A Painted House

John Grisham

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36

John Grisham
A Painted House

Chapter 1

   The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a “good crop.”
   They were farmers, hardworking men who embraced pessimism only when discussing the weather and the crops. There was too much sun, or too much rain, or the threat of floods in the lowlands, or the rising prices of seed and fertilizer, or the uncertainties of the markets. On the most perfect of days, my mother would quietly say to me, “Don’t worry. The men will find something to worry about.”
   Pappy, my grandfather, was worried about the price for labor when we went searching for the hill people. They were paid for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked. The previous year, according to him, it was $1.50 per hundred. He’d already heard rumors that a farmer over in Lake City was offering $1.60.
   This played heavily on his mind as we rode to town. He never talked when he drove, and this was because, according to my mother, not much of a driver herself, he was afraid of motorized vehicles. His truck was a 1939 Ford, and with the exception of our old John Deere tractor, it was our sole means of transportation. This was no particular problem except when we drove to church and my mother and grandmother were forced to sit snugly together up front in their Sunday best while my father and I rode in the back, engulfed in dust. Modern sedans were scarce in rural Arkansas.
   Pappy drove thirty-seven miles per hour. His theory was that every automobile had a speed at which it ran most efficiently, and through some vaguely defined method he had determined that his old truck should go thirty-seven. My mother said (to me) that it was ridiculous. She also said he and my father had once fought over whether the truck should go faster. But my father rarely drove it, and if I happened to be riding with him, he would level off at thirty-seven, out of respect for Pappy. My mother said she suspected he drove much faster when he was alone.
   We turned onto Highway 135, and, as always, I watched Pappy carefully shift the gears-pressing slowly on the clutch, delicately prodding the stick shift on the steering column-until the truck reached its perfect speed. Then I leaned over to check the speedometer: thirty-seven. He smiled at me as if we both agreed that the truck belonged at that speed.
   Highway 135 ran straight and flat through the farm country of the Arkansas Delta. On both sides as far as I could see, the fields were white with cotton. It was time for the harvest, a wonderful season for me because they turned out school for two months. For my grandfather, though, it was a time of endless worry.

   On the right, at the Jordan place, we saw a group of Mexicans working in the field near the road. They were stooped at the waist, their cotton sacks draped behind them, their hands moving deftly through the stalks, tearing off the bolls. Pappy grunted. He didn’t like the Jordans because they were Methodists-and Cubs fans. Now that they already had workers in their fields, there was another reason to dislike them.
   The distance from our farm to town was fewer than eight miles, but at thirty-seven miles an hour, the trip took twenty minutes. Always twenty minutes, even with little traffic. Pappy didn’t believe in passing slower vehicles in front of him. Of course, he was usually the slow one. Near Black Oak, we caught up to a trailer filled to the top with snowy mounds of freshly picked cotton. A tarp covered the front half, and the Montgomery twins, who were my age, playfully bounced around in all that cotton until they saw us on the road below them. Then they stopped and waved. I waved back, but my grandfather did not. When he drove, he never waved or nodded at folks, and this was, my mother said, because he was afraid to take his hands from the wheel. She said people talked about him behind his back, saying he was rude and arrogant. Personally, I don’t think he cared how the gossip ran.
   We followed the Montgomery trailer until it turned at the cotton gin. It was pulled by their old Massey Harris tractor, and driven by Frank, the eldest Montgomery boy, who had dropped out of school in the fifth grade and was considered by everyone at church to be headed for serious trouble.
   Highway 135 became Main Street for the short stretch it took to negotiate Black Oak. We passed the Black Oak Baptist Church, one of the few times we’d pass without stopping for some type of service. Every store, shop, business, church, even the school, faced Main Street, and on Saturdays the traffic inched along, bumper to bumper, as the country folks flocked to town for their weekly shopping. But it was Wednesday, and when we got into town, we parked in front of Pop and Pearl Watson’s grocery store on Main.
   I waited on the sidewalk until my grandfather nodded in the direction of the store. That was my cue to go inside and purchase a Tootsie Roll, on credit. It only cost a penny, but it was not a foregone conclusion that I would get one every trip to town. Occasionally, he wouldn’t nod, but I would enter the store anyway and loiter around the cash register long enough for Pearl to sneak me one, which always came with strict instructions not to tell my grandfather. She was afraid of him. Eli Chandler was a poor man, but he was intensely proud. He would starve to death before he took free food, which, on his list, included Tootsie Rolls. He would’ve beaten me with a stick if he knew I had accepted a piece of candy, so Pearl Watson had no trouble swearing me to secrecy.
   But this time I got the nod. As always, Pearl was dusting the counter when I entered and gave her a stiff hug. Then I grabbed a Tootsie Roll from the jar next to the cash register. I signed the charge slip with great flair, and Pearl inspected my penmanship. “It’s getting better, Luke,” she said.
   “Not bad for a seven-year-old,” I said. Because of my mother, I had been practicing my name in cursive writing for two years. “Where’s Pop?” I asked. They were the only adults I knew who insisted I call them by their “first” names, but only in the store when no one else was listening. If a customer walked in, then it was suddenly Mr. and Mrs. Watson. I told no one but my mother this, and she told me she was certain no other child held such privilege.
   “In the back, putting up stock,” Pearl said. “Where’s your grandfather?”
   It was Pearl’s calling in life to monitor the movements of the town’s population, so any question was usually answered with another.
   “The Tea Shoppe, checking on the Mexicans. Can I go back there?” I was determined to outquestion her.
   “Better not. Y’all using hill people, too?”
   “If we can find them. Eli says they don’t come down like they used to. He also thinks they’re all half crazy. Where’s Champ?” Champ was the store’s ancient beagle, which never left Pop’s side.
   Pearl grinned whenever I called my grandfather by his first name. She was about to ask me a question when the small bell clanged as the door opened and closed. A genuine Mexican walked in, alone and timid, as they all seemed to be at first. Pearl nodded politely at the new customer.
   I shouted, “Buenos dias, senor!”
   The Mexican grinned and said sheepishly, “Buenos dias,” before disappearing into the back of the store.
   “They’re good people,” Pearl said under her breath, as if the Mexican spoke English and might be offended by something nice she said. I bit into my Tootsie Roll and chewed it slowly while rewrapping and pocketing the other half.
   “Eli’s worried about payin’ them too much,” I said. With a customer in the store, Pearl was suddenly busy again, dusting and straightening around the only cash register.
   “Eli worries about everything,” she said.
   “He’s a farmer.”
   “Are you going to be a farmer?”
   “No ma’am. A baseball player.”
   “For the Cardinals?”
   “Of course.”
   Pearl hummed for a bit while I waited for the Mexican. I had some more Spanish I was anxious to try.
   The old wooden shelves were bursting with fresh groceries. I loved the store during picking season because Pop filled it from floor to ceiling. The crops were coming in, and money was changing hands.
   Pappy opened the door just wide enough to stick his head in. “Let’s go,” he said; then, “Howdy, Pearl.”
   “Howdy, Eli,” she said as she patted my head and sent me away.
   “Where are the Mexicans?” I asked Pappy when we were outside.
   “Should be in later this afternoon.”
   We got back in the truck and left town in the direction of Jonesboro, where my grandfather always found the hill people.

   We parked on the shoulder of the highway, near the intersection of a gravel road. In Pappy’s opinion, it was the best spot in the county to catch the hill people. I wasn’t so sure. He’d been trying to hire some for a week with no results. We sat on the tailgate in the scorching sun in complete silence for half an hour before the first truck stopped. It was clean and had good tires. If we were lucky enough to find hill people, they would live with us for the next two months. We wanted folks who were neat, and the fact that this truck was much nicer than Pappy’s was a good sign.
   “Afternoon,” Pappy said when the engine was turned off.
   “Howdy,” said the driver.
   “Where y’all from?” asked Pappy.
   “Up north of Hardy.”
   With no traffic around, my grandfather stood on the pavement, a pleasant expression on his face, taking in the truck and its contents. The driver and his wife sat in the cab with a small girl between them. Three large teenaged boys were napping in the back. Everyone appeared to be healthy and well dressed. I could tell Pappy wanted these people.
   “Y’all lookin’ for work?” he asked.
   “Yep. Lookin’ for Lloyd Crenshaw, somewhere west of Black Oak.” My grandfather pointed this way and that, and they drove off. We watched them until they were out of sight.
   He could’ve offered them more than Mr. Crenshaw was promising. Hill people were notorious for negotiating their labor. Last year, in the middle of the first picking on our place, the Fulbrights from Calico Rock disappeared one Sunday night and went to work for a farmer ten miles away.
   But Pappy was not dishonest, nor did he want to start a bidding war.
   We tossed a baseball along the edge of a cotton field, stopping whenever a truck approached.
   My glove was a Rawlings that Santa had delivered the Christmas before. I slept with it nightly and oiled it weekly, and nothing was as dear to my soul.
   My grandfather, who had taught me how to throw and catch and hit, didn’t need a glove. His large, callused hands absorbed my throws without the slightest sting.
   Though he was a quiet man who never bragged, Eli Chandler had been a legendary baseball player. At the age of seventeen, he had signed a contract with the Cardinals to play professional baseball. But the First War called him, and not long after he came home, his father died. Pappy had no choice but to become a farmer.
   Pop Watson loved to tell me stories of how great Eli Chandler had been-how far he could hit a baseball, how hard he could throw one. “Probably the greatest ever from Arkansas,” was Pop’s assessment.
   “Better than Dizzy Dean?” I would ask.
   “Not even close,” Pop would say, sighing.
   When I relayed these stories to my mother, she always smiled and said, “Be careful. Pop tells tales.”
   Pappy, who was rubbing the baseball in his mammoth hands, cocked his head at the sound of a vehicle. Coming from the west was a truck with a trailer behind it. From a quarter of a mile away we could tell they were hill people. We walked to the shoulder of the road and waited as the driver downshifted, gears crunching and whining as he brought the truck to a stop.
   I counted seven heads, five in the truck, two in the trailer.
   “Howdy,” the driver said slowly, sizing up my grandfather as we in turn quickly scrutinized them.
   “Good afternoon,” Pappy said, taking a step closer but still keeping his distance.
   Tobacco juice lined the lower lip of the driver. This was an ominous sign. My mother thought most hill people were prone to bad hygiene and bad habits. Tobacco and alcohol were forbidden in our home. We were Baptists.
   “Name’s Spruill,” he said.
   “Eli Chandler. Nice to meet you. Y’all lookin’ for work?”
   “Yep.”
   “Where you from?”
   “Eureka Springs.”
   The truck was almost as old as Pappy’s, with slick tires and a cracked windshield and rusted fenders and what looked like faded blue paint under a layer of dust. A tier had been constructed above the bed, and it was crammed with cardboard boxes and burlap bags filled with supplies. Under it, on the floor of the bed, a mattress was wedged next to the cab. Two large boys stood on it, both staring blankly at me. Sitting on the tailgate, barefoot and shirtless, was a heavy young man with massive shoulders and a neck as thick as a stump. He spat tobacco juice between the truck and the trailer and seemed oblivious to Pappy and me. He swung his feet slowly, then spat again, never looking away from the asphalt beneath him.
   “I’m lookin’ for field hands,” Pappy said.
   “How much you payin’?” Mr. Spruill asked.
   “One-sixty a hundred,” Pappy said.
   Mr. Spruill frowned and looked at the woman beside him. They mumbled something.
   It was at this point in the ritual that quick decisions had to be made. We had to decide whether we wanted these people living with us. And they had to accept or reject our price.
   “What kinda cotton?” Mr. Spruill asked.
   “Stoneville,” my grandfather said. “The bolls are ready. It’ll be easy to pick.” Mr. Spruill could look around him and see the bolls bursting. The sun and soil and rains had cooperated so far. Pappy, of course, had been fretting over some dire rainfall prediction in the Farmers’ Almanac.
   “We got one-sixty last year,” Mr. Spruill said.
   I didn’t care for money talk, so I ambled along the center line to inspect the trailer. The tires on the trailer were even balder than those on the truck. One was half flat from the load. It was a good thing that their journey was almost over.
   Rising in one corner of the trailer, with her elbows resting on the plank siding, was a very pretty girl. She had dark hair pulled tightly behind her head and big brown eyes. She was younger than my mother, but certainly a lot older than I was, and I couldn’t help but stare.
   “What’s your name?” she said.
   “Luke,” I said, kicking a rock. My cheeks were immediately warm. “What’s yours?”
   “Tally. How old are you?”
   “Seven. How old are you?”
   “Seventeen.”
   “How long you been ridin’ in that trailer?”
   “Day and a half.”
   She was barefoot, and her dress was dirty and very tight-tight all the way to her knees. This was the first time I remember really examining a girl. She watched me with a knowing smile. A kid sat on a crate next to her with his back to me, and he slowly turned around and looked at me as if I weren’t there. He had green eyes and a long forehead covered with sticky black hair. His left arm appeared to be useless.
   “This is Trot,” she said. “He ain’t right.”
   “Nice to meet you, Trot,” I said, but his eyes looked away. He acted as if he hadn’t heard me.
   “How old is he?” I asked her.
   “Twelve. He’s a cripple.”
   Trot turned abruptly to face a corner, his bad arm flopping lifelessly. My friend Dewayne said that hill people married their cousins and that’s why there were so many defects in their families.
   Tally appeared to be perfect, though. She gazed thoughtfully across the cotton fields, and I admired her dirty dress once again.
   I knew my grandfather and Mr. Spruill had come to terms because Mr. Spruill started his truck. I walked past the trailer, past the man on the tailgate who was briefly awake but still staring at the pavement, and stood beside Pappy. “Nine miles that way, take a left by a burned-out barn, then six more miles to the St. Francis River. We’re the first farm past the river on your left.”
   “Bottomland?” Mr. Spruill asked, as if he were being sent into a swamp.
   “Some of it is, but it’s good land.”
   Mr. Spruill glanced at his wife again, then looked back at us. “Where do we set up?”
   “You’ll see a shady spot in the back, next to the silo. That’s the best place.”
   We watched them drive away, the gears rattling, the tires wobbling, crates and boxes and pots bouncing along.
   “You don’t like them, do you?” I asked.
   “They’re good folks. They’re just different.”
   “I guess we’re lucky to have them, aren’t we?”
   “Yes, we are.”
   More field hands meant less cotton for me to pick. For the next month I would go to the fields at sunrise, drape a nine-foot cotton sack over my shoulder, and stare for a moment at an endless row of cotton, the stalks taller than I was, then plunge into them, lost as far as anyone could tell. And I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice. My fingers would bleed, my neck would burn, my back would hurt.
   Yes, I wanted lots of help in the fields. Lots of hill people, lots of Mexicans.

Chapter 2

   With the cotton waiting, my grandfather was not a patient man. Though he still drove the truck at its requisite speed, he was restless because the other fields along the road were getting picked, and ours were not. Our Mexicans were two days late. We parked again near Pop and Pearl’s, and I followed him to the Tea Shoppe, where he argued with the man in charge of farm labor.
   “Relax, Eli,” the man said. “They’ll be here any minute.”
   He couldn’t relax. We walked to the Black Oak gin on the edge of town, a long walk-but Pappy did not believe in wasting gasoline. Between six and eleven that morning, he’d picked two hundred pounds of cotton, yet he still walked so fast I had to jog to keep up.
   The gravel lot of the gin was crowded with cotton trailers, some empty, others waiting for their harvest to be ginned. I waved again at the Montgomery twins as they were leaving, their trailer empty, headed home for another load.
   The gin roared with the chorus of heavy machines at work. They were incredibly loud and dangerous. During each picking season, at least one worker would fall victim to some gruesome injury inside the cotton gin. I was scared of the machines, and when Pappy told me to wait outside, I was happy to do so. He walked by a group of field hands waiting for their trailers without so much as a nod. He had things on his mind.
   I found a safe spot near the dock, where they wheeled out the finished bales and loaded them onto trailers headed for the Carolinas. At one end of the gin the freshly picked cotton was sucked from the trailers through a long pipe, twelve inches around; then it disappeared into the building where the machines worked on it. It emerged at the other end in neat square bales covered in burlap and strapped tightly with one-inch steel bands. A good gin produced perfect bales, ones that could be stacked like bricks.
   A bale of cotton was worth a hundred and seventy-five dollars, give or take, depending on the markets. A good crop could produce a bale an acre. We rented eighty acres. Most farm kids could do the math.
   In fact, the math was so easy you wondered why anyone would want to be a farmer. My mother made sure I understood the numbers. The two of us had already made a secret pact that I would never, under any circumstances, stay on the farm. I would finish all twelve grades and go play for the Cardinals.
   Pappy and my father had borrowed fourteen thousand dollars in March from the owner of the gin. That was their crop loan, and the money was spent on seed, fertilizer, labor, and other expenses. So far we’d been lucky-the weather had been nearly perfect, and the crops looked good. If our luck continued through the picking, and the fields yielded a bale an acre, then the Chandler farming operation would break even. That was our goal.
   But, like most farmers, Pappy and my father carried debt from the previous year. They owed the owner of the gin two thousand dollars from 1951, which had seen an average crop. They also owed money to the John Deere dealer in Jonesboro for parts, to Lance Brothers for fuel, to the Co-op for seed and supplies, and to Pop and Pearl Watson for groceries.
   I certainly wasn’t supposed to know about their crop loans and debts. But in the summertime my parents often sat on the front steps late into the night, waiting for the air to cool so they could sleep without sweating, and they talked. My bed was near a window by the porch. They thought I was sleeping, but I heard more than I should have.
   Though I wasn’t sure, I strongly suspected Pappy needed to borrow more money to pay the Mexicans and the hill people. I couldn’t tell if he got the money or not. He was frowning when we walked to the gin, and he was frowning when we left it.

