The Beet Fields Read online

  “God—”

  The motor was still running and he turned the key off, amazed at how incredibly silent it became. Somewhere nearby he heard a meadow-lark call from a fence post, then nothing and he thought, What am I going to do?

  Help, he thought. I need to get help. But he didn't know why. The man was clearly, awfully, messily dead-—there was nothing to be done for him. And the boy was a wanted man; he thought that way, not as a wanted boy but as a wanted man.

  He pulled down on the door handle, opened the door slighdy, sick now at the sight and smell of the mess that the inside of the car had become; wanting to puke, he stood out of the car, away from it.

  A pattern came into his thinking. Not so much ideas as a pattern of what had to be done. He would have to leave. There was nothing of him in the car and it would help nobody if he was found. He would have to leave and when he came to a place with a phone he could call the police and tell them of the accident and they would come and, well, do whatever they did. That didn't matter.

  What mattered, what he saw in the pictures in his mind, was that he had to leave and he slammed the door and moved away from the car and looked back to the road and saw that no cars were coming. He trotted to the side of the road and began walking and for the first time looked down at his clothes. The pants were all right but the T-shirt was spotted with a little blood.

  “Damn!“

  Well, nothing for it. He had no other clothes, had nothing. The sheriffs deputy had taken him from Bill's without his clothes. He took the T-shirt off and thought his face must be spattered too. While walking, trotting really, he spit on the shirt and used it to clean his face.

  Shirt still off, he had moved along the road for ten minutes, then another five, a good mile west of the wreck, maybe more, when he heard the sound of a car coming, the slick whine of tires on asphalt. He wondered if he should try to hide but there was nowhere to go-—the fields went flat away from the road, nothing higher than a dirt hump for at least a mile, maybe more.

  So he kept walking. Whoever it was must not have seen the car off in the field—how could they miss it?—or if they saw it didn't care and he tried to make himself what he wasn't, tried in his mind to be neither part of the wreck nor a fugitive.

  The car slowed. He didn't turn but it slowed and came to a stop next to him.

  “Going to Clinton?”

  The boy turned. An ancient woman wearing a pair of bib overalls arid a work shirt sat in the front seat of an old Dodge—the boy guessed a '34 or '35: one of the old black ones. He only knew of them because he'd once watched a boy who had one try to make it into a hot rod,

  “Sure,” he said. “Clinton, sure. How far is it?”

  “Upwards of thirty mile,” the woman said. She was round. Not fat but round. “Too far to walk in a day but I'll give you a ride most of the way there if you like. My name is Hazel.”

  “Thank you,” the boy said, and opened the front door and got in, thinking, How can she have gone past the Plymouth sitting out in the field and not seen it? Sitting there with a body in it and not seen it? But before they'd gone a mile he found out why.

  The woman sat, looking straight ahead, a round head in the front seat, and she didn't talk and she didn't look left or look right. She concentrated on her driving, grasping the wheel with an almost frantic grip, both hands, and when she got the car up to thirty miles an hour she stopped accelerating. Thirty it was, thirty it would be as they ground along.

  The boy leaned back in the seat, resting his bare back on the fuzzy cloth—it seemed to be woven with dust built into the fabric—and watched the fields crawling by the side window but didn't see anything. His eyes burned in the wind coming through the open window and he thought, I have nothing but crap for luck. I make some money and the law takes it away. I get a ride and… He thought suddenly of the Hungarian man and how he looked, dead, and felt ashamed for complaining about his luck. If he'd lost the money at least he'd gotten away from the law and hadn't been sent home. Home? he thought. He had no home. Not anymore. He'd never had much of one but now it was all gone—from his thinking and, he hoped, from his memories. His luck wasn't that bad: he'd gotten away firom the law and wasn't hurt in the wreck and he was moving….

