A Moment in the Sun (26 page)

Niles smiles. His voice, when he speaks, lacks all force, as if he knows that no matter how he plays the hand, whether he passes or calls the bluff, he has lost. “But where?” he asks.

“Anywhere but North Carolina,” says the Judge, and leaves his son in the breakfast room, dented hat in hand.

TRAMPS

Hod hacks at the chalky ground as tow-headed Mormon boys crawl beside him. Big Ten is over two rows, backing up as he stabs his shovel down, leaving a jagged rut behind. The older Mormon boys have long-handled hoes, crouching to block out plants from the tangled mat of sugar beet, making them into separate islands of green, while the smaller ones crawl after them, rags wound around their bony knees, chopping each cluster back till only the thickest stem remains. The air is dry heat and flies and fine dust coughing up from the mat like a rug beaten on a line and flies, always flies this time of year, worrying your eyes and nose, frantic in your ear as you hack baked soil into yet more dust. Sweat runs off Hod’s face, cutting salty rivulets down his mask of dust and crisping away in the dry oven heat before it can reach the thirsty ground. Other young men, Saints, scrape out irrigation rows off to the right, joking and calling out to each other, keeping a cautious distance from him and the big Indian. Big Ten wears a bowler mashed down on his head and barely sweats, chopping his shovel down as if killing snakes.

Hod’s ditch is uneven but the first run of water will smooth it out. Saints got just enough sense to plant their stand near the American Fork, he thinks, and have jiggered all kinds of canals and gates, reservoirs and tanks to bring it close. There is no water at the moment, though, the little boys charged with running buckets making a wide arc around Hod and Big Ten to serve their own people, Hod’s tongue a dusty hank of wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands have blistered and cracked and blistered again, the gloves he bought in Reno worn through and tossed away two states ago, and there is sticky blood beneath his palms on the wood of the hoe.

“You been to Chicago?” asks Big Ten.

They’re not supposed to talk much, Indians, but this one never heard about it. In the barn at night Hod pretends to snore so he’ll shut the mouthworks down.

“Never got that far.”

“I tried it a few years back.”

“Find a job?”

Their blades fall into rhythm as they chop and shovel, Hod moving forward, Big Ten backing up.

“Oh, there’s plenty of work, you got a strong back and a weak mind.” He says he’s from Wisconsin, that he’s Ojibwe and Cree and at least half French. “Only it’s too jumbled-up there.”

If you don’t shift your hands on the shovel, just keep them clamped tight the same way, they won’t hurt so much.

“You ever been in these beets through a harvest campaign?”

Hod has bucked barley and wheat, has husked corn and dug potatoes, chopped and picked cotton, loaded melons and cut cane in Texas, even picked strawberries once. “Can’t say I have.”

“You turn the crop up, it’s a big fella—” the Indian works methodically, regular as a steam-hammer, “—slice the tops off for the sheep, knock away the dirt, and you got a nice fat sugar beet. Only sometimes it got the root-crazies. Then it isn’t just one taproot, it’s dozens of em, hundreds maybe, all twisted over and around each other. Make your stomach feel funny just to look at it.”

“I never seen that,” says Hod. “I come up, we had turnips, and they’d get the knot gall.”

Big Ten shakes his head as he chops. “Chicago they got so many different kind of people living all up against each other, over and under each other—if you know who you are when you get there you bound to forget it pretty damn soon.”

“A big city.”

“I kilt hogs there.” The shovel blade slams down and a chunk of crusted earth breaks free. “In the winter the steam come up from the blood when it’d blow out of em, then it froze hard on the ground. Hogs’d shit, scream, kick, and die. Haul that one away, there’s another thousand pressing down the chute to take its place. I come back nights, somebody look at me wrong, I just as well cut their throat too.”

There is no anger in the telling, the Indian fixed on the hard ground at his feet, chopping and digging.

“Believe I’ll give it a pass then,” says Hod.

Big Ten wears huge clodhopper brogan shoes with twine for laces and black pants and a black undertaker coat he never takes off even in the middle of the day with the old dusty bowler crammed down over his ears. He chops the shovel blade into the hard ground the Mormon boys have exposed with their thinning, twists and flicks the soil aside. Hod is slashing with a hoe, the heaviest he could find in the barn, and would be swinging a rock pike if they’d offered him one. He can’t recall how many days he’s been cutting this ground, can barely remember, in the heat and the dust and the constant flies, how he came to be here.