   The hill people had been migrating from the Ozarks for decades to pick cotton. Many of them owned their own homes and land, and quite often they had nicer vehicles than the farmers who hired them for the harvest. They worked very hard, saved their money, and appeared to be as poor as we were.
   By 1950 the migration had slowed. The postwar boom had finally trickled down to Arkansas, at least to some portions of the state, and the younger hill people didn’t need the extra money as badly as their parents. They simply stayed at home. Picking cotton was not something anyone would volunteer to do. The farmers faced a labor shortage that gradually grew worse; then somebody discovered the Mexicans.
   The first truckload arrived in Black Oak in 1951. We got six of them, including Juan, my buddy, who gave me my first tortilla. Juan and forty others had traveled three days in the back of a long trailer, packed in tightly together, with little food, no shade from the sun or shelter from the rain. They were weary and disoriented when they hit Main Street. Pappy said the trailer smelled worse than a cattle truck. Those who saw it told others, and before long the ladies at the Baptist and Methodist churches were openly complaining about the primitive manner in which the Mexicans had been transported.
   My mother had been vocal, at least to my father. I heard them discuss it many times after the crops were in and the Mexicans had been shipped back. She wanted my father to talk to the other farmers and receive assurances from the man in charge of labor that those who collected the Mexicans and sent them to us would treat them better. She felt it was our duty as farmers to protect the laborers, a notion my father shared somewhat, though he seemed unenthusiastic about leading the charge. Pappy didn’t give a damn. Nor did the Mexicans; They just wanted to work.
   The Mexicans finally arrived just after four o’clock. There had been rumors that they would be riding in a bus, and I certainly hoped this was true. I didn’t want my parents straining at the issue for another winter. Nor did I want the Mexicans to be treated so poorly.
   But they were in a trailer again, an old one with planks for sides and nothing over the top to protect them. It was true that cattle had it better.
   They carefully hopped down out of the trailer bed and onto the street, three or four at a time, in one wave after another. They spilled forth, emptying in front of the Co-op, and gathered on the sidewalk in small bewildered groups. They stretched and bent and looked around as if they had landed on another planet. I counted sixty-two of them. To my great disappointment, Juan was not there.
   They were several inches shorter than Pappy, very thin, and they all had black hair and brown skin. Each carried a little bag of clothing and supplies.
   Pearl Watson stood on the sidewalk in front of her store, hands on hips, glaring. They were her customers, and she certainly didn’t want them mistreated. I knew that before church on Sunday the ladies would be in an uproar again. And I knew my mother would quiz me as soon as we arrived home with our gang.
   Harsh words erupted between the man in charge of labor and the driver of the truck. Somebody down in Texas had, in fact, promised that the Mexicans would be shipped in a bus. This was the second load to arrive in a dirty trailer. Pappy never shied away from a fight, and I could tell he wanted to jump into the fray and finish off the truck driver. But he was also angry with the labor man, and I guess he saw no point in whipping both of them. We sat on the tailgate of our truck and waited for the dust to clear.
   When the yelling stopped, the paperwork began. The Mexicans clung together on the sidewalk in front of the Co-op. Occasionally, they would glance at us and the other farmers who were gathering along Main Street. Word was out-the new batch had arrived.
   Pappy got the first ten. The leader was Miguel. He appeared to be the oldest and, as I noticed from my initial inspection, he had the only cloth bag. The rest of them carried their belongings in paper sacks.
   Miguel’s English was passable, but not nearly as good as Juan’s had been. I chatted him up while Pappy finished the paperwork. Miguel introduced me to the group. There was a Rico, a Roberto, a Jose, a Luis, a Pablo, and several I couldn’t understand. I remembered from a year earlier that it would take a week to distinguish among them.
   Although they were clearly exhausted, each of them seemed to make some effort to smile-except for one who sneered at me when I looked at him. He wore a western-style hat, which Miguel pointed to and said, “He thinks he’s a cowboy. So that’s what we call him.” Cowboy was very young, and tall for a Mexican. His eyes were narrow and mean. He had a thin mustache that only added to the fierceness. He frightened me so badly that I gave a passing thought to telling Pappy. I certainly didn’t want the man living on our farm for the weeks to come. But instead I just backed away.
   Our group of Mexicans followed Pappy down the sidewalk to Pop and Pearl’s. I trailed along, careful not to step close to Cowboy. Inside the store, I assumed my position near the cash register, where Pearl was waiting for someone to whisper to.
   “They treat them like animals,” she said.
   “Eli says they’re just happy to be here,” I whispered back. My grandfather was waiting by the door, arms folded across his chest, watching the Mexicans gather what few items they needed. Miguel was rattling instructions to the rest of them.
   Pearl was not about to criticize Eli Chandler. But she shot him a dirty look, though he didn’t see it. Pappy wasn’t concerned with cither me or Pearl. He was fretting because the cotton wasn’t getting (licked.
   “It’s just awful,” she said. I could tell Pearl couldn’t wait for us to clear out so she could find her church friends and again stir up the issue. Pearl was a Methodist.
   As the Mexicans, holding their goods, drifted to the cash register, Miguel gave each name to Pearl, who in turn opened a charge account. She rang up the total, entered the amount in a ledger by the worker’s name, then showed the entry to both Miguel and the customer. Instant credit, American style.
   They bought flour and shortening to make tortillas, lots of beans in both cans and bags, and rice. Nothing extra-no sugar or sweets, no vegetables. They ate as little as possible, because food cost money. Their goal was to save every cent they could and take it back home.
   Of course, these poor fellas had no idea where they were going. They did not know that my mother was a devoted gardener who spent more time tending her vegetables than she did the cotton. They were quite lucky, because my mother believed that no one living within walking distance of our farm would ever go without food.
   Cowboy was last in line, and when Pearl smiled at him, I thought he was going to spit on her. Miguel stayed close. He’d just spent three days in the back of a trailer with the boy and probably knew all about him.
   I said good-bye to Pearl for the second time that day, which was odd because I usually saw her only once a week.
   Pappy led the Mexicans to the truck. They got into the bed and sat shoulder-to-shoulder, feet and legs intertwined. They were silent and stared blankly ahead as if they had no idea where their journey would end.
   The old truck strained with the load but eventually leveled out at thirty-seven, and Pappy almost smiled. It was late in the afternoon, and the weather was hot and dry, perfect for picking. Between the Sp mills and the Mexicans we finally had enough hands to harvest our crop. I reached into my pocket, and pulled out the other half of my Tootsie Roll.
   Long before we arrived at our house, we saw smoke and then a tent. We lived on a dirt road that was very dusty for most of the year, and Pappy was just puttering along so the Mexicans wouldn’t get choked.
   “What’s that?” I asked.
   “Looks like a tent of some sort,” Pappy said.
   It was situated near the road, at the far end of our front yard, under a pin oak that was a hundred years old, very near the spot where home plate belonged. We slowed even more as we approached our mailbox. The Spruills had taken control of half our front yard. The large tent was dirty white with a pointed roof and was erected with a mismatched collection of hand-whittled sticks and metal poles. Two sides of the tent were open, and I could see boxes and blankets lying on the ground under the roof. I could also see Tally napping inside.
   Their truck was parked beside it, and another canvas of some sort had been rigged over its bed. It was anchored with baling rope staked to the ground so that the truck couldn’t move without first getting unhitched. Their old trailer had been partially unloaded, its boxes and burlap bags scattered on the grass as if a storm had hit.
   Mrs. Spruill was tending a fire, hence the smoke. For some reason, she had chosen a slightly bare spot near the end of the yard. It was the exact spot where Pappy or my father squatted almost every afternoon and caught my fastballs and my curves. I wanted to cry. I would never forgive Mrs. Spruill for this.
   “I thought you told them to set up out behind the silo,” I said.
   “I did,” Pappy answered. He slowed the truck almost to a stop, then turned into our place. The silo was out back, near the barn, a sufficient distance from our house. We’d had hill people camping back there before-never in the front yard.
   He parked under another pin oak that was only seventy years old, according to my grandmother. It was the smallest of the three that shaded our house and yard. We rolled to a stop near the house, in the same dry ruts Pappy’d parked in for decades. Both my mother and grandmother were waiting at the kitchen steps.
   Ruth, my grandmother, did not like the fact that the hill people had laid claim to our front yard. Pappy and I knew this before we got out of the truck. She had her hands on her hips.
   My mother was eager to examine the Mexicans and ask me about their traveling conditions. She watched them pile out of the truck as she walked to me and squeezed my shoulder.
   “Ten of them,” she said. “Yes ma’am.”
   Gran met Pappy at the front of the truck and said, quietly but sternly, “Why are those people in our front yard?”
   “I asked them to set up by the silo,” Pappy said, never one to back down, not even from his wife. “I don’t know why they picked that spot.”
   “Can you ask them to move?”
   “I cannot. If they pack up, they’ll leave. You know how hill people are.”
   And that was the end of Gran’s questions. They were not about to argue in front of me and ten new Mexicans. She walked away, toward the house, shaking her head in disapproval. Pappy honestly didn’t care where the hill people camped. They appeared to be able-bodied and willing to work, and nothing else mattered to him.
   I suspected Gran was not that concerned either. The picking was so crucial that we would’ve taken in a chain gang if they could’ve averaged three hundred pounds of cotton a day.
   The Mexicans followed Pappy off to the barn, which was 352 feet from the back porch steps. Past the chicken coop, the water pump, the clotheslines, and the tool shed, past a sugar maple that would turn bright red in October. My father had helped me measure the exact distance one day last January. It seemed like a mile to me. From home plate to the left field wall in Sportsman’s Park, where the Cardinals played, was 350 feet, and every time Stan Musial hit a home run I would sit on the steps the next day and marvel at the distance. In mid-July he’d hit a ball 400 feet against the Braves. Pappy had said, “He hit it over the barn, Luke.”
   For two days afterward, I’d sat on the steps and dreamed of hitting ‘cm over the barn.
   When the Mexicans were past the tool shed, my mother said, “They look very tired.”
   “They rode in a trailer, sixty-two of them,” I said, eager, for some reason, to help stir things up.
   “I was afraid of that.”
   “An old trailer. Old and dirty. Pearl’s already mad about it.”
   “It won’t happen again,” she said, and I knew that my father was about to get an earful. “Run along and help your grandfather.”
   I’d spent most of the previous two weeks in the barn, alone with my mother, sweeping and cleaning the loft, trying to make a home for the Mexicans. Most of the farmers put them in abandoned tenant houses or barns. There’d been a rumor that Ned Shackleford three miles south had made his live with the chickens.
   Not so on the Chandler farm. For lack of another shelter, the Mexicans would be forced to live in the loft of our barn, but there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt anywhere to be found. And it would have a pleasant smell. For a year my mother had gathered old blankets and quilts for them to sleep on.
   I slipped into the barn, but stayed below, next to Isabel’s stall. She was our milk cow. Pappy claimed his life had been saved in the First War by a young French girl named Isabel, and to honor the memory, he named our Jersey cow after her. My grandmother never believed that story.
   I could hear them up in the loft, moving around, settling in. Pappy was talking to Miguel, who was impressed with how nice and clean the loft was. Pappy took the compliments as if he and he alone had done the scrubbing.
   In fact, he and Gran had been skeptical of my mother’s efforts to provide a decent place for the laborers to sleep. My mother had been raised on a small farm at the very edge of Black Oak, so she was almost a town girl. She actually grew up with kids who were too good to pick cotton. She never walked to school-her father drove her. She’d been to Memphis three times before she married my father. She’d been raised in a painted house.

Chapter 3

   We Chandlers rented our land from Mr. Vogel of Jonesboro, a man I’d never seen. His name was rarely mentioned, but when it did slip into a conversation, it was uttered with respect and awe. I thought he was the richest man in the world.
   Pappy and Gran had been renting the land since before the Great Depression, which arrived early and stayed late in rural Arkansas. After thirty years of backbreaking labor, they had managed to purchase
   from Mr. Vogel the house and the three acres around it. They also owned the John Deere tractor, two disks, a seed planter, a cotton trailer, a flatbed trailer, two mules, a wagon, and the truck. My father had a vague agreement that gave him an ownership interest in some “I these assets. The land deed was in the names of Eli and Ruth Chandler.
   The only farmers who made money were those who owned their land. The renters, like us, tried to break even. The sharecroppers had i he worst and were doomed to eternal poverty. My father’s goal was to own forty acres of land, free and clear. My other’s dreams were tucked away, only to be shared with me as I grew older. But I already knew she longed to leave the rural life and is determined that I would not farm. By the time I was seven, she had made a believer out of me.
   When she was satisfied that the Mexicans were being properly situated, she sent me to find my father. It was late, the sun was falling beyond the trees that lined the St. Francis River, and it was time for in to weigh his cotton sack for the final time and call it a day. I walked barefoot along a dirt path between two fields, looking for him. The soil was dark and rich, good Delta farmland that produced enough to keep you tied to it. Ahead, I saw the cotton trailer, and I knew he was working his way toward it.
   Jesse Chandler was the elder son of Pappy and Gran. His younger brother, Ricky, was nineteen and fighting somewhere in Korea. There were two sisters who’d fled the farm as soon as they’d finished high school.
   My father didn’t flee. He was determined to be a farmer like his father and grandfather, except he’d be the first Chandler to own his land. I didn’t know if he had dreams of a life away from the fields. Like my grandfather, he had been an excellent baseball player, and I’m sure at one point he’d dreamed of major league glory. But he took a German bullet through his thigh in Anzio in 1944, and his baseball career came to an end.
   He walked with a very slight limp, but then so did most people who toiled in the cotton patch.
   I stopped at the trailer, which was almost empty. It sat on a narrow cotton road, waiting to be filled. I climbed up on it. Around me, on all sides, neat rows of green and brown stalks stretched to the tree lines that bordered our land. At the top of the stalks, puffy bolls of cotton were popping forth. The cotton was coming to life by the minute, so when I stepped on the back of the trailer and surveyed the fields, I saw an ocean of white. The fields were silent-no voices, no tractor engines, no cars on the road. For a moment, hanging on to the trailer, I could almost understand why my father wanted to be a farmer.
   I could barely see his old straw hat in the distance as he moved between rows. I jumped down and hurried to meet him. With dusk approaching, the gaps between the rows were even darker. Because the sun and rain had cooperated, the leaves were full and thick and weaving together so that they brushed against me as I walked quickly toward my father.
   “Is that you, Luke?” he called, knowing full well that no one else would be coming to find him.
   “Yes sir!” I answered, moving to the voice. “Mom says it’s time to quit!”
   “Oh she does?”
   “Yes sir.” I missed him by one row. I cut through the stalks, and there he was, bent at the waist, both hands moving through the leaves, adroitly plucking the cotton and stuffing it into the nearly full sack draped over his shoulder. He’d been in the fields since sunrise, breaking only for lunch.
   “Did y’all find some help?” he asked without looking at me.
   “Yes sir,” I said proudly. “Mexicans and hill people.”
   “How many Mexicans?”
   “Ten,” I said, as if I’d personally rounded them up.
   “That’s good. Who are the hill people?”
   “The Spruills. I forgot where they’re from.”
   “How many?” He finished a stalk and crept forward, with his heavy sack inching along behind him.
   “A whole truckload. It’s hard to tell. Gran’s mad because they’ve set up camp in the front yard, even got a fire goin’ where home plate is. Pappy told ‘em to set up by the silo. I heard him. I don’t think they’re real smart.”
   “Don’t be sayin’ that.”
   “Yes sir. Anyway, Gran’s not too pleased.”
   “She’ll be all right. We need the hill people.”
   “Yes sir. That’s what Pappy said. But I hate they’ve messed up home plate.”
   “Pickin’ is more important than baseball these days.”
   “I guess.” Maybe in his opinion.
   “How are the Mexicans?”
   “Not too good. They stuffed ‘em in a trailer again, and Mom’s not too happy about it.”
   His hands stopped for a second as he considered another winter of squabbles. “They’re just happy to be here,” he said, his hands moving again.
   I took a few steps toward the trailer in the distance, then turned to watch him again. “Tell that to Mom.”
   He gave me a look before saying, “Did Juan make it?”
   “No sir.”
   “Sorry to hear that.”
   I’d talked about Juan for a year. He had promised me last fall that he’d be back. “That’s okay,” I said. “The new guy is Miguel. He’s real nice.”
   I told him about the trip to town, how we found the Spruills, about Tally and Trot and the large young man on the tailgate, then back to i own where Pappy argued with the man in charge of labor, then the nip to the gin, then about the Mexicans. I did all the talking because my day had certainly been more eventful than his.
   At the trailer, he lifted the straps of his cotton sack and hung them over the hook at the bottom of the scales. The needle settled on fifty-eight pounds. He scribbled this in a ragged old ledger wired to the trailer.
   “How much?” I asked when he closed the book.
   “Four-seventy.”
   “A triple,” I said.
   He shrugged and said, “Not bad.”
   Five hundred pounds equaled a home run, something he accomplished every other day. He squatted and said, “Hop on.”
   I jumped on his back, and we started for the house. His shirt and overalls were soaked with sweat, and had been all day, but his arms were like steel. Pop Watson told me that Jesse Chandler once hit a baseball that landed in the center of Main Street. Pop and Mr. Snake Wilcox, the barber, measured it the next day and began telling people that it had traveled, on the fly, 440 feet. But a hostile opinion quickly emerged from the Tea Shoppe, where Mr. Junior Barnhart claimed, rather loudly, that the ball had bounced at least once before hitting Main Street.
   Pop and Junior went weeks without speaking to each other. My mother verified the argument, but not the home run.
   She was waiting for us by the water pump. My father sat on a bench and removed his boots and socks. Then he unsnapped his overalls and took off his shirt.
   One of my chores at dawn was to fill a washtub with water and leave it in the sun all day so there’d be warm water for my father every afternoon. My mother dipped a hand towel in the tub and gently rubbed his neck with it.
   She had grown up in a house full of girls, and had been raised in part by a couple of prissy old aunts. I think they bathed more than farm people, and her passion for cleanliness had rubbed off on my father. I got a complete scrubbing every Saturday afternoon, whether I needed it or not.
   When he was washed up and dried off, she handed him a fresh shirt. It was time to welcome our guests. In a large basket, my mother had assembled a collection of her finest vegetables, all handpicked, of course, and washed within the past two hours. Indian tomatoes, Vidalia onions, red-skin potatoes, green and red bell peppers, ears of corn. We carried it to the back of the barn, where the Mexicans were resting and talking and waiting for their small fire to burn low so they could make their tortillas. I introduced my father to Miguel, who in turn presented some of his gang.
   Cowboy sat alone, his back to the barn, making no move to acknowledge us. I could see him watching my mother from under the brim of his hat. It frightened me for a second; then I realized Jesse Chandler would snap Cowboy’s skinny little neck if he made one wrong move.
   We had learned a lot from the Mexicans the year before. They did not eat butter beans, snap beans, squash, eggplant, or turnips, but preferred tomatoes, onions, potatoes, peppers, and corn. And they would never ask for food from our garden. It had to be offered.
   My mother explained to Miguel and the other men that our garden was full and that she would bring them vegetables every other day. They were not expected to pay for the food. It was part of the package.
   We took another basket to the front of the house, where Camp Spruill seemed to be expanding by the hour. They had crept even farther across the yard, and there were more cardboard boxes and burlap sacks strewn about. They’d laid three planks across a box on one end and a barrel on the other to make a table, and they were crowded around it eating dinner when we approached them. Mr. Spruill got to his feet and shook my father’s hand.
   “Leon Spruill,” he said with food on his lip. “Nice to meet you.”
   “Happy to have you folks here,” my father said pleasantly.
   “Thank you,” Mr. Spruill said, pulling up his pants. “This here is my wife, Lucy.” She smiled and kept chewing slowly.
   “This is my daughter, Tally,” he said, pointing. When she looked at me, I could feel my cheeks burning.
   “And these are my nephews, Bo and Dale,” he said, nodding to the two boys who’d been resting on the mattress when they had stopped on the highway. They were teenagers, probably fifteen or so. And sitting next to them was the giant I’d first seen on the tailgate, half-asleep.
   “This is my son Hank,” Mr. Spruill said. Hank was at least twenty and was certainly old enough to stand up and shake hands. But he kept eating. Both jaws were ballooned with what appeared to be corn bread. “He eats a lot,” Mr. Spruill said, and we tried to laugh.
   “And this here is Trot,” he said. Trot never looked up. His limp left arm hung by his side. He clutched a spoon with his right hand. His standing in the family was left undeclared.
   My mother presented the large basket of vegetables, and for a second, Hank stopped his chomping and looked up at the fresh supply. Then he returned to his beans. “The tomatoes and corn are especially good this year,” my mother was saying. “And there’s plenty. Just let me know what you like.”
   Tally chewed slowly and stared at me. I studied my feet.
   “That’s mighty nice of you, ma’am,” Mr. Spruill said, and Mrs. Spruill added a quick thanks. There was no danger of the Spruills going without food, not that they had missed any meals. Hank was burly with a thick chest that narrowed only slightly where it met his neck. Mr. and Mrs. Spruill were both stocky and appeared strong. Bo and Dale were lean but not thin. Tally, of course, was perfectly proportioned. Only Trot was gaunt and skinny.
   “Didn’t mean to interrupt dinner,” my father said, and we began backing away.
   “Thanks again,” Mr. Spruill said.
   I knew from experience that within a short time we would know more than we wanted about the Spruills. They would share our land, our water, our outhouse. We would take them vegetables from the garden, milk from Isabel, eggs from the coop. We would invite them to town on Saturday and to church on Sunday. We would work beside them in the fields from sunrise until almost dark. And when the picking was over, they would leave and return to the hills. The trees would turn, winter would come, and we would spend many cold nights huddled around the fire telling stories about the Spruills.

