The Beet Fields

by Gary Paulsen

  The woman was lying against a grassy bank on the fencerow along the edge of the field with her hat over her eyes and she raised the hat. “iQue?”

  He said something in Spanish. The woman laughed and gave the old man the finger and then went back to resting.

  “But it is true,” the man said. “Women have all the lust there is. They are never satisfied. They all have the moon on their shoulder.”

  The boy lay back, half asleep, smiling, thinking of it until they went back to the hoes.

  Working through the afternoon burned the pain and stiffness off and by quitting time he was back to normal and starving.

  Somebody had cleaned the pigeons the night before and put them in a shady corner of the shed, in a pot with cool water, covered to keep the flies out.

  Soon they had the fire going and when the beans were cooked, after dark, the pigeons were put in and some dried chilies, and the stew simmered while the boy sat dozing in the corner and the Mexicans talked. He listened to the music of their talk instead of the words.

  Finally the food was ready and the women cooked tortillas and everybody ate until they were full, standing around the pot, picking the pigeon meat off the bones and wrapping it with beans in the tortillas.

  The boy thought it must be near midnight when they were done and full and had smoked rolled cigarettes and still the men sat and talked in one place while the women talked in another.

  He could hardly keep his eyes open and moved to his sleeping area but the old man came over to him.

  “Are we not to get more pigeons?

  “Tonight?”

  “It is when they sleep.”

  “But it's late.” The boy never wanted to climb again. “And we have to work tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow. It is domingo—Sunday. We do not work on this day.”

  “But—“

  “Did you not like the pigeons?”

  More than like, the boy thought, his belly full and the pigeon fat still on his lips with the faint burn from the chili—much more than like. “Yes.”

  “Is it that you are afraid to climb again? That would show an understanding—if you were afraid to climb. A fall like that would cause an understanding of the risk.…”

  It was important that a man not be afraid and so the boy felt cornered. Later he would wonder, when he was no longer with the Mexicans, if the old man had done it intentionally to make him face his fear or, perhaps, just because he wanted more pigeons.

  Whatever the intent, the result was the same. With a full belly and fear in his heart the boy went to the equipment barn and climbed upside down to the rafters for more pigeons.

  The fear helped rather than hindered him, made him cautious and slow and kept him from falling. He climbed and dropped the pigeons one after another until finally the old man called up, “It is enough. We have enough to eat and more will only spoil/'

  The boy climbed down and was ready for bed but it was not to be, not yet. They went to the sleeping shed and sat in back with the glow from the bulb hanging inside and cleaned the pigeons, everybody helping, men and women, ripping the skins from the birds and thumbing the guts out expertly while the old man told them the story of getting the pigeons, first in English for the boy and then in Spanish for the rest.

  “He went through the birds like a bad wind,” the old man said, “holding as sure as would a panther, killing left and killing right until I made him stop. It was a thing to see.”

  And the boy knew that he was being half teased, but still, there were the birds being cleaned and they would eat the next day because he had climbed the rafters and dropped the dead birds down. It made him conscious of the way the women looked at him—or how he imagined they looked at him—and when at last the long aching day was done and he crawled onto his feed sacks near dawn to sleep he could not help feeling pride that he had killed the pigeons.

  THREE

  THE DAYS BLED ONE INTO ANOTHER AND THE work fed on itself until he could not distinguish a change. He measured time in happenings, not days or weeks.

  There was the day of the snake. He was working next to a small girl of eight or nine or ten, he could not tell. Somehow a rattlesnake had found its way this far north and into the beets. The girl was hoeing and the boy saw the snake and while he had never seen one before he knew instantly what it was and he froze. The snake was two feet from his right leg and he could do nothing, but the girl simply reached across two rows with her hoe and with an almost delicate flick took the snake's head off. All without looking up, without pausing, with no acknowledgment that the boy existed, she killed the snake and moved on, missed one beet strike to kill a snake, then on, the small girl with the straw hat on her head moving off down the row while he stood, still frozen, watching the snake roll over and over, its pale belly writhing asats nerves slowly died.

