The Beet Fields (2 page)

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 half 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.”

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.”