   Dinner was potatoes, sliced thin and fried, boiled okra, corn on the cob, and hot corn bread-but no meats because it was almost fall, and because we’d had a roast the day before. Gran fried chicken twice a week, but never on Wednesdays. My mother’s garden was producing enough tomatoes and onions to feed all of Black Oak, so she sliced a platter of them for every meal.
   The kitchen was small and hot. A round oscillating fan rattled away on top of the refrigerator and tried to keep the air circulating as my mother and grandmother prepared dinner. Their movements were slow but steady. They were tired, and it was too hot to hurry up.
   They were not particularly fond of each other, but both were determined to exist in peace. I never heard them argue, never heard my mother say anything bad about her mother-in-law. They lived in the same house, cooked the same meals, did the same laundry, picked the same cotton. With so much work to do, who had time to bicker?
   But Gran had been born and bred deep in the cotton patch. She knew she would be buried in the soil she worked. My mother longed for an escape.
   Through daily ritual, they had silently negotiated a method to their kitchen work. Gran hovered near the stove, checking the corn bread, stirring the potatoes, okra, and corn. My mother kept to the sink, where she peeled tomatoes and stacked the dirty dishes. I studied this from the kitchen table, where I sat every night and peeled cucumbers with a paring knife. They both loved music, and occasionally one would hum while the other sang softly. The music kept the tension buried.
   But not tonight. They were too preoccupied to sing and hum. My mother was stewing over the fact that the Mexicans had been hauled in like cattle. My grandmother was pouting because the Spruills had invaded our front yard.
   At exactly six o’clock, Gran removed her apron and sat across from me. The end of the table was flush against the wall and served as a large shelf that accumulated things. In the center was an RCA radio in a walnut casing. She turned on the switch and smiled at me.
   The CBS news was delivered to us by Edward R. Murrow, live from New York. For a week there’d been heavy fighting in Pyongyang, near the Sea of Japan, and from an old map that Gran kept on her night table, we knew that Ricky’s infantry division was in the area. His last letter had arrived two weeks earlier. It was a quickly written note, but between the lines it gave the impression that he was in the thick of things.
   When Mr. Murrow got past his lead story about a spat with the Russians, he started on Korea, and Gran closed her eyes. She folded her hands together, put both index fingers to her lips, and waited.
   I wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. Mr. Murrow was not going lo announce to the nation that Ricky Chandler was dead or alive.
   My mother listened, too. She stood with her back to the sink, wiping her hands with a towel, staring blankly at the table. This happened almost every night in the summer and fall of 1952.
   Peace efforts had been started, then abandoned. The Chinese withdrew, then attacked again. Through Mr. Murrow’s reports and Ricky’s letters, we lived the war.
   Pappy and my father would not listen to the news. They busied themselves outside, at the tool shed or the water pump, doing small chores that could’ve waited, talking about the crops, searching for something to worry about besides Ricky. Both had fought in wars. They didn’t need Mr. Murrow in New York to read some correspondent’s cable from Korea and tell the nation what was occurring in one battle or the next. They knew.
   In any case, it was a short report that night about Korea, and this was taken in our little farmhouse as something good. Mr. Murrow moved along to other matters, and Gran finally smiled at me. “Ricky’s okay,” she said, rubbing my hand. “He’ll be home before you know it.”
   She’d earned the right to believe this. She had waited for Pappy during the First War, and she had prayed long distance for my father and his wounds during the Second. Her boys always came home, and Ricky would not let us down.
   She turned the radio off. The potatoes and okra needed her attention. She and my mother returned to cooking, and we waited for Pappy to walk through the back screen door.
   I think Pappy expected the worst from the war. The Chandlers had been lucky so far in the century. He wouldn’t listen to the news, but he wanted to know if things looked good or bad. When he heard the radio go off, he usually made his way into the kitchen. That evening he stopped at the table and tousled my hair. Gran looked at him. She smiled and said, “No bad news.”
   My mother told me that Gran and Pappy often slept less than an hour or two before waking and worrying about their younger son. Gran was convinced Ricky was coming home. Pappy was not.
   At six-thirty, we sat around the table, held hands, and gave thanks for all the food and all the blessings. Pappy led the praying, at least over dinner. He thanked God for the Mexicans and for the Spruills, and for the fine crops around us. I prayed quietly, and only for Ricky. I was grateful for the food, but it didn’t seem nearly as important as he did.
   The adults ate slowly and talked about nothing but cotton. I was not expected to add much to the conversation. Gran in particular was of the opinion that children should be seen and not heard.
   I wanted to go to the barn and check out the Mexicans. And I wanted to sneak around front and maybe catch a glimpse of Tally. My mother suspected something, and when we finished eating, she told me to help her with the dishes. I would’ve preferred a whipping, but I had no choice.

   We drifted to the front porch for our nightly sitting. It seemed like a simple enough ritual, but it wasn’t. First we would let the meal settle, then we’d tend to baseball. We would turn on the radio and Harry Caray at KMOX in St. Louis would deliver the play-by-play of our beloved Cardinals. My mother and grandmother would shell peas or butter beans. Any loose ends of dinner gossip would be wrapped up. Of course, the crops were fretted over.
   But that night it was raining two hundred miles away in St. Louis, and the game had been canceled. I sat on the steps, holding my Rawlings glove, squeezing my baseball inside it, watching the shadows of the Spruills in the distance and wondering how anyone could be so thoughtless as to build a fire on home plate.
   The outside radio was a small General Electric that my father had bought in Boston when he left the hospital during the war. Its sole purpose was to bring the Cardinals into our lives. We seldom missed a game. It sat on a wooden crate near the creaking swing where the men rested. My mother and grandmother sat in padded wooden chairs not far away, on the other side of the porch, shelling peas. I was in the middle, on the front steps.
   Before the Mexicans arrived, we’d had a portable fan we put near the screen door. Each night it would hum away quietly and manage to push the heavy air around just enough to make things bearable. But, thanks to my mother, it was now in the loft of our barn. This had caused friction, though most of it had been kept away from me.
   And so the night was very quiet-no ball game, no fan-just the slow talk of weary farm people waiting for the temperature to drop a few more degrees.
   The rain in St. Louis inspired the men to worry about the weather. The rivers and creeks in the Arkansas Delta flooded with frustrating regularity. Every four or five years they left their banks and washed away the crops. I couldn’t remember a flood, but I’d heard so much about them I felt like a veteran. We would pray for weeks for a good rain. One would come, and as soon as the ground was soaked, Pappy and my father would start watching the clouds and telling flood stories.
   The Spruills were winding down. Their voices were fading. I could see their shadows moving around the tents. Their fire flickered low, then died.
   All was quiet on the Chandler farm. We had hill people. We had Mexicans. The cotton was waiting.

Chapter 4

   At some point in the vast darkness of the night, Pappy, our human alarm clock, awoke, put on his boots, and began stomping around the kitchen making the first pot of coffee. The house was not largethree bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room-and it was so old the plank floors sagged in places. If one person chose to wake up the rest, he or she could certainly do so.
   I was allowed to stay in bed until my father came after me. It was difficult to sleep, though, with all those people on the farm and all that cotton to pick. I was already awake when he shook me and said it was time to go. I dressed quickly and met him on the back porch.
   There was no hint of sunrise as we walked across the backyard, the dew soaking our boots. We stopped at the chicken coop, where he bent low and slipped inside. I was told to wait in front of it, since last month while gathering eggs in the darkness, I’d stepped on a huge rat snake and cried for two days. At first my father had not been sympathetic; rat snakes are harmless and just a part of life on the farm. My mother, however, intervened with a fury, and for the time being, I was not permitted to collect eggs alone.
   My father filled a straw bowl with a dozen eggs and handed it to me. We headed to the barn, where Isabel was waiting. Now that we’d roused the chickens, the roosters began crowing.
   The only light came from a pale bulb hanging from the hayloft. The Mexicans were awake. A fire had been lit behind the barn, and they were huddled near it as if they were cold. I was already warm from the humidity.
   I could milk the cow, and on most mornings that chore belonged to me. But the rat snake still had me frightened, plus we were in a hurry because we had to be in the fields by sunrise. My father rapidly milked two gallons, which would’ve taken me half the morning. We delivered the food to the kitchen, where the women were in charge. The ham was already in the skillet, its rich aroma thick in the air.
   Breakfast was fresh eggs, milk, salt-cured ham, and hot biscuits, with sorghum optional. As they cooked, I settled into my chair, ran my fingers across the damp, checkered oilcloth, and waited for my cup of coffee. It was the one vice my mother allowed me.
   Gran placed the cup and saucer before me, then the sugar bowl and the fresh cream. I doctored the coffee until it was as sweet as a malt, then sipped it slowly.
   At breakfast, conversation in the kitchen was held to a minimum. It was exciting to have so many strangers on our farm for the harvest, hut the enthusiasm was dampened by the reality that we would spend most of the next twelve hours unshielded in the sun, bent over, picking until our fingers bled.
   We ate quickly, the roosters making a ruckus in the side yard. My grandmother’s biscuits were heavy and perfectly round, and so warm that when I carefully placed a slice of butter in the center of one, it melted instantly. I watched the yellow cream soak into the biscuit, then took a bite. My mother conceded that Ruth Chandler made the best biscuits she’d ever tasted. I wanted so badly to eat two or three, like my father, but I simply couldn’t hold them. My mother ate one, same as Gran. Pappy had two, my father three. Several hours later, in the middle of the morning, we would stop for a moment under the shade of a tree or beside the cotton trailer to eat the leftover biscuits.
   Breakfast was slow in the winter because there was little else to do. The pace was somewhat faster in the spring when we were planting, and in the summer when we were chopping. But during the fall harvest, with the sun about to catch us, we ate with a purpose.
   There was some chatter about the weather. The rain in St. Louis that had canceled last night’s Cardinals game was weighing on Pappy’s mind. St. Louis was so far away that no one at the table, except for Pappy, had ever been there, yet the city’s weather was now a crucial element in the harvest of our crops. My mother listened patiently. I didn’t say a word.
   My father had been reading the almanac and offered the opinion that the weather would cooperate throughout the month of September. But mid-October looked ominous. Bad weather was on the way. It was imperative that for the next six weeks we work until we dropped. The harder we worked, the harder the Mexicans and the Spruills would work. This was my father’s version of a pep talk.
   The subject of day laborers came up. These were locals who went from farm to farm looking for the best deal. Most were town people we knew. During the previous fall, Miss Sophie Turner, who taught fifth and sixth grades, had bestowed a great honor on us when she had chosen our fields to pick in.
   We needed all the day laborers we could get, but they generally picked wherever they wanted.
   When Pappy finished his last bite, he thanked his wife and my mother for the good food and left them to clean up the mess. I strutted onto the back porch with the men.
   Our house faced south, the barn and crops were to the north and west, and to the east I saw the first hint of orange peeking over the flat farmland of the Arkansas Delta. The sun was coming, undaunted by clouds. My shirt was already sticking to my back.
   A flatbed trailer was hitched to the John Deere, and the Mexicans had already gotten on. My dad went up to speak to Miguel. “Good morning. How did you sleep? Are you ready to work?” Pappy went to fetch the Spruills.
   I had a spot, a nook between the fender and the seat of the John Deere, and I had spent hours there firmly grasping the metal pole holding the umbrella that would cover the driver, either Pappy or my father, when we chugged through the fields plowing or planting or spreading fertilizer. I took my place and looked down at the crowded trailer, Mexicans on one side, Spruills on the other. At that moment I felt very privileged because I got to ride on the tractor, and the tractor belonged to us. My haughtiness, however, would vanish shortly, because all things were level among the cotton stalks.
   I’d been curious as to whether poor Trot would go to the fields. Picking required two good arms. Trot had only one, as far as I’d been able to determine. But there he was, sitting at the edge of the trailer, his back to everyone else, feet hanging over the side, alone in his own world. And there was Tally, who didn’t acknowledge me, but just looked into the distance.
   Without a word, Pappy popped the clutch, and the tractor and trailer lurched forward. I checked to make sure no one fell off. Through the kitchen window I could see my mother’s face, watching us as she cleaned the dishes. She would finish her chores, spend an hour in her garden, then join us for a hard day in the fields. Same for Gran. No one rested when the cotton was ready.
   We puttered past the barn, the diesel thumping, the trailer creaking, and turned south toward the lower forty, a tract next to Siler’s Creek. We always picked the lower forty first because the floods would start there.
   We had the lower forty and the back forty. Eighty acres was no small farming operation.
   In a few minutes we arrived at the cotton trailer, and Pappy stopped the tractor. Before I jumped down, I looked to the east and saw the lights of our house, less than a mile away. Behind it, the sky was coming to life with streaks of orange and yellow. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and this meant no floods in the near future. It also meant no shelter from the scorching sun.
   Tally said, “Good morning, Luke,” as she walked by.
   I managed to return her greeting. She smiled at me as if she knew some secret that she would never tell.
   Pappy didn’t give an orientation, and none was needed. Choose a row in either direction, and start picking. No chitchat, no stretching of the muscles, no predictions about the weather. Without a word the Mexicans draped their long cotton sacks over their shoulders, lined up, and went south. The Arkansans went north.
   For a second, I stood there in the semidarkness of an already hot September morning, staring down a very long, straight row of cotton, a row that had somehow been assigned to me. I thought, I’ll never get to the end of it, and I was suddenly tired.
   I had cousins in Memphis, sons and daughters of my father’s two sisters, and they had never picked cotton. City kids, in the suburbs, in nice little homes with indoor plumbing. They returned to Arkansas for funerals-sometimes for Thanksgiving. As I stared at my endless row of cotton, I thought of those cousins.
   Two things motivated me to work. First, and most important, I had my father on one side and my grandfather on the other. Neither tolerated laziness. They had worked the fields when they were children, and I would certainly do the same. Second, I got paid for picking, same as the other field hands. A dollar sixty for a hundred pounds. And I had big plans for the money.
   “Let’s go,” my father said firmly in my direction. Pappy was already settled among the stalks, ten feet into his row. I could see his outline and his straw hat. I could hear the Spruills a few rows over chatting among themselves. Hill people sang a lot, and it was not uncommon to hear them crooning some low, mournful tune as they picked. Tally laughed about something, her luxurious voice echoing across the fields.
   She was only ten years older than I was.
   Pappy’s father had fought in the Civil War. His name was Jeremiah Chandler, and according to family lore, he’d almost single-handedly won the Battle of Shiloh. When Jeremiah’s second wife died, he took a third, a local maiden thirty years his junior. A few years later she gave birth to Pappy.
   A thirty-year gap for Jeremiah and his bride. Ten for Tally and me. It could work.
   With solemn resolve, I flung my nine-foot cotton sack across my back, the strap over my right shoulder, and attacked the first boll of cotton. It was damp from the dew, and that was one reason we started so early. For the first hour or so, before the sun got too high and baked everything, the cotton was soft and gentle to our hands. Later, after it was dumped into the trailer, it would dry and could be easily ginned. Cotton soaked with rainwater could not be ginned, something every farmer had learned the hard way.
   I picked as fast as possible, with both hands, and stuffed the cotton into the sack. I had to be careful, though. Either Pappy or my father, or possibly both of them, would inspect my row at some point during the morning. If I left too much cotton in the bolls, then I would be reprimanded. The severity of the scolding would be determined by how close my mother was to me at that particular moment.
   As deftly as I could, I worked my small hands through the maze of stalks, grabbing the bolls, avoiding if possible the burrs because they were pointed and could draw blood. I bobbed and weaved and inched along, falling farther behind my father and Pappy.
   Our cotton was so thick that the stalks from each row intertwined. They brushed against my face. After the incident with the rat snake, I watched every step around our farm, especially in the fields, since there were cottonmouths near the river. I’d seen plenty of them from the back of the John Deere when we were plowing and planting.
   Before long I was all alone, a child left behind by those with quicker hands and stronger backs. The sun was a bright orange ball, rising fast into position to sear the land for another day. When my father and Pappy were out of sight, I decided to take my first break. Tally was the nearest person. She was five rows over and fifty feet in front of me. I could barely see her faded denim bonnet above the cotton.
   Under the shade of the stalks, I stretched out on my cotton sack, which after an hour was depressingly flat. There were a few soft lumps, but nothing significant. The year before, I’d been expected to pick fifty pounds a day, and my fear was that this quota was about to be increased.
   Lying on my back, I watched through the stalks the perfectly clear sky, hoped for clouds, and dreamed of money. Every August we received by mail the latest edition of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and few events were more momentous, at least in my life. It came in a brown wrapper, all the way from Chicago, and was required by Gran to be kept at the end of the kitchen table, next to the radio and the family Bible. The women studied the clothes and the home furnishings. The men scrutinized the tools and auto supplies. But I dwelt on the important sections-toys and sporting goods. I made secret Christmas lists in my mind. I was afraid to write down all the things I dreamed of. Someone might find such a list and think I was either hopelessly greedy or mentally ill.
   On page 308 of the current catalog was an incredible ad for baseball warm-up jackets. There was one for almost every professional team. What made the ad so amazing was that the young man doing the modeling was wearing a Cardinals jacket, and it was in color. A bright Cardinal red, in some type of shiny fabric, white buttons down the front. Of all the teams, someone with uncanny wisdom at Sears, Roebuck had picked the Cardinals to display.
   It cost $7.50, plus shipping. And it came in children’s sizes, which presented another quandary because I was bound to grow and I wanted to wear the jacket for the rest of my life.
   Ten days of hard labor, and I’d have enough money to purchase the jacket. I was certain nothing like it had ever been seen in Black Oak, Arkansas. My mother said it was a bit gaudy, whatever that meant. My father said I needed boots. Pappy thought it was a waste of money, but I could tell he secretly admired it.
   At the first hint of cool weather I would wear the jacket to school every day, and to church on Sundays. I would wear it to town on Saturdays; a bolt of bright red amid the drearily clad throngs loitering on the sidewalks. I would wear it everywhere, and I’d be the envy of every kid in Black Oak (and a lot of adults, too).
   They would never have the chance to play for the Cardinals. I, on the other hand, would become famous in St. Louis. It was important to start looking the part.
   “Lucas!” a stern voice shot through the stillness of the fields. Stalks were snapping nearby.
   “Yes sir,” I said, jumping to my feet, keeping low, thrusting my hands at the nearest bolls of cotton.
   My father was suddenly standing over me. “What are you doing?” he asked.
   “I had to pee,” I said, without stopping my hands.
   “It took a long time,” he said, unconvinced.
   “Yes sir. It’s all that coffee.” I looked up at him. He knew the truth.
   “Try to keep up,” he said, turning around and walking away.
   “Yes sir,” I said to his back, knowing I could never keep up with him.