  Moving slow, he thought, looking out of the cqrner of his eye at the lady and at the speedometer seemingly glued on thirty. But moving. It could have been worse.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, just a moment—or so it seemed—and when he next opened them the car was stopped and when he looked out he saw he was parked in front of a small farmhouse and the old woman was no longer in the car:

  He opened the door and stood away from the car and looked around. It had once been a functioning farm, but years earlier. There was an ancient barn that needed paint and something to prop up the sagging roof. A brick silo with a wooden roof half gone. Some wooden sheds and an outhouse and a small white house that was the only thing in good repair. The farmhouse looked freshly painted and seemed to have an almost new roof and a neady painted picket fence and a neatly mown rectangle of grass in front. Out back was a garden with clean rows of lettuce and carrots and beans. Everywhere else, out around the house and by the barn and sheds and lying out in the fields around the house, were parked old pieces of farm machinery. Most of it dated back to horse-drawn days—cultivators, swatters, corn and potato planters, seed drills, trip rakes and John Deere mowers. The boy had watched his uncles use horses and knew something of working them and that some farms still used them in the winter when tractors were hard to start, but this equipment was so old the wheels had wooden spokes and iron tires, so old the wood was rotting.

  “You're up.”

  The boy turned and saw the old woman coming out of the house carrying a work shirt.

  “You seemed tired and I saw the blood on your shirt and figured you for a nosebleeder so I let you sleep. Figured you needed rest. I took your shirt to wash.” She walked while talking and was in front of the boy and handed him the shirt. “You didn't have clothes with you so I found a shirt. This is one I…had. You take it and cover yourself. I'm cooking some food and I won't feed a person unless he's properly covered.”

  She had the strangest way of talking in clipped sentences that never seemed to want an answer. The boy put the shirt on and buttoned it It was too big by a size but he rolled the sleeves up and tucked it into his pants and followed her back into the house.

  The inside was like a picture he'd once seen in a library book of a fairy village. There seemed to be glass cases or shelves in every corner and they were all filled with knickknacks; tiny porcelain figurines and animals, litde bouquets of porcelain and glass flowers, painted plates, small silver spoons. There were ironed lace curtains and a crocheted tablecloth on a hardwood dining table in the middle of the room. Off to the back was a kitchen, and a small doorway at the right led to what the boy supposed was a bedroom, but this main room, this sittjng-dining room dominated the house. It was like a museum. On one wall there was a large tinted color photograph of a young man in a pilot's uniform with a flight helmet and raised goggles on his head. Across the picture diagonally there was a narrow black satin ribbon and on the wall next to it was a framed newspaper obituary and a telegram with a black star on it.

  “He was my son,” the old woman said, and then disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of stew and corrected herself.

  “Is my son—he is Robert and he is my son, not was. He was a pilot in the Pacific. Flew one of them P-38s and there was a fight and the Japs shot him down—“

  Hazel put the stew down and looked at the picture, her eyes tearing. “He was something. When it rained of a hot day Robert would take off all his clothes and sit in the yard in a puddle. Just sit there laughing.” Her eyes changed, grew hard. “I didn't even get the body back. The son-of-a-bitch army kept it and wouldn't give it back to me. They said he was missing. They said they couldn't find him. Bullshit.

  “That's all lies,” she spat, her voice a hiss
. “That's lies they tell when they don't want you to know what really happened. He's probably in one of them secret camps. Where they keep them after the war.”

  She turned and went back into the kitchen and came back with bread. “I get magazines with stories in them. I read about them camps—the ones where they keep soldiers so they don't bring diseases back to this country….”

  She trailed off and gathered bowls to put on the table and when she had placed them she looked at the boy. “Hands.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I want to see your hands, see if they're clean. I won"t feed those with dirty hands.”

  The boy held his hands up and she took them and turned them over, then back, “Wash,” she said. “In the kitchen at the sink you'll find soap and water. Wash them good or you'll take sick.”