“Only thing a place like that is good for,” says Big Ten, “is if you got to disappear.”

Disappearing is not Hod’s problem. There is a little piece of mirror glass, a jagged triangle stuck in one of the stall posts in the barn that he can’t help but look at least once a day while it is light, and the thought is always the same.

Still here?

“You got a reason to make yourself scarce?” asks Hod. The Indian has hinted before that he is some kind of fugitive.

Big Ten lifts his chin at something behind him. “Garvey comin.”

Hod sneaks a look back and there is Elder Garvey wandering through the beet-vacation boys, pretending to be looking over their work. Never good when the boss man steps into a field.

Hod puts his head down, chops at the earth. The stand of plants stretches to the horizon, flat and dusty green. It’s best never to look at the work ahead, just punish the little bit of it lying at your feet.

“You two!”

Hod blows flies away from his ear and turns to face the farmer. “I’m just loosenin it up,” he says, defensively. “Then I come back through with the shovel and scoop it out.”

Elder Garvey looks off past him to the untamed crop. They look you in the eye to holler orders and argue pay, but when they look away—

“I got kin showed up,” he says.

Hod has to peel his hands off the shaft of the hoe.

“You want us to finish the day?” asks Big Ten. He is still chopping the blade of his shovel down, still backing up as he digs.

“Figured you’d want time to find something else.”

Meaning we’re let go, thinks Hod. Meaning off the property by nightfall.

Big Ten drops his shovel in the jagged trench he has dug and starts to walk away.

“If it wasn’t kin,” mutters Elder Garvey, looking off to the other side of Hod. He told them there was work all the way past the harvest campaign. Back then there was fruit to pick down by Provo, there were shovel jobs for the railroad, but he promised them that this would last through the winter. “Pay you for a half-day,” he adds.

Hod nods and steps around the old man, carrying the hoe on his shoulder. The nickel-a-day thinners don’t look up as he passes, fixed on their little patch of pain, and the older boys turn their heads away and keep blocking. He drops the tool and catches up with the big Indian.

Grasshoppers and beetles scatter in a frenzy on the ground before them, uncovered by the tow-headed boys, and a flock of lake gulls feast on the insects, rising and falling like a white blanket flapped by the wind.

“Make a white man feel like a nigger,” Big Ten grumbles when Hod catches up. Hod chooses not to point out he is the only white man been fired this day, and gingerly pulls his fingers straight.

When they reach the yard, Normal, Garvey’s oldest son, has a plow laid upside-down and is sharpening the coulter with a file. “I got your pay,” he says without looking up. “Gon’ pick up some lumber at the station later, I could run you in.”

Big Ten grunts and they step into the barn. There is a family spread out around the bunks along the wall, a hungry-looking bunch with hair bleached near white from the sun and blue eyes so clear that at first Hod thinks they’re blind. His little pile of things is already laid out on the floor on a blanket, right beside Big Ten’s.

“We had to get settled,” says the one who looks like the father, scrawny and unshaven. Some of the anti-Manifesto crowd most likely, the kind where you can’t tell if the middling-sized girls are daughters or wives. Near a dozen of them if you count the twins chasing the cat across the floor and the one nursing from his mama on the bottom bunk. “Say if there’s anything you’re missing.”

Big Ten pokes his pile with the toe of his shoe, then wraps the corners of the blanket around it to make a bundle.

“Sorry,” says the man.

“Aint none of your fault,” says Hod. Scabs back in Montana had this look, hollow-ribbed people with their bodies set tense, staring big-eyed past the militia boys protecting them. They can always find somebody hungrier to replace you.

“We come in just this morning from Tooele,” the man says, “and he told us to get settled then get on out there in the field. Sorry to touch your belongins.”

Norm has the wagon hitched when they come out with their bundles. They climb onto the bed.

“Met your cousins,” says Hod, arranging his bundle so he can sit on it.

“No relations of mine.” Norm switches and the bay mare starts ahead. Norm looks like his old man, thin and hard-mouthed, dry as the soil. “It’s just you can’t be feeding Gentiles when your own turn up needing work.”