   A twelve-foot sack like the adults used held about sixty pounds of cotton, so by eight-thirty or nine o’clock the men were ready to weigh. Pappy and my father were in charge of the scales, which hung from the end of the trailer. The sacks were hoisted upward to one of them. The straps were looped over the hooks at the bottom of the scales. The needle sprang around like the long hand of a large clock. Everyone could see how much each person picked.
   Pappy recorded the data in a small book near the scales. Then the cotton sack was shoved even higher and emptied into the trailer. No time for a rest. You caught the empty sack when it was tossed down. You selected another row and disappeared for another two hours.
   I was in the middle of an endless row of cotton, sweating, boiling in the sun, bending at the shoulders, trying to be fast with my hands, and stopping occasionally to monitor the movements of Pappy and my father so that maybe I could arrange another nap. But there was never an opportunity to drop my sack. Instead, I plowed ahead, working hard, waiting for the sack to get heavy, and wondering for the first time if I really needed the Cardinals jacket.
   After an eternity alone in the fields, I heard the John Deere fire up, and I knew it was time for lunch. Though I had not completed my first row, I didn’t really care about my lack of progress. We met at the tractor, and I saw Trot curled in a knot on the flat deck trailer. Mrs. Spruill and Tally were patting him. At first I thought he might be dead, then he moved a little. “The heat got him,” my father whispered to me, as he took my sack and whirled it around over his shoulder as if it were empty.
   I followed him to the scales, where Pappy quickly weighed it. All that back-numbing labor for thirty-one pounds of cotton.
   When the Mexicans and Spruills were accounted for, we all headed for the house. Lunch was at noon sharp. My mother and Gran had left the fields an hour earlier to prepare it.
   From my perch on the John Deere, I clutched the umbrella stand with my scratched and sore left hand and watched the field workers bounce along. Mr. and Mrs. Spruill were holding Trot, who was still lifeless and pale. Tally sat nearby, her long legs stretched across the deck of the trailer. Bo, Dale, and Hank seemed unconcerned about poor Trot. Like everyone else, they were hot and tired and ready for a break.
   On the other side, the Mexicans sat in a row, shoulder to shoulder, feet hanging off the side and almost dragging the ground. A couple of them wore no shoes or boots.
   When we were nearly at the barn, I saw something that at first I couldn’t believe. Cowboy, sitting at the very end of the short trailer, turned quickly, and glanced at Tally. She seemed to have been waiting for him to look, because she gave him one of her pretty little smiles, similar to the ones I’d been getting. Though he didn’t return the smile, it was obvious he was pleased.
   It happened in a flash, and nobody saw it but me.

Chapter 5

   According to Gran and my mother, conspiring together, the early afternoon nap was crucial to the proper growth of a child. I believed this only when we were picking cotton. For the rest of the year, I fought a nap with as much vigor as I put into planning my baseball career.
   But during the harvest, everybody rested after lunch. The Mexicans ate quickly and sprawled under a maple tree near the barn. The Spruills ate leftover ham and biscuits and likewise found shade.
   I wasn’t allowed to use my bed because I was dirty from the fields, so I slept on the floor in my bedroom. I was tired and stiff from my labors. I dreaded the afternoon session because it always seemed longer, and it was certainly hotter. I drifted away immediately and was even stiffer when I awoke a half hour later.
   Trot was causing concern in the front yard. Gran, who fancied herself as some sort of country medicine woman, had gone to check on him, no doubt with the intention of whipping up one of her dreadful concoctions to force down his throat. They had him on an old mattress under a tree with a wet cloth on his forehead. It was obvious he couldn’t go back to the fields, and Mr. and Mrs. Spruill were reluctant to leave him alone.
   They, of course, had to pick cotton to earn money to live on. I did not. A plan had been devised in my absence to require me to sit with Trot while everybody else worked in the heat for the rest of the afternoon. If Trot somehow took a turn for the worse, I was supposed to sprint to the lower forty and fetch the nearest Spruill. I tried to appear unhappy with this arrangement when my mother explained it to me.
   “What about my Cardinals jacket?” I asked her with as much concern as I could muster.
   “There’s plenty of cotton left for you,” she said. “Just sit with him this afternoon. He should be better tomorrow.”
   There were, of course, eighty acres of cotton, all of which had to be picked twice during the next two months or so. If I lost my Cardinals jacket, it wouldn’t be because of Trot.
   I watched the trailer leave again, this time with my mother and Gran sitting with the field hands. It squeaked and rattled away from the house, past the barn, down the field road, and was finally lost among the rows of cotton. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Tally and Cowboy were making eyes at each other. If I found the courage, I would ask my mother about this.
   When I walked to the mattress, Trot was lying perfectly still with his eyes closed. He didn’t appear to be breathing.
   “Trot,” I said loudly, suddenly terrified that he had died on my watch.
   He opened his eyes, and very slowly sat up and looked at me. Then he glanced around, as if to make certain we were alone. His withered left arm wasn’t much thicker than a broom handle, and it hung from his shoulder without moving much. His black hair shot out in all directions.
   “Are you okay?” I asked. I’d yet to hear him speak, and I was curious to know if he could do so.
   “I guess,” he grunted, his voice thick and his words blurred. I couldn’t tell if he had a speech impediment or if he was just tired and dazed. He kept looking around to make sure everyone else was gone, and it occurred to me that perhaps Trot had been faking a bit. I began to admire him.
   “Does Tally like baseball?” I asked, one of a hundred questions I wanted to drill him with. I thought it was a simple question, but he was overcome by it and immediately closed his eyes and rolled to one side, then curled his knees to his chest and began another nap.
   A breeze rustled the top of the pin oak. I found a thick, grassy spot in the shade near his mattress, and stretched out. Watching the leaves and branches high above, I considered my good fortune. The rest of them were sweating in the sun as time crept along. For a moment I tried to feel guilty, but it didn’t work. My luck was only temporary, so I decided to enjoy it.
   As did Trot. While he slept like a baby, I watched the sky. Soon, though, boredom hit. I went to the house to get a ball and my base-hall glove. I threw myself pop flies near the front porch, something I could do for hours. At one point I caught seventeen in a row.
   Throughout the afternoon, Trot never left the mattress. He would sleep, then sit up and look around, then watch me for a moment. If I tried to strike up a conversation, he usually rolled over and continued his nap. At least he wasn’t dying.
   The next casualty from the cotton patch was Hank. He ambled in late in the day, walking slowly and complaining about the heat. Said he needed to check on Trot.
   “I picked three hundred pounds,” he said, as if this would impress me. “Then the heat got me.” His face was red with sunburn. He wore no hat, which said a lot about his intelligence. Every head was covered in the fields.
   He looked Trot over for a second, then went to the back of the truck and began rummaging through their boxes and sacks like a starving bear. He crammed a cold biscuit into his huge mouth, then stretched out under the tree.
   “Fetch me some water, boy,” he growled abruptly in my direction.
   I was too surprised to move. I’d never heard a hill person give an order to one of us. I wasn’t sure what to do. But he was grown, and I was just a kid.
   “Sir?” I said.
   “Fetch me some water!” he repeated, his voice rising.
   I was certain they had water stored somewhere among their things. I took a very awkward step toward their truck. This upset him.
   “Cold water, boy! From the house. And hurry! I been workin’ all day. You ain’t.”
   I rushed into the house, to the kitchen, where Gran kept a gallon jug of water in the refrigerator. My hands shook as I poured the water into a glass. I knew that when I reported this, it would cause trouble. My father would have words with Leon Spruill.
   I handed Hank the glass. He drained it quickly, smacked his lips, then said, “Gimme another glass.”
   Trot was sitting and watching this. I ran back to the house and refilled it. When Hank finished the second, he spat near my feet. “You’re a good boy,” he said, and tossed me the glass.
   “Thanks,” I said, catching it.
   “Now leave us alone,” he said as he lay down on the grass. I retreated to the house and waited for my mother.
   You could quit picking at five if you wanted. That was when Pappy pulled the trailer back to the house. Or you could stay in the fields until dark, like the Mexicans. Their stamina was amazing. They would pick until they couldn’t see the bolls anymore, then walk a half mile with their heavy sacks to the barn, where they would build a small fire and eat a few tortillas before sleeping hard.
   The other Spruills gathered around Trot, who managed to look even sicker for the short minute or so they examined him. Once it was determined that he was alive and somewhat alert, they hurriedly turned their attention to dinner. Mrs. Spruill built a fire.
   Next, Gran hovered over Trot. She appeared to be deeply concerned, and I think the Spruills appreciated this. I knew, however, that she merely wanted to conduct experiments on the poor boy with one of her vile remedies. Since I was the smallest victim around, I was usually the guinea pig for any new brew she discovered. I knew from experience that she could whip up a concoction so curative that Trot would bolt from the mattress and run like a scalded dog. After a few minutes, Trot got suspicious and began watching her closely. He now seemed more aware of things, and Gran took this as a sign that he didn’t need any medicine, at least not immediately. But she placed him under surveillance, and she’d make her rounds again tomorrow.
   My worst chore of the late afternoon was in the garden. I thought it was cruel to force me, or any other seven-year-old kid for that matter, to awake before sunrise, work in the fields all day, and then pull garden duty before supper. But I knew we were lucky to have such a beautiful garden.
   At some point before I was born, the women had sectioned off little areas of turf, both inside the house and out, and laid claim to them. I don’t know how my mother got the entire garden, but there was no doubt it belonged to her.
   It was on the east side of our house, the quiet side, away from the kitchen door and the barnyard and the chicken coop. Away from Pappy’s pickup and the small dirt drive where the rare visitor parked. It was enclosed in a wire fence four feet tall, built by my father under my mother’s direction, and designed to keep out deer and varmints.
   Corn was planted around the fence so that once you closed the rickety gate with the leather latch, you stepped into a secret world hidden by the stalks.
   My job was to take a straw basket and follow my mother around as she gathered whatever she deemed ripe. She had a basket, too, and she slowly filled it with tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, onions, and eggplant. She talked quietly, not necessarily to me, but to the garden in general.
   “Look at the corn, would you? We’ll eat those next week.”
   “Yes ma’am.”
   “The pumpkins should be just right for Halloween.”
   “Yes ma’am.”
   She was constantly searching for weeds, little trespassers that survived only momentarily in our garden. She stopped, pointed, and said, “Pull those weeds there, Luke, by the watermelons.”
   I set the basket on the dirt trail and pulled with a vengeance.
   The garden work was not as rough in the late summer as it was in the spring, when the ground had to be tilled and the weeds grew faster than the vegetables.
   A long green snake froze us for a second, then it disappeared into the butter bean vines. The garden was full of snakes, all harmless, but snakes nonetheless. My mother was not deathly afraid of them, but we gave them plenty of room. I lived in fear of reaching for a cucumber and feeling fangs sink into the back of my hand.
   My mother loved this little plot of soil because it was hers-no one else really wanted it. She treated it like a sanctuary. When the house got crowded, I could always find her in the garden, talking to her vegetables. Harsh words were rare in our family. When they happened, I knew my mother would disappear into her refuge.
   I could hardly carry my basket by the time she’d finished her selections.

