Joe (26 page)

“What you want?” he said.

“You need any help?”

The old man looked dubious. He leaned back against the wall of hay and looked out over the field. Most of it was still in long raked piles all over the ground.

“I reckon we can handle it. Throw that damn bale up here, Bobby. What you waitin on?”

The boy on the ground had been listening. He was chubby and soft-looking. He bent and grunted up with the bale and said, “Well, you stopped.” He just barely got it up over the edge of the bed and with a herculean effort at that.

“I’ll be goddamned,” the old man said.

A sharp voice inside the truck said a name.

“Well, any damn body fourteen year old ought to be able to pick up a bale of hay. Give it here.” He snatched the bale off the bed and threw it over his head into place and then glared down at the boy. The boy wasn’t looking at him. He was walking ahead. The two ancient blacks were each standing beside a bale but the old man didn’t yell at them. They were both older than he was. One of them had a solid white eye and wore glasses, the lens cracked over the bad eye as if in simultaneous injury.

“I just thought you might need some help,” Gary said. “Didn’t figure it’d hurt nothin to ask.”

“You ever hauled any hay?”

“Yessir. I’ve hauled a good bit.”

“Where at? Who for?”

“Well,” he said. “I ain’t never hauled none around here. I’ve hauled a bunch in Texas. I hauled all one summer down there.”

The old man worked his cud and looked at Gary’s thick little arms and legs.

“Can you throw one up on the truck?”

“Yessir.”

“Let’s see you throw one then.”

He got off on the side of the truck and walked to the bale nearest him. He bent his legs and muscled the bale up against his chest and walked to the truck with it. It was seventy or eighty pounds, felt like. He tossed it up over the side onto the stack and all the old man had to do was hit it on the side and settle it straight. He looked down on him.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen, I reckon. I’m just little for my age.” He was looking up and shading one hand against the sun in his eyes.

“You gonna work in that?” He was pointing to the black T-shirt Gary was wearing.

“Yessir. I ain’t got no other shirt with me. It don’t matter.”

“That hay’ll stick you.”

“It’s all right. I’ve hauled in a short-sleeve shirt before.”

“You ain’t got no gloves.”

He worked his fingers open and closed once. “My hands is tough,” he said.

“Well.” He called down to one of the black men: “Come on, Cleve.” Then: “All right. Get over here on the left and maybe you can help this boy keep up. We done had to crank the baler out twice cause he couldn’t pick em up.”

“Yessir. Thank you.” He walked behind the truck and the old man leaned around the hay. “Let’s go,” he said. The gears clashed as it went into first and the truck started rolling. Gary walked fast alongside it and hurried on to the next bale, going by the fat boy who barely got his on before the truck moved past. When it came by Gary he handed a bale up to the old man. When he went by the cab again, he saw a woman with a straw hat behind the wheel, a brown stain of snuff on her chin. She had both hands in a desperate clench on the wheel, with the truck crawling about two miles an hour. The old man cursed every time the fat boy tried to put one up.

“How much does hay haulers make in Texas?” he said.

Gary handed another one up to him and he turned and stacked it. “It just depends,” he said. “Who you work for. I worked with a bunch of Mexicans one day and got two cents a bale. I never did go back and work for that fellow no more, though.”

“Well,” he said. “I pay a nickel a bale and dinner. That all right with you?”

“Yes sir,” he said. He could already envision the feast. “How much we gonna haul today?” He was working and hurrying and throwing the bales up while they were talking.

“They’s another field down yonder,” the old man shouted. “Other side of that creek. See yonder?”

Gary looked. He could see a pale green square of flattened grass shimmering in the distance.

“We got another truck comin after dinner and three more hands,” he said. “We gonna haul till dark if we can. You think you can stand it?”

“I can stand it,” Gary said. The baling twine had already made deep red lines in his palms. He hurried ahead and picked up a bale and stood waiting with it.

“Uh uh,” the old man called. He put it down.

“Now see there. You havin to pick it up twice. Don’t pick it up till the truck gets to you. Wait on the truck.”

“Yessir.”

“Now, come on with it.”

He tossed it up.

“I thought you said you’d hauled before.”

“I have. It’s just been a while.”

“How much of a while?”

“Aw. A year or two.”

“Well. It’s all the same. In Texas or Missippi. All you got to do’s put it on the truck.”

He walked past the other boy and stopped beside him just as he was starting up with a bale. He was bent over from the waist, his back bowed.

“Use your legs,” he said.

The boy looked at him. He was white around the mouth.

“What?”

“Use your legs. Don’t pick it up with your back. Look here.”

He bent over a bale with his forearms resting on his thighs.
“See here?” He raised the bale with his arms like a weightlifter doing a curl and straightened his legs at the same time. When he came erect the bale was at chest level. When the truck passed he threw it up.

“See there? It’s easier like that. It don’t give your back out like that.”

He smiled at the boy but the boy didn’t smile back. When the old man went to the other side to catch the hay, he walked up next to Gary and said, “That’s my granddaddy. Daddy makes me come out here in the summertime and help him. All he ever does is fuss at me, though.”

“You get paid?”

“Shit,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t come out here and do it for nothin. What you think I am, crazy?”

“I don’t guess.”

“I wouldn’t even be out here if I didn’t have to.

“Aw.”

“I don’t care if I don’t never make any money or not.”

Gary didn’t say anything to that.

“Plus I have to mow the yard and hang out clothes, too.”

“Yeah?” Gary said.

“And they don’t even pay me for that.”