  And the day of the Madonna. There was a woman he did not know by name—he thought Maria but several of them were named Maria— and he thought she should not be there because she was enormous with child. He had seen pregnant aunts and some cousins and women on the street back in town but none this large. She was of course beautiful, as he thought all the Mexican women were, with thick black hair and dark almond eyes and skin the color of caramel and the pregnancy made her the more beautiful in some way he did not understand. He felt it was wrong for her to work in the fields. There came a day when he was not twenty feet away from her and she was bent hoeing and she swore, “;Chingar Then he heard the sound of liquid splashing and saw water running down her legs beneath her skirt and she looked at the boy, through the boy at something he could not imagine, and went down to her knees and then onto her back.

  The boy screamed at the men and they saw her go down and came running, one of them her husband or the man the boy thought was her husband, and the boy moved closer to help, though he had no idea what to do.

  In the end, there wasn't much for him to do. It was not her first pregnancy and she heaved some and lay back and heaved some more with two younger women helping her and on the fourth heave or maybe the fortieth—the boy had never seen such pain on anyone's face—a baby slid out onto one of the men's shirts to be caught by the women who were helping her. They wiped the baby with another shirt and handed it to the woman and one of the younger women said the words “Santa Maria, “very softly and here the new mother did a strange thing.

  She put the baby on her breasts and covered it with her hands so that the palms were over the baby's eyes and she dug her heels in and tried to push away, hiding the baby, and the boy felt she was embarrassed because he had watched all of it and thought she did not want him to see.

  “She is hiding the baby from us,” he said, looking away. “From me.”

  “No,” the old man said. “Not you. She is hiding the baby from the beets so that they will not see him and in that way perhaps he'll never have to know the beets.”

  So he learned that they hated the beets as he did, and he marveled all the more at their humor, which was always there, and their grace.

  And so another week passed.

  There came a day when he could bend to the hoe and chop in a rhythm that held a kind of grace and at the end of that day he looked up and saw that he had matched the work of his Mexican companions.

  Soon after, they ran out of beets and they had to leave. But there were many farmers with beets to thin and they simply walked down the road a mile and started another endless field with rows that went up to the sky and its hot sun and that gave them the ache-joy of work and new pots of beans and meat and tortillas to eat.

  The boy did not know how long it would last, did not care, but centered on the work and the Mexicans as he would have centered on a family if he'd had a family; if he thought of how it might all come to end he assumed he would just go on with them.

  One night the old man sat and smoked and told him of working in California in the fruit orchards and picking lettuce and artichokes and the boy nodded.

  He had money now. He had h
is hoe and gloves and had come up to an acre a day and kept it all except for ten cents every four days for Bull Durham tobacco and papers, which the farmer bought for a nickel and sold to them for a dime. His pockets were jammed with money because he rarely went to town and spent it, except for one brief trip to replace his tattered jeans. He had adopted the fears of the Mexicans as well as their work habits.

  “Everybody knows we are here,” the old man told him on another evening. “They know we are not legal; we are like ghosts that they see but do not recognize. As long as we just work and do not go into town or make a difficulty we are all right and they leave us alone.”

  And so the boy decided it would be the same for him. He would just work and pocket the money and not make a difficulty and he did not think past it

  The next farm only kept them busy for eight days and then on to the next, where the boy fell in love.

  He had of course been in love many times with different girls in school, an aching love, a love of blue eyes and ponytails and bobby sox and pointy new brassieres and teasing laughter and red lips and furtive looks—a love that brought pain from the center of his life. The girls didn't see him. None of the girls knew him or thought of him because he was not popular and did not play sports or dress right and had drunks for parents. But he loved them still; loved them with all that he was, loved Shirley and Anne and Elaine and had dreams of them until his life was ruined and he ran off.

  He had decided that he would go through life poor and with a broken heart—well, less poor now that he was making good money hoeing beets. Then they came to the Bill Flaherty farm.

  It was almost time to stop thinning beets in North Dakota because the plants had grown too large and other illegal workers had worked other fields and there were none left. The old man had talked to the boy again of riding a bus out to California to work the fields there when in some way—the boy never understood how the Mexicans came to know things—-word came that there was another local farm that needed beets thinned.

  They walked four miles down a dirt road, wearing their straw hats with the green plastic brims and carrying their clothes and belongings in feed sacks—the boy now had two pairs of Levi's and an extra pair of tennis shoes and a light wind-breaker and two T-shirts, plus his hoe and gloves to carry—until they saw a sign scrawled with black paint on cardboard that said:

  THINNERS NEEDED

  And they turned in to see an eighty-acre field of beets.