   The rain had stopped in St. Louis. At exactly eight o’clock, Pappy turned on the radio, fiddled with the knobs and the antenna, and there was colorful Harry Caray, the raspy voice of the Cardinals. There were about twenty games remaining in the season. The Dodgers were in front, and the Giants were in second place. The Cards were in third. It was more than we could stand. Cardinal fans naturally hated the Yankees, and trailing behind two other New York teams in our own league was unbearable.
   Pappy was of the opinion that the manager, Eddie Stanky, should’ve been fired months earlier. When the Cardinals won, it was because of Stan Musial. When they lost, with the same players on the field, it was always the fault of the manager.
   Pappy and my father sat side by side on the swing, its rusted chains squeaking as they rocked gently. Gran and my mother shelled butter beans and peas on the other side of the small porch. I was lounging on the top step, within earshot of the radio, watching the Spruill show wind down, waiting with the adults for the heat to finally relent. I missed the steady hum of the old fan, but I knew better than to bring up the subject.
   Conversation arose softly from the women as they talked about church stuff-the fall revival and the upcoming dinner-on-the-grounds. A Black Oak girl was getting married in Jonesboro, in a big church, supposedly to a boy with money, and this had to be discussed every night in some fashion. I could not imagine why the women were drawn back to the subject, night after night.
   The men had virtually nothing to say, at least nothing unrelated to baseball. Pappy was capable of long stretches of silence, and my father wasn’t much better. No doubt, they were worrying about the weather or cotton prices, but they were too tired to fret aloud.
   I was content simply to listen, to close my eyes and try to picture Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, a magnificent stadium where thirty thousand people could gather to watch Stan Musial and the Cardinals. Pappy had been there, and during the season I made him describe the place to me at least once a week. He said when you saw the field it seemed to expand. There was grass so green and smooth you could roll marbles across it. The dirt on the infield was actually raked until it was perfect. The scoreboard in left-center was bigger than our house. And all those people, those unbelievably lucky people of St. Louis who got to see the Cardinals and didn’t have to pick cotton.
   Dizzy Dean and Enos “Country” Slaughter and Red Schoendienst, all the great Cardinals, all the fabled Gashouse Gang, had played there. And because my father and grandfather and uncle could play the game, there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would one day rule Sportsman’s Park. I would glide across the perfect outfield grass in front of thirty thousand fans and personally grind the Yankees into the dirt.
   The greatest Cardinal of all time was Stan Musial, and when he came to the plate in the second inning with a runner at first, I saw Hank Spruill ease through the darkness and sit in the shadows, just close enough to hear the radio.
   “Is Stan up?” my mother asked.
   “Yes ma’am,” I said. She pretended to take an interest in baseball because she knew nothing about it. And if she acted interested in Stan Musial, then she could survive any conversation on the subject around Black Oak.
   The soft snap and crunch of the butter beans and peas stopped. The swing was still. I squeezed my baseball glove. My father held the opinion that Harry Caray’s voice took on an edge when Musial stepped in, but Pappy was not convinced.
   The first pitch by the Pirates pitcher was a fastball low and away. Few pitchers challenged Musial with fastballs on the first pitch. The year before, he’d led the National League with a. 355 batting average, and in 1952, he was running neck and neck with the Cubs’ Frankie Baumholtz for the lead. He had power and speed, a great glove, and he played hard every day.
   I had a Stan Musial baseball card hidden in a cigar box in my drawer, and if the house ever caught on fire, I would grab it before I grabbed anything else.
   The second pitch was a high curveball, and with the count of two balls, you could almost hear the fans get out of their seats. A baseball was about to get ripped into some remote section of Sportsman’s Park. No pitcher fell behind Stan Musial and survived the moment. The third pitch was a fastball, and Harry Caray hesitated just long enough for us to hear the crack of the bat. The crowd exploded. I held my breath, waiting in that split second for old Harry to tell us where the ball was going. It bounced off the wall in right field, and the crowd roared even louder. The front porch got excited, too. I jumped to my feet, as if by standing I could somehow see St. Louis. Pappy and my father both leaned forward as Harry Caray yelled through the radio. My mother managed some form of exclamation.
   Musial was battling his teammate Schoendienst for the National League lead in doubles. The year before, he’d had twelve triples, tops in the majors. As he rounded second, I could barely hear Caray above the crowd. The runner from first scored easily, and Stan slid into third, in the dirt, his feet touching the base, the hapless third baseman taking the late throw and tossing it back to the pitcher. I could see him get to his feet as the crowd went nuts. Then with both hands he slapped the dirt off his white uniform with the bright red trim.
   The game had to go on, but for us Chandlers, at least the men, the day was now complete. Musial had hit a bomb, and because we had little hope that the Cardinals would win the pennant, we gladly took our victories where we could get them. The crowd settled down, Harry’s voice lowered, and I sank back onto the porch, still watching Stan at third.
   If those damned Spruills hadn’t been out there, I would’ve eased into the darkness and taken my position at home plate. I would wait for the fastball, hit it just like my hero, then race around the bases and slide majestically into third base, over by the shadows where the monster Hank was loitering.
   “Who’s winnin’?” Mr. Spruill asked from somewhere in the darkness.
   “Cardinals. One to nothin’. Bottom of the second. Musial just hit a triple,” Hank answered. If they were such baseball fans, why had they built their fire on home plate and pitched their ragged tents around my infield? Any fool could look at our front yard, the trees notwithstanding, and see that it was meant for baseball.
   If not for Tally, I would have dismissed the entire bunch. And Trot. I did feel sympathy for the poor kid.
   I had decided not to bring up the issue of Hank and the cold water. I knew that if I reported it to my father, or to Pappy, then a serious discussion would take place with Mr. Spruill. The Mexicans knew their place, and the hill people were expected to know theirs. They did not ask for things from our house, and they did not give orders to me or anyone else.
   Hank had a neck thicker than any I’d ever seen. His arms and hands were also massive, but what scared me were his eyes. I thought they were blank and stupid most of the time, but when he barked at me to fetch him the cold water, they narrowed and glowed with evil.
   I didn’t want Hank mad at me, nor did I want my father to confront him. My father could whip anybody, except for maybe Pappy, who was older but, when necessary, much meaner. I decided to set aside the incident for the time being. If it happened again, then I would have no choice but to tell my mother.
   The Pirates scored two in the fourth, primarily because, according to Pappy, Eddie Stanky didn’t change pitchers when he should have. Then they scored three in the fifth, and Pappy got so mad he went to bed.
   In the seventh inning, the heat broke just enough to convince us we could get some sleep. The peas and butter beans had been shelled. The Spruills were all tucked away. We were exhausted, and the Cardinals were going nowhere. It wasn’t difficult to leave the game.
   After my mother tucked me in and we said our prayers, I kicked I he sheets off so I could breathe. I listened to the crickets sing their screeching chorus, calling to each other across the fields. They serenaded us every night in the summer, unless it was raining. I heard a voice in the distance-a Spruill was rambling about, probably Hank rummaging for one last biscuit.
   In the living room we had a box fan, a large window unit, which in theory was supposed to suck the hot air through the house and blow it out across the barnyard. It worked about half the time. One door inadvertently closed or blown shut would disrupt the movements of. nr, and you’d lie in your own sweat until you fell asleep. Wind from I he outside would somehow confuse the box fan, and the hot air would gather in the living room, then creep through the house, smothering us. The fan broke down often-but it was one of Pappy’s proudest possessions, and we knew of only two other farm families at church who owned such a luxury.
   That night it happened to be working.
   Lying in Ricky’s bed, listening to the crickets, enjoying the slight draft over my body as the sticky summer air was pulled toward the living room, I let my thoughts drift to Korea, a place I never wanted to see. My father would tell me nothing about war. Not a hint. There were a few glorious adventures of Pappy’s father and his victories in the Civil War, but when it came to the wars of this century, he offered little. I wanted to know how many people he’d shot. How many battles he’d won. I wanted to see his scars. There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask him.
   “Don’t talk about war,” my mother had cautioned me many times. “It’s too awful.”
   And now Ricky was in Korea. It had been snowing when he left us in February, three days after his nineteenth birthday. It was cold in Korea, too. I knew that much from a story on the radio. I was safe and warm in his bed while he was lying in a trench shooting and getting shot at.
   What if he didn’t come home?
   It was a question I tortured myself with every night. I thought about him dying until I cried. I didn’t want his bed. I didn’t want his room. I wanted Ricky home, so we could run the bases in the front yard and throw baseballs against the barn and fish in the St. Francis. He was really more of a big brother than an uncle.
   Boys were getting killed over there, lots of them. We prayed for them at church. We talked about the war at school. At the moment, Ricky was the only boy from Black Oak in Korea, which bestowed upon us Chandlers some odd distinction I cared nothing about.
   “Have you heard from Ricky?” was the great question that confronted us every time we went to town.
   Yes or no, it didn’t matter. Our neighbors were just trying to be thoughtful. Pappy wouldn’t answer them. My father would give a polite response. Gran and my mother would chat quietly for a few minutes about his last letter.
   I always said, “Yeah. He’s coming home soon.”

Chapter 6

   Shortly after breakfast, I followed Gran down the front steps and through the middle of the front yard. She was a woman on a mission: Dr. Gran making her early morning rounds, thrilled that a bona-fide sick person was present within her jurisdiction.
   The Spruills were hunched over their makeshift table, eating quickly. Trot’s lazy eyes came to life when Gran said, “Good mornin’,” and went straight toward him.
   “How’s Trot?” she said.
   “Much better,” said Mrs. Spruill.
   “He’s fine,” said Mr. Spruill.
   Gran touched the boy’s forehead. “Any fever?” she demanded. Trot shook his head with a vengeance. There’d been no fever the day before. Why would there be one this morning?
   “Are you light-headed?”
   Trot wasn’t sure what that meant, nor were the rest of the Spruills. I figured the boy went through life in a perpetual state of light-headedness.
   Mr. Spruill took charge, wiping a drip of sorghum from the corner of his mouth with a forearm. “We figure we’ll take him to the fields and let him sit under the trailer, out of the sun.”
   “If a cloud comes up, then he can pick,” added Mrs. Spruill. It was evident the Spruills had already made plans for Trot.
   Dammit, I thought.
   Ricky had taught me a few cuss words. I usually practiced them in I he woods by the river, then prayed for forgiveness as soon as I was alone.
   I had envisioned another lazy day under the shade trees in the Front yard, guarding Trot while playing baseball and taking it easy.
   “I suppose,” said Gran as she took her thumb and index finger and pried one of his eyes wide open. Trot shot a frightened look with his other eye.
   “I’ll stay close by,” Gran said, clearly disappointed. Over breakfast I’d heard her tell my mother that she’d decided the proper remedy would be a strong dose of castor oil, lemon, and some black herb she grew in a window box. I’d stopped eating when I heard this. It was her old standby, one she’d used on me several times. It was more powerful than surgery. My ailments were instantly cured as the dosage burned from my tongue to my toes, and kept burning.
   She once mixed a surefire remedy for Pappy because he was constipated. He’d spent two days in the outhouse, unable to farm, begging for water, which I hauled back and forth in a milk jug. I thought she’d killed him. When he emerged-pale, gaunt, somewhat thinner-he walked with a purpose to the house, angrier than anyone had ever seen him. My parents threw me in the pickup, and we went for a long drive.
   Gran again promised Trot she’d watch him during the day. He said nothing. He’d stopped eating and was staring blankly across the table, in the general direction of Tally, who was pretending I didn’t exist.
   We left and returned to the house. I sat on the front steps, waiting for a glimpse of Tally, silently cussing Trot for being so stupid. Maybe he’d collapse again. Surely when the sun was overhead he’d succumb, and they’d need me to watch him on the mattress.
   When we gathered at the trailer, I greeted Miguel as his gang emerged from the barn and took their places on one side of the trailer. The Spruills took the other side. My father sat in the middle, crowded between the two groups. Pappy drove the tractor, and I observed them from my prized perch next to his seat. Of particular interest this morning was any activity between the loathsome Cowboy and my beloved Tally. I didn’t notice any. Everyone was in a daze, eyes half-open and downcast, dreading another day of sun and drudgery.
   The trailer rocked and swayed as we slowly made our way into the white fields. As I gazed at the fields of cotton, I couldn’t think of my shiny red Cardinals baseball jacket. I tried mightily to pull up images of the great Musial and his muscled teammates running across the manicured green grass of Sportsman’s Park. I tried to imagine all of them clad in their red and white uniforms with some no doubt wearing baseball jackets just like the one in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. I tried to picture these scenes because they never failed to inspire me, but the tractor stopped, and all I could see was the looming cotton, just standing there, row after row, waiting.

   Last year, Juan had revealed to me the pleasures of Mexican food, especially tortillas. The workers ate them three times a day, so I figured they must be good. I’d eaten lunch one day with Juan and his group, after I’d eaten in our house. He’d fixed me two tortillas, and I’d devoured them. Three hours later I was on hands and knees under the cotton trailer, as sick as a dog. I was scolded by every Chandler present, my mother leading the pack.
   “You can’t eat their food!” she said with as much scorn as I’d ever heard.
   “Why not?” I asked.
   “Because it’s not clean.”
   I was expressly forbidden to eat anything cooked by the Mexicans. And this, of course, made the tortillas taste even better. I got caught again when Pappy made a surprise appearance at the barn to check on Isabel. My father took me behind the tool shed and whipped me with his belt. I laid off the tortillas for as long as I could.
   But a new chef was with us, and I was eager to measure Miguel’s food against Juan’s. After lunch, when I was certain everyone was asleep, I sneaked out the kitchen door and walked nonchalantly toward the barn. It was a dangerous little excursion because Pappy and Gran did not nap well, even when they were exhausted from the fields.
   The Mexicans were sprawled in the shade of the north end of the barn, most of them sleeping on the grass. Miguel knew I was coming because we’d talked for a moment earlier in the morning when we met to get our cotton weighed. His haul was seventy pounds, mine was fifteen.
   He knelt over the coals of a small fire and warmed a tortilla in a skillet. He flipped it, and when it was brown on one side, he added a thin layer of salsa-finely chopped tomatoes and onions and peppers, all from our garden. It also contained jalapenos and chopped red peppers that had never been grown in the state of Arkansas. These the Mexicans imported themselves in their little bags.
   A couple of the Mexicans were interested in the fact that I wanted a tortilla. The rest of them were working hard at their siestas. Cowboy was nowhere to be seen. Standing at the corner of the barn, with a full view of the house and any Chandler who might come looking, I ate a tortilla. It was hot and spicy and messy. I couldn’t tell any difference between Juan’s and Miguel’s. They were both delicious. Miguel asked if I wanted another, and I could easily have eaten one. But I didn’t want to take their food. They were all small and skinny and dirt-poor, and last year when I got caught and the adults took turns scolding me and heaping untold measures of shame upon me, Gran had been creative enough to invent the sin of taking food from the less fortunate. As Baptists, we were never short on sins to haunt us.
   I thanked him and crept back to the house and onto the front porch without waking a single Spruill. I curled into the swing as if I’d been napping all along. No one was stirring, but I couldn’t sleep. A breeze came from nowhere, and I daydreamed of a lazy afternoon on the porch, no cotton to be picked, nothing to do but maybe fish in the St. Francis and catch pop flies in the front yard.
   The work almost killed me during the afternoon. Late in the day, I limped toward the cotton trailer, lugging my harvest behind me, hot and thirsty, soaked with sweat, my fingers swollen from the tiny shallow punctures inflicted by the burrs. I already had forty-one pounds for the day. My quota was still fifty, and I was certain I had at least ten pounds in my sack. I was hoping my mother would be somewhere near the scales because she would insist that I be allowed to quit and go to the house. Both Pappy and my father would send me back for more, quota or not.
   Only those two were allowed to weigh the cotton, and if they happened to be deep in a row somewhere, then you got a break while they worked their way back to the trailer. I saw neither of them, and the idea of a nap flashed before me.
   The Spruills had gathered at the east end of the trailer, in the shade. They were sitting on their bulky cotton sacks, resting and looking at Trot, who, as far as I could tell, hadn’t moved more than ten feet during the entire day.
   I freed myself from the shoulder strap of my cotton sack and walked to the end of the trailer. “Howdy,” one of the Spruills said.
   “How’s Trot?” I asked.
   “Reckon he’ll be all right,” Mr. Spruill said. They were eating crackers and Vienna sausages, a favorite pick-me-up in the fields. Sitting next to Trot was Tally, who completely ignored me.
   “You got anything to eat, boy?” Hank suddenly demanded, his liquid eyes flashing at me. For a second I was too surprised to say anything. Mrs. Spruill shook her head and studied the ground.
   “Do you?” he demanded, shifting his weight so that he faced me squarely.
   “Uh, no,” I managed to say.
   “You mean ‘No sir,’ don’t you, boy?” he said angrily.
   “Come on, Hank,” Tally said. The rest of the family seemed to withdraw. All heads were lowered.
   “No sir,” I said.
   “No sir what?” His voice was sharper. It was obvious Hank enjoyed picking fights. They’d probably been through this many times.
   “No sir,” I said again.
   “You farm people are right uppity, you know that? You think you’re better than us hill folk ‘cause you have this land and ‘cause you pay us to work it. Ain’t that right, boy?”
   “That’s enough, Hank,” Mr. Spruill said, but he lacked conviction. I suddenly hoped Pappy or my father would appear. I was ready for these people to leave our farm.
   My throat constricted, and my lower lip began to shake. I was hurt and embarrassed and didn’t know what to say.
   Hank wasn’t about to be quiet. He reclined on an elbow, and with a nasty smile said, “We’re just one notch above them wetbacks, ain’t we, boy? Just hired labor. Just a bunch of hillbillies who drink moonshine and marry our sisters. Ain’t that right, boy?”
   He paused for a split second as if he really wanted me to respond. I was tempted to run away, but I just stared at my boots. The rest of the Spruills may have felt sorry for me, but none of them came to my rescue.
   “We got a house nicer than yours, boy. You believe that? A lot nicer.”
   “Quiet down, Hank,” Mrs. Spruill said.
   “It’s bigger, got a long front porch, got a tin roof without tar patches, and you know what else it’s got? You ain’t gonna believe this, boy, but our house’s got paint on it. White paint. You ever see paint, boy?”
   With that, Bo and Dale, the two teenagers who rarely made a sound, began chuckling to themselves, as if they wanted to appease Hank while not offending Mrs. Spruill.
   “Make him stop, Momma,” Tally said, and my humiliation was interrupted, if only for a second.
   I looked at Trot, and to my surprise he was resting on his elbows, his eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them, absorbing this one-sided little confrontation. He seemed to be enjoying it.
   Hank gave a goofy grin to Bo and Dale, and they laughed even louder. Mr. Spruill also looked amused now. Perhaps he’d been called a hillbilly once too often.
   “Why don’t you sodbusters paint your houses?” Hank boomed in my direction.
   The word “sodbusters” hit their nerves. Bo and Dale shook with laughter. Hank bellowed at his own punch line. The entire bunch seemed on the verge of knee-slapping when Trot said, with as much volume as he could muster, “Stop it, Hank!”
   His words were slurred slightly so that “Hank” came out “Hane,” but he was clearly understood by the rest of them. They were startled, and their little joke came to an abrupt end. Everyone looked at Trot, who was glaring at Hank with as much disgust as possible.
   I was on the verge of tears, so I turned and ran past the trailer and along the field road until I was safely out of their sight. Then I ducked into the cotton and waited for friendly voices. I sat on the hot ground, surrounded by stalks four feet tall, and I cried, something I really hated to do.

