The Beet Fields Read online

  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 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.

  ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN

  Alida's Song

  The Boy Who Owned the School

  The Brian Books: The River, Brians Winter and

  Brian's Return

  Canyons

  The Car

  The Cookcamp

  The Crossing

  Dogsong

  Father Water, Mother Woods: Essays on Fishing and Hunting in the North Woods

  Harris and Me

  Hatchet

  The Haymeadow

  The Island

  The Monument

  My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn

  The Night the White Deer Died

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  Sarny: A Life Remembered

  The Schemoff Discoveries

  Soldiers Heart

  The Transall Saga

  The Tucket Adventures, Books One through Five

  The Voyage of the Frog

  The Winter Room

  Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen:

  Canoe Days and Dogteam

  This one's for Gito

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I have been telling stories for many years, mining my life for the ore that makes each piece of fiction, as most writers mine their lives for material to make stories come to life and dance.

  Because of that, small portions of this book appeared in softer forms, shadowed and sketched and changed into gentler fiction, over twenty years ago. But here it is now, as real as I can write it, and as real as I can remember it happening. It is strange what one remembers:

  Light through a dusty little trailer window, the smell of an unfiltered cigarette, the shine of metal on a hoe working in a beet field, the sweat on a forearm, the pop of a tractor motor, the soft hair at a farm girl's temples as she pays for a ride at the fair—all of these came to me when I started to work on this book, all these true things came and let me see more things honestly, to help me lift those parts of stories back out of fiction and into the real story of what happened in that summer of the beet fields.…

  Shee gave me of the Tree, and I did eate.

  JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  THE BOY'S LIFE TRULY BEGAN when he was sixteen years old, sleeping in the grubby apartment, in his small room, on the couch that folded out into a bed.

  He was only half awake, fighting sleep: half dreaming, half knowing. His mother was there beside him.

  She had come to his bed many times drunk, to sleep, as she had slept with him when he was a small boy during the war, when his father was away in the army. She was the mother and he was the boy and they lived alone. All his life she had fallen asleep hear him, two, three nights a week, and he would either slide to the side away from her or ease out onto the floor and pull a blanket down to sleep there while she passed out, mumbling drunkenly about his father. Always about the father.

  But tonight, even half dreaming, he knew something was different, wrong, about her need for him, and he rolled and pushed and stood away in lonely horror while she lay there moaning, half conscious, the drunk smell of her filling his shabby room, dark except for the light from a streetlamp a block away.

  And he ran.…

  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 metal 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 spit 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 in to 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 the 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 boredom, nothing 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 spit 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 color 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 math 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 dreamt of wealth, did the math 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—aiid 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 the lodging, not to mention the hat and gloves, only a third of an acre lhad been thinned that first day, and he knew 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 never 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 seamed 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 lie 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 in back of 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 led 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 center of an enormous bowl that went green to the sky and then yellow blue into the gold-hot sun, the color 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 shining 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 Iknow 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 all meaningless because the farmer's wife was nowhere near as pretty as some of Oie Mexican women, who had thick black hair and dark eyes that lifted at the corners. 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 that 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 to not eat. Even with the 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 the 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 they 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-slappash, 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 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 litde leather slings and round rocks, once a rabbit, and twice some woodchucks that lived in holes along a fencerow and came out to chukkera warning when they went by. The woodchucks and rabbit they took out of their holes with a long piece of old barbwire shaped like a crank on one end. They stuck the wire down in the hole and twisted the crank end until the barbwire 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 pants 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 chilies, 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 further 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 three and a hal
f days now 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 looked at 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 two burritos stuffed with beans was overpowering.

  He ate them in four 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 dth a roofing nail through the center 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.”