The Beet Fields Read online

  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 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 guano. 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 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 to be nice and let 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 forever 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 wife was at the wooden table with her large pot of lard-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 eat 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 something 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 to 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 too 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 the 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 at 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 arid 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 ask 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 a 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 t
imes 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 it is 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 others 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 hangar than a barn. At the peak the rafters were an easy thirty-five feet off the 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 on to the bird with one hand and realized 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 to me you must kill it first. Wring the neck. Otherwise it will fly away.”

  “I can't—“

  “Ah, well, then, 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 awhile 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 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 color in his brain that he couldn't remember later and then nothing. Not pain, not sound, not a thing. Nothing.

  TWO

  LIGHT.

  There was lightness, seen from the inside of a cloud, white light that came from all directions, somehow came from inside him as well as out, and he opened his eyes.

  The white light did not go away, grew more intense with his eyes open.

  “Can you feel this?” Somebody pinched his legs and it hurt. He swore.

  “That is good. Move something now, move this foot,…”

  The boy started to focus and saw that what he thought was white light was really the shirt of the old man reflecting the glare from the bulb hanging in the shed where they slept.

  He moved his foot, then his hands and arms, each as he was told to move, and at last his neck. By now an older woman—at least forty—was there and she said something in Spanish and felt his neck and shoulders, then smiled at him with even white teeth and said something more.

  “She says you are young and green and did not break,” the old man said. “I thought surely a bone or two would have snapped. You fell such a distance“—he laughed—“and even when you were senseless you did not let go of the pigeon.” He smiled. “You must be a true hunter.”

  Which made the boy feel proud because he had hunted, had thrown himself at the woods to escape the drinking and fancied himself a good hunter. “I hurt.”

  “As you should. The ground shook when you fell. But it will be worse tomorrow when you awaken—you must sleep now.”

  The boy rolled onto his side and then rose to his knees. He did not want to appear weak in front of the old man or the woman kneeling next to him or the two girls standing off to the side, so he stood, wobbling, and made his way to his sleeping area and fell onto his bed of feed sacks and was asleep—or unconscious again—instantly.

  In the morning he thought, I am paralyzed. He had slept on his right side, a rolled-up feed sack for a pillow, and he had drooled and his head was pressed into the wetness. He wanted to move it away but he could not.

  His body screamed with pain. Every bone, every muscle, his head, even his teeth, ached and v/hen at last he made something move—he swung his leg sideways—it was pure agony.

  He rolled slowly onto his back and opened his eyes. There was daylight, bright sun, cutting into the gloom of the shed and he knew that he was very late—it must be close to nine—and that all the Mexicans were gone to the fields and would get so far ahead of him he would never catch up. In his life he would never catch up, he thought, and then he saw the farmer's wife come in the door.

  His sleeping area was way in the back of the shed, tucked in a dark corner so that somebody coming in from the bright sun would not be able to see to the rear where he lay. He held his breath, watching her, wondering.

  She wore a loose red-print dress that hung on her like a drape. She stopped at the first bed on the left side�
��the men slept on the left, the women on the right—and reached down to pull a sack up from the floor. She held the sack in her left hand and put it to her face, her cheek, and then to her nose and smelled it and breathed the odor of the sack and at the same time she slid her other hand down her body.

  The boy forgot the pain and felt himself grow hard and at the same time confused because she had said she hated the Mexicans and didn't want the men to get her and yet here she was breathing in the smell of them.

  He knew that if she saw him now she would probably go and get the pistol and shoot him but he needn't have worried. In a moment she rearranged the sack as it had been, straightened her dress, turned and walked out of the shed, and he lay back to ponder what he had seen. The pain had returned and he thought he might just lie there all day thinking of the skinny farmer's wife and what she had done but he had to pee so badly that he finally stood—moaning from the pain— and made his way to the outhouse behind the shed.

  Once he was up and moving, the pain seemed to lessen and after using the outhouse he slowly walked the half mile out to the field and picked up his hoe where the Mexicans had left it and went to work, carefully, cutting left and right, left and right, every other beet.

  When at last it was time for lunch he sat with the men and ate tortillas with beans and after they had eaten he told the old man what he had seen in the sleeping shed that morning.

  The man laughed and turned and said something in Spanish to the other men and then looked to where the farmer's wife sat in the truck, a hundred yards away. She had brought sandwiches, though nobody was eating them now, and sat in the cab of the pickup with the gun next to her.

  “She does not know herself,” the old man said, the smile leaving his face. “Her husband must not be much of a man and she feels the moon on her shoulder and wants but cannot have and so does not know herself.”

  “What does that mean?” The boy wiped his hands on his jeans. “The moon on her shoulder, what is that?”

  “It is something we say in the village where I come from. Women are said to have the moon on their shoulder when they are not satisfied.” He sighed and looked up at the noon sun. “It is said that men have the most lust but women have more—they have all the lust. They want everything. Marta, hey, Marta,” he called to the older Mexican woman. “Marta—do you have lust?”