   The trailers from the better farms had tarps to hold the cotton and keep it from blowing onto the roads leading to the gin. Our old tarp was tied firmly in place, securing the fruits of our labor, ninety pounds of which had been picked by me over the past two days. No Chandler had ever taken a load to the gin with bolls flying out like snow and littering the road. Lots of other folks did, though, and part of the picking season was watching the weeds and ditches along Highway 135 slowly grow white as the farmers hurried to the gin with their harvest.
   With the loaded cotton trailer dwarfing our pickup, Pappy drove less than twenty miles an hour on the way to town. And he didn’t say anything. We were both digesting our dinner. I was thinking about Hank and trying to decide what to do. I’m sure Pappy was worrying about the weather.
   If I told him about Hank, I knew exactly what would happen. He’d march me down the front yard to Spruillville, and we’d have an ugly confrontation. Because Hank was younger and bigger, Pappy would have in his hand a stick of some sort, and he’d be very happy to use it. He’d demand that Hank apologize, and when he refused, Pappy would start the threats and insults. Hank would misjudge his opponent, and before long the stick would come into play. Hank wouldn’t have a prayer. My father would be forced to cover the Chandler flanks with his twelve-gauge. The women would be safe on the porch, but my mother would once again be humiliated by Pappy’s penchant for violence.
   The Spruills would lick their wounds and pack up their ragged belongings. They’d move down the road to another farm where they were needed and appreciated, and we’d be left short-handed.
   I’d be expected to pick even more cotton.
   So I didn’t say a word.
   We drove slowly along Highway 135, stirring up the cotton on the right shoulder of the road, watching the fields where an occasional gang of Mexicans was still working, racing against the dark.
   I decided I would simply avoid Hank and the rest of the Spruills until the picking was over and they went back to the hills, back to their wonderfully painted houses and their moonshine and sister-marrying. And at some point late in the winter when we sat around the fire in the living room and told stories about the harvest, I would finally serve up all of Hank’s misdeeds. I’d have plenty of time to work on my stories, and would embellish where I deemed appropriate. It was a Chandler tradition.
   I had to be careful, though, when telling the painted house story.
   As we neared Black Oak, we passed the Clench farm, home of Foy and Laverl Clench and their eight children, all of whom, I was certain, were still in the fields. No one, not even the Mexicans, worked harder than the Clenches. The parents were notorious slave drivers, but the children seemed to enjoy picking cotton and pursuing even the most mundane chores around the farm. The hedge rows around the front yard were perfectly manicured. Their fences were straight and needed no repair. Their garden was huge and its yield legendary. Even their old truck was clean. One of the kids washed it every Saturday.
   And their house was painted, the first one on the highway into town. White was the color, with gray trim around the edges and corners. The porch and front steps were dark green.
   Soon all the houses were painted.
   Our house had been built before the First War, back when indoor plumbing and electricity were unheard of. Its exterior was one-by-six clapboards made of oak, probably cut from the land we now farmed. With time and weather the boards had faded into a pale brown, pretty much the same color as the other farmhouses around Black Oak. Paint was unnecessary. The boards were kept clean and in good repair, and besides paint cost money.
   But shortly after my parents were married, my mother decided the house needed an upgrade. She went to work on my father, who was anxious to please his young wife. His parents, though, were not. Pappy and Gran, with all the stubbornness that came from the soil flatly refused to even consider painting the house. The cost was the official reason. This was relayed to my mother through my father. No fight occurred-no words. Just a tense period one winter when four adults lived in a small unpainted house and tried to be cordial.
   My mother vowed to herself that she would not raise her children on a farm. She would one day have a house in a town or in a city, a house with indoor plumbing and shrubs around the porch, and with paint on the boards, maybe even bricks.
   “Paint” was a sensitive word around the Chandler farm.

   I counted eleven trailers ahead of us when we arrived at the gin. Another twenty or so were empty and parked to one side. Those were owned by farmers with enough money to have two. They could leave one to be ginned at night while the other stayed in the fields. My father desperately wanted a second trailer.
   Pappy parked and walked to a group of farmers huddled by a trailer. I could tell by the way they were standing that they were worried about something.
   For nine months the gin sat idle. It was a tall, long, box-like structure, the biggest building in the county. In early September it came to life when the harvest began. At the height of the picking season it ran all day and all night, stopping only on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Its compresses and mills roared with a noisy precision that could be heard throughout Black Oak.
   I saw the Montgomery twins throwing rocks at the weeds beside the gin, and I joined them. We compared stories about Mexicans and told lies about how much cotton we’d personally picked. It was dark, and the line of trailers moved slowly.
   “My pop says cotton prices are goin’ down,” Dan Montgomery said as he tossed a rock into the darkness. “Says the cotton traders in Memphis are pushin’ down prices ‘cause there’s so much cotton.”
   “It’s a big crop,” I said. The Montgomery twins wanted to be farmers when they grew up. I felt sorry for them.
   When the rains flooded the land and wiped out the crops, the prices went up because the traders in Memphis couldn’t get enough cotton. But the farmers, of course, had nothing to sell. And when the rains cooperated and the crops were huge, the prices went down because the traders in Memphis had too much cotton. The poor people who labored in the fields didn’t make enough to pay their crop loans.
   Good crops or bad crops, it didn’t make any difference.
   We talked baseball for a while. The Montgomerys did not own a radio, so their knowledge of the Cardinals was limited. Again, I felt sorry for them.
   When we left the gin, Pappy had nothing to say. The wrinkles in his forehead were closer together, and his chin was jutting out a bit, so I knew he’d heard bad news. I assumed it had something to do with the price of cotton.
   I said nothing as we left Black Oak. When the lights were behind us, I laid my head on the window opening so the wind would hit my lace. The air was hot and still, and I wanted Pappy to drive faster so we could cool off.
   I would listen more closely for the next few days. I’d give the adults time to whisper among themselves, then I’d ask my mother what was going on.
   If it involved bad news about farming, she would eventually tell me.

Chapter 7

   Saturday morning. At sunrise, with Mexicans on one side and the Spruills on the other, we were in the trailer moving toward the fields. I kept close to my father, for fear that the monster Hank might come after me again. I hated all the Spruills that morning, perhaps with the exception of Trot, my lone defender. They ignored me. I hoped they were ashamed of themselves.
   I tried not to think about the Spruills as we moved through the fields. It was Saturday. A magical day for all the poor souls who toiled the land. On the Chandler farm, we’d work half a day, then head for town to join all the other farmers and their families who went there.! to buy food and supplies, to mix and mingle along Main Street, to catch the gossip, to escape for a few hours the drudgery of the cotton patch. The Mexicans and the hill people went, too. The men would gather in groups in front of the Tea Shoppe and the Co-op and compare crops and tell stories about floods. The women would pack into Pop and Pearl’s and take forever buying a few groceries. The kids were allowed to roam the sidewalks on Main Street and its neighboring alleys until four o’clock, that wonderful hour when the Dixie opened for the matinee.
   When the trailer stopped, we hopped off and found our cotton sacks. I was half asleep, not paying attention to anything in particular, when the sweetest voice said, “Good mornin’, Luke.” It was Tally, just standing there smiling at me. It was her way of saying she was sorry for yesterday.
   Because I was a Chandler, I was capable of deep stubbornness. I turned my back to her and walked away. I told myself I hated all Spruills. I attacked the first row of cotton as if I might just wipe out forty acres before lunch. After a few minutes, though, I was tired. I was lost in the stalks, in the dark, and I could still hear her voice and see her smile.
   She was only ten years older than I was.

   The Saturday bath was a ritual I hated more than all others. It took place after lunch, under the stern supervision of my mother. The tub, hardly big enough for me, was used later in the day by each member of the family. It was kept in a remote corner of the back porch, shielded from view by an old bedsheets.
   First, I had to haul the water from the pump to the back porch, where I filled the tub about a third full. This took eight trips with a bucket, and I was exhausted before the bath began. Then I pulled the bedsheets across the porch and stripped naked with remarkable speed. The water was very cold.
   With a bar of store-bought soap and a washcloth, I worked furiously to remove dirt and make bubbles and otherwise cloud the water so my mother couldn’t see my privates when she came to direct matters. She appeared first to collect my dirty clothes, then to bring me a clean change. Then she went straight for the ears and neck. In her hands the washcloth became a weapon. She scraped my tender skin as if the soil I collected working in the fields offended her. Throughout the process, she continued to marvel at how dirty I could get.
   When my neck was raw, she attacked my hair as if it were filled with lice and gnats. She poured cold water from the bucket over my head to rinse off the soap. My humiliation was complete when she finished scouring my arms and feet-mercifully, she left the midsection for me.
   The water was muddy when I hopped out-a week’s worth of dirt collected from the Arkansas Delta. I pulled the plug and watched it seep through the cracks of the porch as I toweled off and stepped into my clean overalls. I felt fresh and clean and five pounds lighter, and I was ready for town.
   Pappy decided that his truck would make only one run to Black ()ak. That meant that Gran and my mother would ride in the front with him and my father and I would ride in the back with all ten Mexicans. Getting packed into a box didn’t bother the Mexicans at all, but it sure irritated me.
   As we drove away, I watched the Spruills as they knocked down poles and unhitched ropes and hurried about the business of freeing their old truck so they could get to town. Everyone was busy but Hank, who was eating something in the shade.
   To prevent the dust from boiling over the fenders and choking us in the back, Pappy drove less than five miles per hour down our road. While it was thoughtful of him, it didn’t help matters much. We were hot and suffocating. The Saturday bath was a ritual in rural Arkansas. In Mexico, apparently, it was not.

   On Saturday, some farm families arrived in town by noon. Pappy thought it was sinful to spend too much time enjoying Saturday, so we took our time getting there. During the winter, he even threatened to avoid town, except for church on Sunday. My mother said he once went a month without leaving the farm, and this included a boycott of church because the preacher had somehow offended him. It didn’t take much to offend Pappy. But we were lucky. A lot of sharecroppers never left the farm. They didn’t have money for groceries and didn’t have a car to get to town. And there were some renters like us and landowners who seldom went to town. Mr. Clovis Beckly from Caraway hadn’t been to town in fourteen years, according to Gran. And he hadn’t been to church since before the First War. I’d heard folks openly praying for him during revivals.
   I loved the traffic and the crowded sidewalks and the uncertainty of whom you might see next. I liked the groups of Mexicans camped under shade trees, eating ice cream and greeting their countrymen from other farms in excited bursts of Spanish. I liked the crowds of strangers, hill people who would be gone before long. Pappy told me once that when he was in St. Louis before the First War, there were half a million other people there and that he got lost just walking down a street.
   That would never happen to me. When I walked down the streets in St. Louis, everybody would know me.
   I followed my mother and Gran to Pop and Pearl Watson’s. The men went to the Co-op because that’s where all the farmers went on Saturday afternoon. I could never determine exactly what they did there, besides gripe about the price of cotton and fret over the weather.
   Pearl was busy at the cash register. “Hi, Mrs. Watson,” I said when I could get close enough. The store was packed with women and Mexicans.
   “Well, hello, Luke,” she said as she winked at me. “How’s the cotton?” she asked. It was the same question you heard over and over.
   “Pickin’ well,” I said, as if I’d hauled in a ton.
   It took Gran and my mother an hour to buy five pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of coffee, a bottle of vinegar, a pound of table salt, and two bars of soap. The aisles were crowded with women more concerned with saying hello than with buying food. They talked about their gardens and the weather and church the next day, and about who was definitely having a baby and who might be. They prattled on about a funeral here, a revival there, an upcoming wedding.
   Not one word about the Cardinals.
   My only chore in town was to haul the groceries back to the truck. When this was accomplished, I was free to roam Main Street and its alleys without being supervised. I moved with the languid foot traffic toward the north end of Black Oak, past the Co-op, past the drugstore and the hardware store and the Tea Shoppe. Along the sidewalk, packs of people stood gossiping, with no intention of moving. Telephones were scarce, and there were only a few televisions in the county, so Saturday was meant for catching up on the latest news and events.
   I found my friend Dewayne Pinter trying to convince his mother that he should be free to roam. Dewayne was a year older than I was but still in the second grade. His father let him drive their tractor around the farm, and this elevated his status among all second graders at the Black Oak School. The Pinters were Baptists and Cardinals fans, but for some unknown reason, Pappy still didn’t like them.
   “Good afternoon, Luke,” Mrs. Pinter said to me.
   “Hello, Mrs. Pinter.”
   “Where’s your mother?” she asked, looking behind me.
   “I think she’s still at the drugstore. I’m not sure.”
   With that, Dewayne was able to tear himself away. If I could be trusted to walk the streets alone, then so could he. As we walked off, Mrs. Pinter was still barking instructions. We went to the Dixie, where the older kids were hanging out and waiting for four o’clock. In my pocket I had a few coins-five cents for the matinee, five cents for a Coca-Cola, three cents for popcorn. My mother had given me I he money as an advance against what I would earn picking cotton. I was supposed to pay it back one day, but she and I both knew it would never happen. If Pappy tried to collect it, he would have to step around Mom.
   Evidently Dewayne had had a better week with the cotton than I had. He had a pocket full of dimes and couldn’t wait to show them off. His family also rented land, and they owned twenty acres outright, a lot more than the Chandlers.
   A freckle-faced girl named Brenda lingered near us, trying to start a conversation with Dewayne. She’d told all of her friends that she wanted to marry him. She was making his life unbearable by following him around at church, shadowing him every Saturday up and down Main Street, and always asking if he would sit by her at the movies.
   Dewayne despised her. When a pack of Mexicans walked by, we got lost in the middle of them.
   A fight erupted behind the Co-op, a popular spot for the older boys to gather and trade punches. It happened every Saturday, and nothing electrified Black Oak like a good fight. The crowd pushed its way through a wide alley next to the Co-op, and in the rush I heard someone say, “I’ll bet it’s a Sisco.”
   My mother had warned me against watching fights behind the Co-op, but it wasn’t a strict prohibition because I knew she wouldn’t be there. No proper female would dare to be caught watching a fight. Dewayne and I snaked our way through the mob, anxious to see some violence.
   The Siscos were dirt-poor sharecroppers who lived less than a mile from town. They were always around on Saturday. No one was sure how many kids were in the family, but they could all fight. Their father was a drunk who beat them, and their mother had once whipped a fully armed deputy who was trying to arrest her husband. Broke his arm and his nose. The deputy left town in disgrace. The oldest Sisco was in prison for killing a man in Jonesboro.
   The Sisco kids didn’t go to school or church, so I managed to avoid them. Sure enough, when we got close and peeked through the spectators, there was Jerry Sisco punching a stranger in the face.
   “Who’s that?” I asked Dewayne. The crowd was yelling for each fighter to hurry up and maim the other.
   “Don’t know,” Dewayne said. “Probably a hillbilly.”
   That made sense. With the county full of hill people picking cotton, it was only logical that the Siscos would start a fight with someone who didn’t know them. The locals knew better. The stranger’s face was puffy, and there was blood dripping from his nose. Jerry Sisco ripped a sharp right to his teeth and knocked the man down.
   A whole gang of Siscos and their ilk were in one corner, laughing, and probably drinking. They were shaggy and dirty with ragged clothes and only a few had shoes. Their toughness was legendary. They were lean and hungry and fought with every dirty trick in the hook. The year before, Billy Sisco had almost killed a Mexican in a fight behind the gin.
   On the other side of the makeshift arena was a group of hill people, all-yelling for their man-“Doyle,” it turned out-to get up and do something. Doyle was rubbing his chin when he jumped up and made a charge. He managed to ram his head into Jerry Sisco’s stomach, sending both of them to the ground. This brought a cheer from the hill people. The rest of us wanted to cheer, too, but we didn’t want to upset the Siscos. This was their game, and they’d come after anybody.
   The two fighters clutched and clawed and rolled around in the dirt like wild animals, as the yelling got louder. Doyle suddenly cocked his right hand and landed a perfect punch in the middle of Jerry Sisco’s face, sending blood everywhere. Jerry was still for a split second, and we were all secretly hoping that perhaps a Sisco had met his match. Doyle was about to land another punch when Billy Sisco abruptly charged from the pack and kicked Doyle square in the back. Doyle shrieked like a wounded dog and rolled to the ground, where both Siscos were immediately on him, kicking and pounding him.
   Doyle was about to be slaughtered. Though there was nothing fair about it, it was simply the risk you ran if you fought a Sisco. The hill people were silent, and the locals watched without taking a step forward.
   Then the two Siscos dragged Doyle to his feet, and with all the patience of an executioner, Jerry kicked him in the groin. Doyle screamed and dropped to the ground. The Siscos were delirious with laughter.
   The Siscos were in the process of picking him up again when Mr. Hank Spruill, he of the tree-trunk neck, stepped out from the crowd and hit Jerry hard, causing him to fall. Quick as a cat, Billy Sisco threw a left jab that popped Hank in the jaw, but a curious thing happened. The jab didn’t phase Hank Spruill. He turned around and grabbed Billy by his hair and without any apparent effort spun him around and flung him into the grouping of Siscos in the crowd. From the strewn pack came a new Sisco, Bobby, aged no more than sixteen, but just as mean as his brothers.
   Three Siscos against Hank Spruill.
   As Jerry was getting to his feet, Hank, with unbelievable speed, kicked him in the ribs so hard that we heard cracking. Then Hank turned and slapped Bobby with the back of his hand, knocking him down, and kicked him in the teeth. By this time Billy was making another lunge, and Hank, like a circus strongman, lifted the much skinnier boy into the air and flipped him into the side of the Co-op, where he crashed loudly, rattling the boards and windows, before falling to the pavement on his head. I couldn’t have tossed a baseball any easier.
   When Billy hit the ground, Hank took him by the throat and dragged him back into the center of the arena, where Bobby was on all fours, struggling to get to his feet. Jerry was crumpled to one side, clutching his ribs and whimpering.
   Hank kicked Bobby between the legs. When the boy yelped, Hank let out a hideous laugh.
   He then clutched Billy by the throat and began lashing his face with the back of his right hand. Blood was spurting everywhere; it covered Billy’s face and was pouring down his chest.
   Finally, Hank released Billy and turned to the rest of the Siscos. “Anybody want some more!” he shouted. “Come on! Get you some!”
   The other Siscos cowered behind one another while their three heroes floundered in the dirt.
   The fight should’ve been over, but Hank had other plans. With delight and deliberation, he kicked each of the three in their faces and heads until they stopped moving and groaning. The crowd began to disperse.
   “Let’s go,” a man said from behind me. “You kids don’t need to see this.” But I couldn’t move.
   Then Hank found a broken piece of an old two-by-four. For a moment the crowd stopped its exit to watch with morbid curiosity.
   When Hank hit Jerry across the nose, someone in the crowd said, “Oh my God.”
   Another voice in the mob said something about finding the sheriff.
   “Let’s get outta here,” an old farmer said, and the crowd began leaving again, this time a little quicker.
   Hank still wasn’t finished. His face was red with anger; his eyes flashed like a demon’s. He kept pounding them until the old two-by-four began to shatter into small pieces.
   I didn’t see any of the other Spruills in the crowd. As the beating became a butchering, everyone fled. No one in Black Oak wanted to tangle with the Siscos. And now nobody wanted to face this madman from the hills.
   When we were back on the sidewalk, those of us who’d seen the fight were silent. It was still happening. I wondered if Hank would beat them until they were dead.
   Neither Dewayne nor I said a word as we darted through the crowd and ran toward the movie house.