  He went to the kitchen and it was like stepping back into the past. On the left side there was a big wood cookstove with warming ovens sitting high above the cooktop, all black, trimmed in shiny nickel. Near it, beneath a window looking out on the fields with their old farm equipment, there was a sink with a red hand pump. By the pump was a bar of Lava soap and hanging on the wall next to the window there was a coarse cotton towel. He washed his hands thoroughly and splashed water in his face, dried with the towel and went back into the front room.

  Hazel was sitting at the table waiting for him. There were two empty places set on either side of her and he moved to sit to her left but she stopped him.

  “Sit here, on my right. That other one is for Robert.”

  He nodded and moved around the table to the right and sat and pulled the chair up to the table and it did not seem strange in some way that the other chair and place setting were for Robert. The picture was up there and Robert looked down on them and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting at the table eating. The food was simple—stew and cold cuts of summer sausage and homemade bread and butter. The boy thought of how the Mexicans had eaten, all taking from the one pot, and of how he had eaten at Bill's, off the tailgate of the truck. He wasn't sure how to eat here, so he waited.

  Hazel took a piece of bread and buttered it in a sure rhythm, as she must have buttered it all her life. He waited until she had taken a piece of summer sausage and put it carefully on half of her buttered bread, watched while she slowly cut the bread in half to make a half sandwich, placed the empty half on top of the other half and then put the sandwich in the exact center of her plate.

  “You make yourself a whole sandwich,” Hazel said softly. “You take two pieces of bread, and butter one side of one piece. Then put meat on it and the other piece of bread …" Her voice was even and carefully enunciated, as if she were talking to a small child. As she spoke she took another piece of bread, buttered half of it, made a half sandwich and put it on the plate beneath the picture.

  He did as she told him, working slowly though hunger was tearing at him now. He'd eaten only the half dozen doughnuts before the accident and they hadn't dented the emptiness in him. The bread was cut thick and he rubbed the butter evenly on one piece, took two slices of sausage and made a sandwich. He started to take a bite but saw that Hazel still had her sandwich on her plate and had now clasped her hands in front of the plate. The boy hesitated but did the same.

  “Heavenly Father,” she began, paused, took a breath and finished, “please bless our food and the three of us we pray in Jesus' na“I'me amen.”

  She ladled stew into the boy's bowl, took up her food and began eating in silence, chewing each bite carefully, looking not quite at the boy, staring past and out the small windows through the lace curtains. Twice Hazel looked up at the picture of the pilot and down at its sandwich with such a look in her eyes that the boy half expected thesandwich on the plate to have a bite taken out of it but when they were done the pilot's plate was untouched.

  Hazel took the dishes away, including the one below the picture, and then came back without speaking and went outside.

  The boy waited a moment and when she didn't come back in followed her out and they left the yard and went to a small shed, where Hazel rummaged around and came up with a bucket full of tools—wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, a grease gun, a hammer and some cold chisels.

  “Got to work on the swatter,” she said. “It needs fixing.”

  She left the shed and walked across the yard to one of the rows of old farm machinery. At one end stood a large implement with a wooden paddle wheel out to the side, on a platform, On the front of the platform was a sickle bar with teeth for cutting grass or hay or grain and at one end of the platform there was a rack with machinery on it and a metal seat with holes in it that led out to a long wooden tongue with places to hook a team of horses.

  “This is a swatter,” Hazel said, putting the bucket of tools on the ground. “It cuts grain and binds it into shocks. It needs tightening and greasing.”

  “I saw one before,” the boy said. “On my uncle's farm. He said he used to pull it with horses but didn't use it once he got a tractor.” He looked around. “Do you have horses here?”

  “No.”:

  “Oh;'

  “We will, though. Come maybe this fall or next when Robert comes home we'll be getting a team and we need all this equipment ready to go.”

  And the boy knew then she was maybe crazy, and he didn't care because it was not the evil kind of crazy like his parents but the soft kind.

