determined that I would not farm. By the time I was seven, she had made a believer out ofme. When she was satisfied that the Mexicans were being properly situated, she sent me to find my father. It was late, the sun was falling beyond the trees that lined the St. Francis River, and it was time for in to weigh his cotton sack for the final time and call it a day. I walked barefoot along a dirt path between two fields, looking for him. The soil was dark and rich, good Delta farmland that produced enough to keep you tied to it. Ahead, I saw the cotton trailer, and I knew he was working his way toward it.

Jesse Chandler was the elder son of Pappy and Gran. His younger brother, Ricky, was nineteen and fighting somewhere in Korea. There were two sisters who’d fled the farm as soon as they’d finished high school.

My father didn’t flee. He was determined to be a farmer like his father and grandfather, except he’d be the first Chandler to own his land. I didn’t know if he had dreams of a life away from the fields. Like my grandfather, he had been an excellent baseball player, and I’m sure at one point he’d dreamed of major league glory. But he took a German bullet through his thigh in Anzio in 1944, and his baseball career came to an end.

He walked with a very slight limp, but then so did most people who toiled in the cotton patch. I stopped at the trailer, which was almost empty. It sat on a narrow cotton road, waiting to be filled. I climbed up on it. Around me, on all sides, neat rows of green and brown stalks stretched to the tree lines that bordered our land. At the top of the stalks, puffy bolls of cotton were popping forth. The cotton was coming to life by the minute, so when I stepped on the back of the trailer and surveyed the fields, I saw an ocean of white. The fields were silent-no voices, no tractor engines, no cars on the road. For a moment, hanging on to the trailer, I could almost understand why my father wanted to be a farmer.

I could barely see his old straw hat in the distance as he moved between rows. I jumped down and hurried to meet him. With dusk approaching, the gaps between the rows were even darker. Because the sun and rain had cooperated, the leaves were full and thick and weaving together so that they brushed against me as I walked quickly toward my father.

“Is that you, Luke?” he called, knowing full well that no one else would be coming to find him.

“Yes sir!” I answered, moving to the voice. “Mom says it’s time to quit!”

“Oh she does?”

“Yes sir.” I missed him by one row. I cut through the stalks, and there he was, bent at the waist, both hands moving through the leaves, adroitly plucking the cotton and stuffing it into the nearly full sack draped over his shoulder. He’d been in the fields since sunrise, breaking only for lunch. “Did y’all find some help?” he asked without looking at me.

“Yes sir,” I said proudly. “Mexicans and hill people.”

“How many Mexicans?”

“Ten,” I said, as if I’d personally rounded them up.

“That’s good. Who are the hill people?”

“The Spruills. I forgot where they’re from.”

“How many?” He finished a stalk and crept forward, with his heavy sack inching along behind him. “A whole truckload. It’s hard to tell. Gran’s mad because they’ve set up camp in the front yard, even got a fire goin’ where home plate is. Pappy told ‘em to set up by the silo. I heard him. I don’t think they’re real smart.”

“Don’t be sayin’ that.”

“Yes sir. Anyway, Gran’s not too pleased.”

“She’ll be all right. We need the hill people.”

“Yes sir. That’s what Pappy said. ButT hate they’ve messed up home plate.”

“Pickin’ is more important than baseball these days.”

“I guess.” Maybe in his opinion.

“How are the Mexicans?”

“Not too good. They stuffed ‘em in a trailer again, and Mom’s not too happy about it.”

His hands stopped for a second as he considered another winter of squabbles. “They’re just happy to be here,” he said, his hands moving again.

I took a few steps toward the trailer in the distance, then turned to watch him again. “Tell that to Mom.”

He gave me a look before saying, “Did Juan make it?”

“No sir.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

I’d talked about Juan for a year. He had promised me last fall that he’d be back. “That’s okay,” I said. “The new guy is Miguel. He’s real nice.”