   The Saturday afternoon movie was a special time for all of us farm kids. We didn’t have televisions, and entertainment was considered sinful. For two hours we were transported from the harshness of life in the cotton patch to a fantasy land where the good guys always won. Through the movies we learned how criminals operated, how cops caught them, how wars were fought and won, how history was made in the Wild West. It was even through a movie that I learned the sad truth that the South had, in fact, not won the Civil War, contrary to what I’d been told both at home and at school.
   But this Saturday the Gene Autry western bored Dewayne and me. Every time there was a fistfight on the screen, I thought of Hank Spruill and could see him still out there behind the Co-op hammering the Siscos. Autry’s scuffles were tame compared to the real-life carnage we’d just witnessed. The movie was almost over before I mustered the courage to tell Dewayne.
   “That big hillbilly we saw beat the Siscos?” I whispered. “He’s working on our farm.”
   “You know him?” he whispered back, disbelieving.
   “Yep. Know him real well.”
   Dewayne was impressed and wanted to ask more questions, but the place was packed and Mr. Starnes, the manager, enjoyed patrolling the aisles with his flashlight, just looking for trouble. Any kid caught talking would be yanked up by the ear and ejected. Also, Brenda with the freckles had managed to get the seat directly behind Dewayne, making us both uncomfortable.
   There were a few adults sprinkled throughout the audience, but they were mostly town people. Mr. Starnes made the Mexicans sit in the balcony, but it didn’t seem to bother them. Only a handful would waste money on a picture show.
   We rushed out at the end, and within minutes we were behind the Co-op again, half-expecting to see the bloody corpses of the Sisco boys. But no one was there. There was no evidence of any fight-no blood, no limbs, no shattered two-by-four.
   Pappy held the opinion that people with self-respect should leave town on Saturday before dark. Bad things happened on Saturday night. Other than the fights, though, I’d never witnessed any true evil. I’d heard there were drinking and dice games behind the gin, and even more fights, but all that was kept out of sight and was engaged in by very few people. Still, Pappy was afraid we’d somehow be contaminated.
   Ricky was the hell-raiser of the Chandler family, and my mother told me that he had the reputation of staying in town too long on Saturday. There was an arrest somewhere in the recent family history, but I could never get the details. She said that Pappy and Ricky had fought for years over what time they should leave. I could remember several occasions when we left without him. I’d cry because I was sure I’d never see him again, then Sunday morning he would be sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee as if nothing had happened. Ricky always came home.
   We met at the truck, which was now surrounded by dozens of other vehicles parked haphazardly around the Baptist church because the farmers were still rolling in. The crowd was thicker along Main Street and seemed to be congregating near the school, where fiddlers and banjo pickers sometimes broke out into bluegrass sessions. I didn’t want to leave, and in my opinion there was no hurry to get home.
   Gran and my mother had some last-minute business inside the church, where most of the women found something to do on the day before the Sabbath. From the other side of the truck, I overheard my dad and Pappy talking about a fight. Then I heard the name Sisco, and I became very still. Miguel and some of the Mexicans arrived and wouldn’t stop chattering in Spanish, so I missed any further gossip.
   A few minutes later, Stick Powers, one of Black Oak’s two deputies, walked over from the street and said hello to Pappy and my father. Stick was supposed to have been a POW in the war, and he walked with a limp, which he claimed was the result of abuse in a German camp. Pappy said he’d never left Craighead County, never heard a shot fired in anger.
   “One of them Sisco boys is near ‘bout dead,” I heard him say as I moved in closer. It was almost dark now, and no one was watching me.
   “Nothing wrong with that,” Pappy said.
   “They say that hillbilly is working out at your place.”
   “I didn’t see the fight, Stick,” Pappy said, his quick temper already rising. “You got a name?”
   “Hank something or other.”
   “We got lots of somethings and others.”
   “Mind if I ride out tomorrow and look around?” Stick asked.
   “I can’t stop you.”
   “No, you can’t.” Stick wheeled on his good leg and gave the Mexicans a look as if they were guilty as sin.
   I eased around to the other side of the truck and said, “What was that all about?”
   As usual, when it was something I was not supposed to know or hear, they simply ignored me.
   We rode home in the dark, the lights of Black Oak fading behind us, the cool wind from the road blowing our hair. At first, I wanted to tell my father about the fight, but I couldn’t do it in front of the Mexicans. Then I decided not to be a witness. I wouldn’t tell anybody since there was no way to win. Any involvement with the Siscos would make my life dangerous, and I didn’t want the Spruills to get mad and leave. The picking had hardly begun, and I was already tired of it. And most important, I didn’t want Hank Spruill angry with me or my father or Pappy.
   Their old truck was not in our front yard when we arrived home. They were still in town, probably visiting with other hill people.
   After supper, we took our places on the porch as Pappy fiddled with his radio. The Cardinals were at Philadelphia, playing under the lights. Musial came to bat in the top of the second, and I began to dream.

Chapter 8

   We awoke at dawn Sunday to the crack of lightning and the rumble of low thunder. A storm blew from the southwest, delaying sunrise, and as I lay in the darkness of Ricky’s room, I again asked the great question of why it rained on Sundays. Why not during the week, so I wouldn’t be forced to pick cotton? Sunday was already a day of rest.
   My grandmother came for me and told me to sit on the porch so we could watch the rain together. She fixed my coffee, mixing it with plenty of milk and sugar, and we rocked gently in the swing as the wind howled. The Spruills were scurrying about, throwing things in boxes, trying to find shelter away from their leaking tents.
   The rain fell in waves, as if trying to make up for two weeks of dry weather. A mist swirled around the porch like a fog, and above us the tin roof sang under the torrents.
   Gran carefully picked her moments to speak. There were times, usually once a week, when she would take me for a walk, or meet me on the porch, just the two of us. Because she’d been married to Pappy for thirty-five years, she’d learned the art of silence. She could walk or swing for long periods of time while saying little.
   “How’s the coffee?” she asked, barely audible above the storm.
   “It’s fine, Gran,” I said.
   “What would you like for breakfast?”
   “Biscuits.”
   “Then I’ll make us some biscuits.”
   The Sunday routine was a little more relaxed. We generally slept later, though the rain had awakened us early today. And for breakfast we skipped the usual eggs and ham and somehow managed to survive on biscuits and molasses. The kitchen work was a little lighter. It was, after all, a day of rest.
   The swing moved slowly back and forth, going nowhere, its rusty chains squeaking softly above us. Lightning popped across the road, somewhere on the Jeter property.
   “I had a dream about Ricky last night,” she said.
   “A good dream?”
   “Yes, very good. I dreamed the war suddenly ended, but they forgot to tell us. And one night we were sitting here on the porch, listening to the radio, and out there on the road we saw a man running toward us. It was Ricky. He was in his army uniform, and he started yelling about the war being over.”
   “I wish I could have a dream like that,” I said.
   “I think the Lord’s telling us something.”
   “Ricky’s coming home?”
   “Yes. Maybe not right away, but the war’ll be over soon. We’ll look up one day and see him walking across the yard there.”
   I looked at the yard. Puddles and streams were beginning to form and run down toward the Spruills. The grass was almost gone, and the wind was blowing the first of the dead leaves from our oaks.
   “I pray for Ricky every night, Gran,” I said, quite proud.
   “I pray for him every hour,” she said, with a hint of mist in her eyes.
   We rocked and watched the rain. My thoughts about Ricky were rarely of a soldier in uniform, with a gun, under fire, hopping from one safe place to another. Rather, my memories were of my best friend, my uncle who was more like a brother, a buddy with a fishing pole or a baseball glove. He was only nineteen, an age that seemed both old and young to me.
   Before long my mother came to the door. The Saturday bath was followed by the Sunday scrubbing, a quick but brutal ritual in which my neck and ears were scraped by a woman possessed. “We need to get ready,” she said. I could already feel the pain.
   I followed Gran to the kitchen for more coffee. Pappy was at the kitchen table, reading the Bible and preparing his Sunday school lesson. My father was on the back porch, watching the storm and gazing into the distance at the river, no doubt beginning to worry that floodwaters were coming.

   The rains stopped long before we left for church. The roads were muddy, and Pappy drove even slower than usual. We puttered along, sometimes sliding in the ruts and puddles of the old dirt road. My father and I were in the back, holding tightly to the sides of the bed, and my mother and Gran rode up front, everybody dressed in their best. The sky had cleared, and now the sun was overhead, already baking the wet ground so that you could see the humidity drifting lazily above the cotton stalks.
   “It’s gonna be a hot one,” my father said, issuing the same forecast he uttered every day from May through September.
   When we reached the highway, we stood and leaned on the cab so the wind was in our faces. It was much cooler that way. The fields were vacant; not even the Mexicans were allowed to work on the Sabbath. Every harvest season brought the same rumors of heathen farmers sneaking around and picking cotton on Sunday, but I personally had never witnessed such sinful behavior.
   Most things were sinful in rural Arkansas, especially if you were a Baptist. And a great part of our Sunday worship ritual was to be preached at by the Reverend Akers, a loud and angry man who spent too much of his time conjuring up new sins. Of course, I didn’t care for the preaching-most kids didn’t-but there was more to Sunday church than worship. It was a time for visiting, and spreading news and gossip. It was a festive gathering, with everyone in good spirits, or at least pretending to be. Whatever the worries of the world-the coming floods, the war in Korea, the fluctuating price of cotton-they were all put aside during church.
   The Lord didn’t intend for His people to worry, Gran always said, especially when we were in His house. This forever struck me as odd, because she worried almost as much as Pappy.
   Other than the family and the farm, nothing was as important to us as the Black Oak Baptist Church. I knew every single person in our church, and they of course knew me. It was a family, for better or worse. Everybody loved one another, or at least professed to, and if one of our members was the slightest bit ill, then all manner of prayer and Christian caring poured forth. A funeral was a weeklong, almost holy event. The fall and spring revivals were planned for months and greatly anticipated. At least once a month we had some form of dinner-on-the-grounds-a potluck picnic under the trees behind the church-and these often lasted until late afternoon. Weddings were important, especially for the ladies, but they lacked the high drama of funerals and burials.
   The church’s gravel parking lot was almost full when we arrived. Most of the vehicles were old farmers’ trucks like ours, all covered with a fresh coat of mud. There were a few sedans, and these were driven either by town folk or by farmers who owned their land. Down the street at the Methodist church, there were fewer trucks and more cars. As a general rule, the merchants and schoolteachers worshiped there. The Methodists thought they were slightly superior, but as Baptists, we knew we had the inside track to God.
   I jumped from the truck and ran to find my friends. Three of the older boys were tossing a baseball behind the church, near the cemetery, and I headed in their direction.
   “Luke,” someone whispered. It was Dewayne, hiding in the shade of an elm tree and looking scared. “Over here.”
   I walked to the tree.
   “Have you heard?” he said. “Jerry Sisco died early this mornin’.”
   I felt as if I’d done something wrong, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Dewayne just stared at me. Finally, I managed to respond. “So?”
   “So they’re tryin’ to find people who saw what happened.”
   “Lot of folks saw it.”
   “Yeah, but nobody wants to say anything. Everybody’s scared of the Siscos, and everybody’s scared of your hillbilly.”
   “Ain’t my hillbilly,” I said.
   “Well, I’m scared of him anyway. Ain’t you?”
   “Yep.”
   “What’re we gonna do?”
   “Nothin’. We ain’t sayin’ a word, not now anyhow.”
   We agreed that we would indeed do nothing. If we were confronted, we would lie. And if we lied, we would say an extra prayer.
   The prayers were long and windy that Sunday morning. So were the rumors and gossip of what had happened to Jerry Sisco. News spread quickly before Sunday school began. Dewayne and I heard details about the fight that we couldn’t believe were being reported. Hank grew larger by the moment. “Hands as big as a country ham,” somebody said. “Shoulders like a Brahma bull,” said somebody else. “Had to weigh three hundred pounds.”
   The men and older boys grouped near the front of the church, and Dewayne and I milled around, just listening. I heard it described as a murder, then a killing, and I wasn’t clear about the difference until I heard Mr. Snake Wilcox say, “Ain’t no murder. Good folks get murdered. White trash like the Siscos get killed.”
   The killing was the first in Black Oak since 1947, when some sharecroppers east of town got drunk and had a family war. A teenage boy found himself on the wrong end of a shotgun, but no charges were filed. They fled during the night, never to be heard from again. No one could remember the last “real” murder.
   I was mesmerized by the gossip. We sat on the front steps of the church, looking down the sidewalk toward Main Street, and heard men arguing and spouting off about what should or shouldn’t be done.
   Down the street, I could see the front of the Co-op, and for a moment I thought I could see Jerry Sisco again, his face a mess, as Hank Spruill clubbed him to death.
   I had watched a man get killed. Suddenly, I felt the urge to sneak back into the sanctuary and start praying. I knew I was guilty of something.
   We drifted into the church, where the girls and women were also huddled and whispering their versions of the tragedy. Among them, Jerry’s stature was rising. Brenda, the freckled girl with a crush on Dewayne, lived only a quarter of a mile from the Siscos, and since they were practically neighbors, she was receiving more than her share of attention. The women were definitely more sympathetic than the men.
   Dewayne and I found the cookies in the fellowship hall, then went to our little classrooms, listening every step of the way.
   Our Sunday school teacher, Miss Beverly Dill Cooley, who taught at the high school in Monette, started things off with a lengthy, and quite generous, obituary for Jerry Sisco, a poor boy from a poor family, a young man who never had a chance. Then she made us hold hands and close our eyes while she lifted her voice to heaven and for a very long time asked God to receive poor Jerry into His warm and eternal embrace. She made Jerry sound like a Christian, and an innocent victim.
   I glanced at Dewayne, who had one eye on me.
   There was something odd about this. As Baptists, we’d been taught from the cradle that the only way you made it to heaven was by believing in Jesus and trying to follow His example in living a clean and moral Christian life. It was a simple message, one that was preached from the pulpit every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, and every revival preacher who passed through Black Oak repeated the message loud and clear. We heard it at Sunday school, at Wednesday night prayer service, and at Vacation Bible School. It was in our music, our devotionals, and our literature. It was straightforward, unwavering, and without loopholes, compromise, or wiggle room.
   And anyone who did not accept Jesus and live a Christian life simply went to hell. That’s where Jerry Sisco was, and we all knew it.
   But Miss Cooley prayed on. She prayed for all the Siscos in this time of grief and loss, and she prayed for our little town as it reached out to help this family.
   I couldn’t think of a single soul in Black Oak who would reach out to the Siscos.
   It was a strange prayer, and when she finally said “amen,” I was completely bewildered. Jerry Sisco had never been near a church, but Miss Cooley prayed as if he were with God at that very moment. If outlaws like the Siscos could make it to heaven, the pressure was off the rest of us.
   Then she started on Jonah and the whale again, and for a while we forgot about the killing.

   An hour later, during worship, I sat in my usual spot, in the same pew where the Chandlers always sat, halfway back on the left side, between Gran and my mother. The pews were not marked or reserved, but everyone knew where everybody else was supposed to sit. In three more years, when I was ten, my parents said I would be allowed to sit with my friends, providing of course that I could do so without misbehaving. This promise had been extracted by me from both parents. It might as well have been twenty years.
   The windows were up, but the heavy air was not moving. The ladies fanned themselves while the men sat still and sweated. By the time Brother Akers rose to preach, my shirt was stuck to my back.
   He was angry, as usual, and he began shouting almost immediately. He attacked sin right off the bat; sin had brought tragedy to Black Oak. Sin had brought death and destruction, as it always had and always would. We sinners drank and gambled and cursed and lied and fought and killed and committed adultery because we allowed ourselves to be separated from God, and that’s why a young man from our town had lost his life. God didn’t intend for us to kill one another.
   I was confused again. I thought Jerry Sisco got himself killed because he’d finally met his match. It had nothing to do with gambling and adultery and most of the other sins Brother Akers was so worked up over. And why was he yelling at us? We were the good folks. We were in church!
   I seldom understood what Brother Akers was preaching about, and occasionally I’d hear Gran mumble over Sunday dinner that she’d also been hopelessly confused during one of his sermons. Ricky had once told me he thought the old man was half crazy.
   The sins grew, one piling on top of the other until my shoulders began to sag. I had yet to lie about watching the fight, but I was already beginning to feel the heat.
   Then Brother Akers traced the history of murder, beginning with Cain slaying Abel, and he walked us through the bloody path of biblical carnage. Gran closed her eyes, and I knew she was praying-she always was. Pappy was staring at a wall, probably thinking about how a dead Sisco might affect his cotton crop. My mother seemed to be paying attention, and mercifully I began to nod off.
   When I awoke, my head was in Gran’s lap, but she didn’t care. When she was worried about Ricky, she wanted me near her. The piano was now playing, and the choir was standing. It was time for the invitation. We stood and sang five stanzas of “Just As I Am,” and then the Reverend dismissed us.
   Outside, the men gathered under a shade tree and started a long discussion about something or other. Pappy was in the middle of things, talking in a hushed voice, waving his hands in an urgent manner. I knew better than to get close.
   The women grouped in small clusters and gossiped along the front lawn, where the children also played and the old folks said their farewells. There was never any hurry to leave church on Sundays. There was little to do at home except eat lunch, take a nap, and get ready for another week of picking cotton.
   Slowly, we made our way to the parking lot. We said good-bye to our friends again, then waved as we pulled away. Alone in the back of the truck with my father, I tried to muster the courage to tell him about watching the fight. The men at church had talked of nothing else. I wasn’t sure how I figured into the plot, but my instincts told me to confess it all to my father and then hide behind him. But Dewayne and I had promised to keep quiet until confronted, then we’d start squirming. I said nothing as we drove home.
   About a mile from our farm, where the gravel thinned and eventually surrendered to dirt, the road met the St. Francis River, where a one-lane wooden bridge crossed over. The bridge had been built in the thirties as a WPA project, so it was sturdy enough to withstand the weight of tractors and loaded cotton trailers. But the thick planks popped and creaked every time we drove over, and if you looked at the brown water directly below, you’d swear the bridge was swaying.
   We crept across, and on the other side we saw the Spruills. Bo and Dale were in the river, shirtless, their pants rolled up to their knees, skipping rocks. Trot was sitting on a thick branch of driftwood, his feet dangling in the water. Mr. and Mrs. Spruill were hiding under a shade tree, where food was spread on a blanket.
   Tally was also in the water, her legs bare up to her thighs, her long hair loose and falling onto her shoulders. My heart pounded as I watched her kick the water, alone in her own world.
   Downriver, in a spot where few fish had ever been caught, was Hank with a small cane pole. His shirt was off, and his skin was already pink from the sun. I wondered if he knew that Jerry Sisco was dead. Probably not. He would find out soon enough, though.
   We waved slowly at them. They froze as if they had been caught trespassing, then they smiled and nodded. But Tally never looked up. Neither did Hank.