Long before dinnertime the old man saw the red welts forming on Gary’s hands and gave him an extra pair of gloves. When they had the truck loaded they stopped and tied the load down, the old man on top crawling around and rigging the rope, Gary kneeling under the truck and throwing the free end of the rope around for him to take up the other side and tie
off. They rode on top to the trees that held the shade at the fence and left that truck and took an old ’65 Chevy pickup back out to the center of the field. The baler was finishing up and they had what looked like about two hundred more to pick up.

“We’ll have a hundred and thirty-five on two loads,” the old man said. They had water in plastic milk jugs that had been frozen solid and wrapped in grocery sacks. It was cold and sweet and Gary knew it would ruin him if he drank too much of it. The fat boy, Bobby, turned the jug up time and time again. They took a break under the shade when they had both trucks loaded.

“You smoke?” the old man said. He pulled a pack of Winstons out of a dry shirt he’d put on.

“Every once in a while,” Gary said.

“Well, here.” He gave him a cigarette and then gave him a light. They sat crosslegged on the ground and the man looked at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “Where you live?”

Gary drew on the cigarette and looked out over the field. He rested his weight on one arm. He tensed it, felt the muscle bunch, untensed it.

“We live up on Edie Hill,” he said.

“Edie Hill?” The eyes were flat and gray. The boy could see the lifetime of hard work in them, the hundreds of days like this one still remembered and not banished by time.

“Yessir,” he said. He flicked at the fire on his cigarette with his little finger. It was quiet on the ground there, the heat rising around
them and drawing the sweat effortlessly from them and already dampening and darkening the old man’s fresh shirt.

“I used to know some folks lived up around there,” he said. “Didn’t know nobody lived up there now.”

“We just livin in this old house up there,” Gary said. “I don’t reckon it belongs to anybody.”

“Is it back up there around a big pine thicket? Got some old sheds and stuff around it? Old log house?”

He drew deeply on the cigarette and studied his feet. He didn’t look up. The burning air had twisted the hair on his neck into wet locks that curled up and cooled his skin. “It’s a log house,” he said.

“You one of them Joneses that moved back here?”

“Yessir.”

The old man nodded and looked off into the distance, the blue denim of his overalls tattered and faded. He waited a few moments before he spoke.

“How much you reckon’s on them two trucks there?”

Gary looked. “I don’t know,” he said.

“A hundred on this one. Thirty on that one.” The old man got up, pulling his billfold from his back pocket. “Six dollars and fifty cents.”

The boy sat on the ground watching him, the cigarette smoking between his fingers. “What is it?” he said.

The old man didn’t answer. He stuck a thin thumb between the leather jaws of his billfold and pulled out a five and a one. The two paper bills fluttered to the ground like wounded doves and were anchored almost immediately by two pitched quarters that
landed flat and soundlessly and pinned them to the faded green stubble in front of his feet. He looked up. The old man was staring down on him now with his eyes hard and unfeeling. He bent over and picked up the gloves the boy had been using. The woman and the fat boy were standing by the other truck. They had not spoken.

“Let’s go,” he said, and they climbed into the cab. The haymaster put one foot on the rear hub and gripped the bed with his dark and freckled hands and pulled himself up over it like a seal clambering onto an ice shelf. But there was no coolness in that field. Long after they had gone Gary sat motionless beneath the shade tree, watching their wavering figures struggling relentlessly over the parched ground, their toiling shapes remorseless and wasted and indentured to the heat that rose from the earth and descended from the sky in a vapor hot as fire.

Sometimes in the singing underbrush the boy could hear sounds that came only at night, strange rustlings and movings that lay dormant in the daytime and rose after the sun fell into the deep green beyond the creek faded to black, the hushed voices and far-off crying dogs that rushed and swept through the dark timber, the faint yellow lights moving across the bottomland. Sometimes he’d go down there to hear them better.

He could follow the path without a light and climb a hill behind the house and come out on a dirt road washed with shadows, where he could see little puffs of dust rising and falling beneath his bare feet. He’d stop on the wooden bridge and listen, squatting there in the warm night. He could hear men talking, the quick baying, the short rush of dogs through the woods.

One night he sat motionless on the bridge with the rough wood under him and heard the quick splash of little feet in the shallows. He knew it was a coon. He could hear the dogs far back, trailing. There was no sound around him but the slow musical trickle of the stream and the slow wind that rustled the cane. The little feet
came closer, stopped. He saw the coon, one small dark blob on the creek bank, a scurrying shape bent south with humped and pumping legs. The dogs came upon him in a rush; it wasn’t until he heard their feet striking the water that the first one opened again. Five dogs, mottled moiling shapes indistinct in the dark, splashed down the ribbon of water and flowed beneath the bridge with their voices like hammers, sudden shocks of noise that disrupted the peace and serenity of the night, tore it apart with their anguished cries, swept past the bridge and down the bank, their voices louder than he could have imagined, echoing up and down and back behind him, all around him, until the whole of the woods rang with the sound of the race. The boy heard them catch it, heard the angry sounds of the dogs and the high thin chittering of the coon as they pulled it apart with their teeth. He saw the yellow lights struggling up through the woods as the men who owned the dogs came to see after them, and he got up, and waited a moment, some longing deep within him he couldn’t name, and went away before they came too close.

Somebody was beating on something down the road. The boy had been walking for a long time and he could hear the sound of it now. It was midmorning and he was on his way to the store again, their supplies low, empty bellies all around him. He still had money saved back, hidden under a rock a long way from the house, but already he’d seen the old man in the woods, bending, stooping, looking. He knew he’d have to move it soon, maybe find a hollow tree or even bury it. There was a good bit in his pocket but he would hide that before he returned home.