“I aint a Gentile,” says Big Ten, stretching out to lay his head on his own bundle. “I’m a Ward of the State.”

The people in Lehi barely poke their heads around the door before they close it again. There is no work for them at the stone works or the rolling mill or from any of the farmers who stop by the lumberyard, and the sugar works won’t hire again till harvest. Hod wonders if it would be any different if he wasn’t with the Indian, but mostly if they see a lone man knocking they think you’re on the bum and pull their pies in from the window. It is late afternoon by the time Hod and Big Ten get themselves hid in the ditch just south of the railyard.

“Eastbound or westbound?”

Big Ten lifts up as if to take in the lay of the land. “How much Utah is there to get through going west?”

“Bout the same as east, only it’s all desert.”

“Colorado, then.”

The tracks above the ditch have three rails, converted from narrow gauge and polished with constant traffic. They duck down and wait while a couple little bobtails hauling local freight and an engine hauling passenger cars pass by.

“When the last time you bought a ticket?”

“Can’t say,” answers Hod after a moment’s thought. “Me and the railroad got an agreement.”

“But only you know about it.”

The men laugh. Hod has been on the bum too many times, alone and without a job, and it is no good. Bad enough when the other citizens look through you, but when you got to pinch yourself to know you’re there—

“Freight coming.” Big Ten peeks up over the edge of the ditch. “Pulling a full load.”

“What line?”

“Denver and Rio Grande.”

Hod grins. “
Through the Rockies, Not Around Them.
”

“Don’t care how they go, long as we get clear from the Land of Milk and Honey here.”

They let the engine pass, sneezing short bursts of hot steam as it picks up speed, then scramble out of the ditch, bundles tied to their arms, and run up the bank to the railbed. This part always makes his heart pound. Big Ten grabs the side ladder at the head of a boxcar and vaults up on the stirrup below it, graceful despite his size, but the train is really rolling now, thousands of rumbling tons, an avalanche on wheels that Hod sprints to keep up with till the best he can do, panicking, is catch the grab irons at the back of the car and swing his legs up off the railbed.

The moment he is borne away he knows it is folly. Unless the train slows again he is stuck, no way up, no way around to the coupling that won’t put him under the wheels. Big Ten shoots a doleful look back, then hauls himself up the ladder with one hand, the other holding his hat on his head, and disappears. Hod watches the bank fly past, hoping for a spot soft enough it won’t kill him when he lets go. It is all jagged rocks and piles of crossties this close to the yard, and the wind shifts to blow black smoke back on him from the stack, cinders clattering against the boards and stinging his face. Only question now is which and how many of his bones are going to be shattered. Hod’s arms are trembling, just about to push away, when a rope made from clothes tied together dangles down above him. He makes a snatch for it and hopes that somewhere the Indian learned how to jerk a decent knot.

Big Ten has to grab Hod’s belt to get him over the top. Hod lies on his belly hugging the wood of the roof for a moment, catching his breath.

“Where’d you learn how to nail a rattler?” Big Ten hollers over the wind.

“Haven’t tried it for a while.”

It is a long train, maybe thirty cars, but the grade is flat and straight and anyone looking ahead from the doghouse cupola will see them. Hod lays his hand on Big Ten’s shoulder to steady himself, knees still wobbly, as they cross the roofwalk to the front of the car. The access hatch is open. Hod takes a last look as the engine swings left toward the Wasatch Range looming ahead, then squeezes through and climbs down.

The hold is crammed with jute bags full of grease wool.

“Bit gamey,” says Big Ten, “but she’ll be a soft ride.”

The odor of sheep is rank in the box, which rocks gently on the long turn, rails clicking underneath. There are towns ahead where there may or may not be work. At some point there will be railroad bulls to dodge and it will be cold and Hod has only a hard lump of bread wrapped in a handkerchief and seven dollars and change in his pocket. But for now they are moving, compliments of the D&RG, rolling on company iron to the Wasatch Mountains and Hod feels a warm rush of contentment course through him. Luxury to be neither here nor there but in the neutral embrace of travel.

“Can’t beat these side-door Pullmans for comfort.”

“Yeah,” answers Big Ten, shifting huge bags of fleece to make a bed, “we’re a pair of kings.”