Chapter 9

   Sunday lunch was always fried chicken, biscuits, and gravy, and though the women cooked as fast as they could, it still took an hour to prepare. We were famished by the time we sat down to eat. I often thought, to myself of course, that if Brother Akers didn’t bark and ramble so long, we wouldn’t be nearly as hungry.
   Pappy gave thanks. The food was passed around, and we were just beginning to eat when a car door slammed close to the house. We stopped eating and looked at one another. Pappy stood silently and walked to the kitchen window. “It’s Stick Powers,” he said, looking out, and my appetite vanished. The law had arrived, and nothing good was about to happen.
   Pappy met him at the back porch. We could hear every word.
   “Good afternoon, Eli.”
   “Stick. What can I do for you?”
   “I guess you heard that Sisco boy died.”
   “I heard,” Pappy said without the slightest hint of sadness.
   “I need to talk to one of your hands.”
   “It was just a fight, Stick. The usual Saturday foolishness that the Siscos have been doin’ for years. You never stopped ‘em. Now one of ‘em bit off more’n he could chew.”
   “I still gotta investigate.”
   “You’ll have to wait till after lunch. We just sat down. Some folks go to church.”
   My mother cringed when Pappy said this. Gran slowly shook her head.
   “I been on duty,” Stick said.
   According to the gossip, Stick had a bout with the Spirit every four years, when it was election time. Then for three and a half years he didn’t feel the need to worship. In Black Oak, if you didn’t go to church, folks knew it. We had to have somebody to pray for during revivals.
   “You’re welcome to sit on the porch,” Pappy said, then returned to the kitchen table. When he took his seat, the others began eating again. I now had a knot in my throat the size of a baseball, and the fried chicken simply wouldn’t go down.
   “Has he had lunch?” Gran whispered across the table.
   Pappy shrugged as if he couldn’t have cared less. It was almost two-thirty. If Stick hadn’t found something to eat by then, why should we worry?
   But Gran cared. She stood and pulled a plate from the cabinet. As we watched, she covered it with potatoes and gravy, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, two biscuits that she carefully buttered, and a thigh and a breast. Then she filled a tall glass with iced tea and took it to the back porch. Again, we heard every word.
   “Here, Stick,” she said. “Nobody misses a meal around here.”
   “Thanks, Miss Ruth, but I’ve already ate.”
   “Then eat again.”
   “I really shouldn’t.”
   We knew that by then Stick’s fleshy nostrils had caught a whiff of the chicken and the biscuits.
   “Thank you, Miss Ruth. This is mighty kind.”
   We were not surprised when she returned empty-handed. Pappy was angry but managed to hold his tongue. Stick was there to cause trouble, to interfere with our farmhands, which meant he was threatening our cotton. Why feed him?
   We ate in silence, which allowed me a few moments to collect my thoughts. Since I didn’t want to act suspiciously, I forced the food into my mouth and chewed as slowly as possible.
   I wasn’t sure what the truth was, nor could I distinguish right from wrong. The Siscos were ganging up on the poor hillbilly when Hank went to his rescue. There were three Siscos, and Hank was alone. He had quickly stopped them, and the fight should’ve been over. Why did he pick up that piece of wood? It was easy to assume the Siscos were always wrong, but Hank had won the fight long before he began clubbing them.
   I thought about Dewayne and our secret pact. Silence and ignorance were still the best strategies, I decided.
   We didn’t want Stick to hear us, so we said nothing throughout the entire meal. Pappy ate slower than usual, because he wanted Stick to sit and wait and stew, and maybe get mad and leave. I doubted if the delay bothered Stick. I could almost hear him licking his plate.
   My father gazed at the table as he chewed, his mind seemingly off on the other side of the world, probably Korea. Both my mother and Gran looked very sad, which was not unusual after the verbal beating we received each week from Brother Akers. That’s another reason I always tried to sleep during his sermons.
   The women had much more sympathy for Jerry Sisco. As the hours passed, his death became sadder. His meanness and other undesirable qualities were slowly forgotten. He was, after all, a local boy, someone we knew, if only in passing, and he’d met a terrible end.
   And his killer slept in our front yard.
   We heard noises. The Spruills were back from the river.

   The inquest took place under our tallest pin oak, about halfway between the front porch and Camp Spruill. The men gathered first, Pappy and my father stretching and rubbing their stomachs, and Stick looking particularly well fed. He carried a sizable belly, which pulled his brown shirt at the buttons, and it was obvious that Stick did not spend his days in the cotton fields. Pappy said he was lazy as hell and slept most of the time in his patrol car, under a shade tree near Gurdy Stone’s hot dog stand on the edge of town.
   From the other end of the yard came the Spruills, all of them, with Mr. Spruill leading the pack and Trot bringing up the rear, twisting and snuffling along in his now familiar gait. I walked behind Gran and my mother, peeking between them and trying to keep my distance. Only the Mexicans were absent.
   A loose huddle formed around Stick; the Spruills loitering on one side, the Chandlers hanging around the other, though when it came down to it, we were all on the same side. I was not pleased to be allied with Hank Spruill, but the cotton was more important than anything else.
   Pappy introduced Stick to Mr. Spruill, who awkwardly shook Stick’s hand and then took a few steps back. It looked like the Spruills were expecting the worst, and I tried to remember if any of them had witnessed the fight. There’d been a large crowd and things had happened so fast. Dewayne and I had been mesmerized by the bloodletting. I couldn’t recall really noticing the faces of the other spectators.
   Stick worked a blade of grass that was protruding from one corner of his mouth, and with both thumbs hung in his pants pockets, he studied our hill people. Hank leaned against the pin oak, sneering at anybody who dared to look at him.
   “Had a big fight in town yesterday behind the Co-op,” Stick announced in the direction of the Spruills. Mr. Spruill nodded but said nothing. “Some local boys got into it with a fella from the hills. One of ‘em, Jerry Sisco, died this mornin’ in the hospital in Jonesboro. Fractured skull.”
   Every Spruill began fidgeting, except Hank, who didn’t move. They obviously had not heard the latest on Jerry Sisco.
   Stick spat and shifted his weight, and he seemed to enjoy being the man in the middle, the voice of authority with a badge and a gun. “And so I’m lookin’ around, askin’ questions, just tryin’ to find out who was involved.”
   “Ain’t none of us,” Mr. Spruill said. “We’re peaceful folks.”
   “Is that so?”
   “Yes sir.”
   “Did y’all go to town yesterday?”
   “We did.”
   Now that the lying had started, I peeked from between the two women for a better look at the Spruills. They were clearly frightened. Bo and Dale stood close together, their eyes darting around. Tally studied the dirt at her bare feet, unwilling to look at us. Mr. and Mrs. Spruill seemed to be looking for friendly faces. Trot, of course, was in another world.
   “You got a boy named Hank?” Stick asked.
   “Maybe,” Mr. Spruill said.
   “Don’t play games with me,” Stick growled with sudden anger. “I ask you a question, you give me a straight answer. We got a jail over in Jonesboro with lots of room. I can take the whole family in for questions. You understand?”
   “I’m Hank Spruill!” came a thunderous voice. Hank strutted through the huddle and stood within striking distance of Stick, who was much smaller but managed to maintain his cockiness.
   Stick studied him for a second, then asked, “Did you go to town yesterday?”
   “I did.”
   “Did you get in a fight behind the Co-op?”
   “Nope. I stopped a fight.”
   “Did you beat up the Sisco boys?”
   “I don’t know their names. There was two of ‘em beatin’ up a boy from the hills. I stopped it.”
   Hank’s face was smug. He showed no fear, and I grudgingly admired him for the way he confronted the law.
   The deputy looked around the crowd, and his eyes stopped with Pappy. Stick was hot on the trail and quite proud of himself. With his tongue he moved the blade of grass to the other corner of his mouth, then looked up at Hank again.
   “Did you use a stick of wood?”
   “Didn’t need to.”
   “Answer the question. Did you use a stick of wood?”
   Without hesitating, Hank said, “Nope. They had a two-by-four.”
   This, of course, conflicted with what someone else had reported to Stick. “I guess I better take you in,” Stick said, but made no move for the handcuffs dangling from his belt.
   Mr. Spruill took a step forward and said to Pappy, “If he leaves, we leave, too. Right now.”
   Pappy was prepared for this. Hill people were noted for their ability to break camp and disappear quickly, and none of us doubted Mr. Spruill meant what he said. They would be gone in an hour, back to Eureka Springs, back to their mountains and their moonshine. It would be virtually impossible to harvest eighty acres of cotton with just the Mexicans to help us. Every pound was crucial. Every hand.
   “Slow down, Stick,” Pappy said. “Let’s talk about this. You and I both know the Siscos are good for no thin’. They fight often, and they fight dirty. Seems to me they picked on the wrong fella.”
   “I got a dead body, Eli. You understand?”
   “Two against one sounds like self-defense to me. Nothin’ fair about two against one.”
   “But look how big he is.”
   “Like I said, the Siscos picked on the wrong fella. You and I both know they had it comin’. Let the boy tell his story.”
   “I ain’t no boy!” Hank snapped.
   “Tell what happened,” Pappy said, stalling for time. Drag it out, and maybe Stick would find some reason to leave and come back in a few days.
   “Go ahead,” Stick said. “Let’s hear your story. God knows ain’t nobody else talkin’.”
   Hank shrugged and said, “I walked up to the fight, saw these two little sodbusters beatin’ up on Doyle, and so I broke it up.”
   “Who’s Doyle?” Stick asked.
   “Boy from Hardy.”
   “You know him?”
   “Nope.”
   “Then how do you know where he’s from?”
   “Just do.”
   “Damn it!” Stick said, then spat near Hank. “Nobody knows nothin’. Nobody saw nothin’. Half the town was behind the Co-op, but nobody knows a damned thing.”
   “Sounds like two against one,” Pappy said again. “And watch your language. You’re on my property, and there’re ladies present.”
   “Sorry,” Stick said, touching his hat and nodding in the direction of Mother and Gran.
   “He was just breakin’ up a fight,” my father said, his first words.
   “There’s more to it, Jesse. I’ve heard that after the fight was over, he picked up a piece of wood and beat the boys. I figure that’s when the skull was fractured. Two against one ain’t fair, and I know it’s the Siscos, but I ain’t sure one of ‘em had to get killed.”
   “I didn’t kill nobody,” Hank said. “I broke up a fight. And there was three of ‘em, not two.”
   It was about time Hank set the record straight. It seemed odd to me that Stick didn’t know that three of the Siscos had been maimed. All he had to do was count the battered faces. But they had probably been hauled off by their kin and hidden back home.
   “Three?” Stick repeated in disbelief. The entire gathering seemed to freeze.
   Pappy seized the moment. “Three against one, and there’s no way you can take him in for murder. No jury in this county’ll ever convict if it’s three against one.”
   For a moment Stick seemed to agree, but he wasn’t about to concede. “That’s if he’s tellin’ the truth. He’ll need witnesses, and right now they’re few and far between.” Stick turned to face Hank again and said, “Who were the three?”
   “I didn’t ask their names, sir,” Hank said with perfect sarcasm. “We didn’t have a chance to say howdy. Three against one takes up a lotta time, especially if you’re the one.”
   Laughter would’ve upset Stick, and nobody wanted to run that risk. So we just lowered our heads and grinned.
   “Don’t get smart with me, boy!” Stick said, trying to reassert himself. “Don’t suppose you got any witnesses, do you?”
   The humor vanished into a long period of silence. I was hoping that maybe Bo or Dale would step forward and claim to be a witness. Since the Spruills had just proved that they would lie under pressure, it seemed sensible to me that one of them would quickly verify Hank’s version. But nobody moved, nobody spoke. I slipped over a few inches and was directly behind my mother.
   Then I heard words that would change my life. With the air perfectly still, Hank said, “Little Chandler saw it.”
   Little Chandler almost wet his pants.
   When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me, of course. Gran and my mother looked particularly horrified. I felt guilty and looked guilty, and I knew in an instant that every person there believed Hank. I was a witness! I’d seen the fight.
   “Come here, Luke,” Pappy said, and I walked as slowly as humanly possible to a spot in the center. I glanced up at Hank, and his eyes were glowing. He wore his usual smirk, and his face told me that he knew I was caught. The crowd inched in as if surrounding me.
   “Did you see the fight?” Pappy asked.
   I’d been taught in Sunday school from the day I could walk that lying would send you straight to hell. No detours. No second chances. Straight into the fiery pit, where Satan was waiting with the likes of Hitler and Judas Iscariot and General Grant. Thou shalt not bear false witness, which, of course, didn’t sound exactly like a strict prohibition against lying, but that was the way the Baptists interpreted it. And I’d been whipped a couple of times for telling little fibs. “Just tell the truth and get it over with” was one of Gran’s favorite sayings.
   I said, “Yes sir.”
   “What were you doin’ there?”
   “I heard there was a fight, so I took off and watched it.” I wasn’t about to include Dewayne, at least not until I had to.
   Stick dropped to one knee so that his chubby face was eye-level with mine. “Tell me what you saw,” he said. “And tell the truth.”
   I glanced at my father, who was hovering over my shoulder. And I looked at Pappy, who, oddly, didn’t seem at all angry with me.
   I sucked in air until my lungs were full, and I looked at Tally, who was watching me very closely. Then I looked at Stick’s flat nose and his black, puffy eyes, and I said, “Jerry Sisco was fightin’ some man from the hills. Then Billy Sisco jumped on him, too. They were beatin’ him up pretty bad when Mr. Hank stepped in to help the man from the hills.”
   “Right then, was it two against one, or two against two?” Stick asked.
   “Two against one.”
   “What happened to the first hill boy?”
   “I don’t know. He just left. I think he was hurt pretty bad.”
   “All right. Keep goin’. And tell the truth.”
   “He’s tellin’ the truth!” Pappy snarled.
   “Go on.”
   I glanced around again to make sure Tally was still watching. Not only was she studying me closely, but now she had a pleasant little smile. “Then, all of a sudden, Bobby Sisco charged from the crowd and attacked Mr. Hank. It was three against one, just like Mr. Hank said.”
   Hank’s face did not relax. If anything, he looked at me with even more viciousness. He was thinking ahead, and he wasn’t finished with me.
   “I guess that settles it,” Pappy said. “I ain’t no lawyer, but I could sway a jury if it’s three against one.”
   Stick ignored him and leaned even closer to me. “Who had the two-by-four?” he asked, his eyes narrowing as if this were the most important question of all.
   Hank suddenly exploded. “Tell him the truth, boy!” he shouted. “One of them Siscos picked up that stick of wood, didn’t he?”
   I could feel the stares of Gran and my mother behind me. And I knew Pappy wanted to reach over and shake me by the neck and somehow make the right words come out.
   In front of me, not too far away, Tally was pleading with her eyes. Bo and Dale, and even Trot, were looking at me.
   “Didn’t he, boy!” Hank barked again.
   I met Stick’s gaze and began nodding, slowly at first, a timid little lie delivered without a word. And I kept nodding, and kept lying, and in doing so, did more to harvest our cotton than six months of good weather.
   I was skirting around the edges of the fiery depths. Satan was waiting, and I could feel the heat. I’d run to the woods and pray for forgiveness as soon as I could. I’d ask God to go easy on me. He’d given us the cotton; it was up to us to protect it and gather the crops.
   Stick slowly stood, but he kept staring at me, our eyes locked together, because both of us knew I was lying. Stick didn’t want to arrest Hank Spruill, not then anyway. First, he’d have to put the handcuffs on him, a task that could turn ugly. Second, he’d upset all the farmers.
   My father grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved me back toward the women. “You’ve scared him to death, Stick,” he said with an awkward laugh, trying to break the tension and get me out of there before I said something wrong.
   “Is he a good boy?” Stick asked.
   “He tells the truth,” my father said.
   “Of course he tells the truth,” Pappy said with a good dose of anger.
   The truth had just been rewritten.
   “I’m gonna keep askin’ around,” Stick said and began walking toward his car. “I might be back later.”
   He slammed the door of his old patrol car and left our yard. We watched him drive away until he was out of sight.