  “Help me here. Hold this wrench. While I tighten.”

  The boy took the handle of the wrench and held it and when the nut was tightened they did another and then another and the old woman showed him how to use the grease gun to grease all the certs on the machine and a rag to wipe the grease off and then on to another machine, a corn planter, and then a mower and then supper with Robert again and then to sleep on the porch and breakfast and working on machines another day, then another, until the boy felt like he belonged to the old farm and the old machines that would never be used.

  But he didn't mind. He was a fugitive now, had broken out of jail and was safe here and felt close to Hazel and while there wasn't any money to earn there was food and a place to sleep without worry and it all could have lasted forever and maybe would have lasted forever, he thought, except that the county fair came to nearby Clinton.

  And so did Ruby.

  SIX

  THERE CAME A MORNING WHEN THEY ATE breakfast and instead of heading out to work on the machines Hazel brought a clean shirt out of the back bedroom and handed it to the boy.

  “Here. We're going to town. You need to be cleaner/'

  He hesitated. It had been a week, no, ten days that he had been here with the old woman and Robert and he felt it was not long enough to be safe if they were looking for him. “I'll stay here and work on the machines.”

  “It's the county fair,” she said. Then, turning to the picture, she added, “Every year the fair comes. We go to it.”

  He washed at the kitchen sink and when he came back outside buttoning his shirt she was at the car. She was still wearing bib overalls—had worn them every day since he'd first met her—but they were clean and she had a clean work shirt on beneath the overalls.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a folded piece of paper. He looked down and was surprised to see that it was a twenty-dollar bill. “Man's got to have some money. For spending at the fair.”

  “You don't need to give me money….”

  “Of course I do—you want it getting out that I don't give my hand money for the fair?”

  They drove in complete silence, setting off at thirty miles an hour on the highway for the two miles into Clinton.

  The town itself was small—not over a thousand people—and the fair was equally small. It was at the fairgrounds on the edge of town. There was a sideshow banner, a Ferris wheel, a Tilt-A-Whirl, some small car rides for children and a row of game booths. The boy was surprised to see that there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, all scrubbed cleaii and milling on the short midway. At one end
of the fairgrounds there were two large sheds and he could see livestock in the buildings, cages with chickens and rabbits and turkeys, pens with sheep and hogs.

  “So many people,” he said to Hazel as they walked from the grassy meadow where the cars were parked. “Where do they come from?”

  “Farms,” she said. “There's farms all over the place. Town wouldn't even be here except for farmers. 'Sides, it's the last day of the fair and that brings them in a little extra—"

  At that precise foment the boy saw the sheriffs deputy who had arrested him and taken all his money and made him a fugitive. He thought of it that way. He saw not just the deputy—who was walking away from them at an angle across the midway—but the deputy who had arrested him and taken all his money and made him a runner from the law.

  He had to hide. If the lawman saw him it would be over. He'd probably go to prison, being a fugitive.

  “I have to go,” he said to Hazel, interrupting. “You know … to the bathroom.”

  He left her walking toward the fair and angled off in the opposite direction taken by the deputy. It led him past the draglines and the Ferris wheel and near the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  “Hey, kid, you want a job?”

  The boy turned and found himself looking at a figure who summed up everything he ever wanted to be in a man. The man wore Levi's so low the crack of his butt showed in the rear and the top edge of pubic hair in the front and a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, one of which he lit now with a Zippo lighter that he snapped open and flicked in an easy motion with one hand. His hair was combed in a perfect greased-back jet-black ducktail and as a final touch of glory he wore heavy-duty black engineer's boots with straps and buckles that looked freshly oiled and polished.

  “Doing what?” the boy asked.

  The man looked over the boy's head when he spoke, coolly ignoring him, letting his eyes move up and down the fairgrounds.

  “I'll give you thirty-five bucks a week to set up and run the Tilt-A-Whirl for the rest of the summer. We're leaving tonight.”