I told him about the trip to town, how we found the Spruills, about Tally and Trot and the large young man on the tailgate, then back to i own where Pappy argued with the man in charge of labor, then the nip to the gin, then about the Mexicans. I did all the talking because my day had certainly been more eventful than his.

At the trailer, he lifted the straps of his cotton sack and hung them over the hook at the bottom of the scales. The needle settled on fifty-eight pounds. He scribbled this in a ragged old ledger wired to the trailer.

“How much?” I asked when he closed the book.

“Four-seventy.”

“A triple,” I said.

He shrugged and said, “Not bad.”

Five hundred pounds equaled a home run, something he accomplished every other day. He squatted and said, “Hop on.”

I jumped on his back, and we started for the house. His shirt and overalls were soaked with sweat, and had been all day, but his arms were like steel. Pop Watson told me that Jesse Chandler once hit a baseball that landed in the center of Main Street. Pop and Mr. Snake Wilcox, the barber, measured it the next day and began telling people that it had traveled, on the fly, 440 feet. But a hostile opinion quickly emerged from the Tea Shoppe, where Mr. Junior Barnhart claimed, rather loudly, that the ball had bounced at least once before hitting Main Street.

Pop and Junior went weeks without speaking to each other. My mother verified the argument, but not the home run.

She was waiting for us by the water pump. My father sat on a bench and removed his boots and socks. Then he unsnapped his overalls and took off his shirt.

One of my chores at dawn was to fill a washtub with water and leave it in the sun all day so there’d be warm water for my father every afternoon. My mother dipped a hand towel in the tub and gently rubbed his neck with it.

She had grown up in a house full of girls, and had been raised in part by a couple of prissy old aunts. I think they bathed more than farm people, and her passion for cleanliness had rubbed off on my father. I got a complete scrubbing every Saturday afternoon, whether I needed it or not. When he was washed up and dried off, she handed him a fresh shirt. It was time to welcome our guests. In a large basket, my mother had assembled a collection of her finest vegetables, all handpicked, of course, and washed within the past two hours. Indian tomatoes, Vidalia onions, redskin potatoes, green and red bell peppers, ears of corn. We carried it to the back of the barn, where the Mexicans were resting and talking and waiting for their small fire to burn low so they could make their tortillas. I introduced my father to Miguel, who in turn presented some of his gang. Cowboy sat alone, his back to the barn, making no move to acknowledge us. I could see him watching my mother from under the brim of his hat. It frightened me for a second; then I realized Jesse Chandler would snap Cowboy’s skinny little neck if he made one wrong move.

We had learned a lot from the Mexicans the year before. They did not eat butter beans, snap beans, squash, eggplant, or turnips, but preferred tomatoes, onions, potatoes, peppers, and corn. And they would never ask for food from our garden. It had to be offered.

My mother explained to Miguel and the other men that our garden was full and that she would bring them vegetables every other day. They were not expected to pay for the food. It was part of the package.

We took another basket to the front of the house, where Camp Spruill seemed to be expanding by the hour. They had crept even farther across the yard, and there were more cardboard boxes and burlap sacks strewn about. They’d laid three planks across a box on one end and a barrel on the

other to make a table, and they were crowded around it eating dinner when we approached them. Mr. Spruill got to his feet and shook my father’s hand.

“Leon Spruill,” he said with food on his lip. “Nice to meet you.”

“Happy to have you folks here,” my father said pleasantly.

“Thank you,” Mr. Spruill said, pulling up his pants. “This here is my wife, Lucy.” She smiled and kept chewing slowly.

“This is my daughter, Tally,” he said, pointing. When she looked at me, I could feel my cheeks burning.

“And these are my nephews, Bo and Dale,” he said, nodding to the two boys who’d been resting on the mattress when they had stopped on the highway. They were teenagers, probably fifteen or so. And sitting next to them was the giant I’d first seen on the tailgate, half-asleep.