  Eighty acres was not much; they had worked fields that were so long they could not see the far end when they started, giant farms, and this small stand would not take them a week working at their normal rate.

  So the old man went to the house while they waited and soon a short barrel-chested man wearing an old felt hat came out and looked at them. He smiled and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice and said to the boy, “How the hell did you get in with these people?”

  “I work with them.”

  The man stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Makes no matter, if you can thin beets. I should never have planted the cussed things. I've got right next to twelve hundred acres of wheat and thought I'd try a little stand of beets. Big pain in the ass, all this babying and thinning…”

  And so they started to thin beets for Bill Flaherty and would have gone in and out and been done and the boy would have gone on with them to California and all the other places except that it rained.

  There had been showers now and again that kept them out of the fields for an hour or so because when the soil was wet it stuck to the hoe and they couldn't cut the plants off.

  But now it rained, hard, for a full day and it took three more days for the water to dry off the fields, three days of nothing to do but sit and watch the sky and fields and wait. The Mexicans were very good at it, waiting, but the boy hated it after the first day.

  It was not thai the place was bad. Flaherty was as nice as others had been mean. He went into town and bought a twenty-five-pound bag of pinto beans and ten pounds of hamburger and twenty pounds of flour and gave it 2dl to the Mexicans to cook and eat while they waited. Everybody was well fed and had fat on their lips and one night they had what the old Mexican called a, fandango, which, the boy learned, was a dance.

  They cooked and ate early and cleared away a place in a machine shed for a dancing area and one of the Mexican men had a guitar the boy had not seen before and another used a harmonica and the music mixed with the summer night in some way to make it seem more than just a guitar and harmonica.

  Soon many of the Mexicans were dancing, the men one way and the women another way, around in circles, and the old man pulled the boy into the shuffling dance around the center of the machine shed in the pale light of one bulb hanging from the high ceiling.

  At first the boy did not feel the music and simply stepped as they stepped, but then it took him and he was moving his feet to the guitar and harmonica and trying not to stare at the circle of women dancing because they had all started to perspire through their damp white shirts and some of them were not wearing undergarments and it was then, just then, that he saw Lynette.

  Bill Flaherty had heard the music from the house and brought his wife, Alice, who was large and round and seemed to be all smiles, and his daughter to watch the Mexicans dance. His daughter was named Lynette and the boy saw her and could not think.

  She had long dark hair and an oval face and deep brown eyes and was perhaps seventeen and tall and slender and moved to the music as she stood next to her father and watched the Mexicans dance.

  And me, he thought, I am here and she is watching me as well, but he could not tell if she even noticed him. She stayed a few minutes and went back to the house and Bill and Alice followed her a little while later. The next day the ground was dry and they went back to hoeing, and nothing more happened.

  Except that the boy could not stop thinking of her, of Lynette, standing in the pale light watching them dance. When they finished the eighty acres and Bill paid them, the Mexicans started to walk down the driveway and the boy followed, his hoe and feed sack over his shoulder. But Bill stopped him.

  “Where are you from?” Bill looked off at the beet field.

  “I'm with them.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you're not a Mexican and I thought…well, let's try it another way. Can you drive a tractor?”

  The boy had driven tractors on his uncle's farm, had plowed and disced and even drilled seed, but he merely nodded.

  “I need help here, for the rest of summer. Someone who can drive a tractor. I've got a bunch of lease land I've got to work up and get ready for winter wheat planting.…”

  And here a picture of Lynette entered the boy's mind. He had been thinking of going on with the Mexicans because he was feeling like a man of the road now, with some money in his pocket and another hill to get over—a phrase he'd heard in a country-and-western song—but the clear picture of Lynette came into his mind and he opened his mouth and said, “What would it pay?”

  Bill looked at him and back out across the field and dipped a pinch of snuff into his lower lip. “Five a day and found, including Saturday and Sunday if you want to keep at it.”

  “That comes out at thirty-five dollars a week.”

  Bill nodded. “A hundred and fifty a month if you work straight through.”

  “I make eleven dollars a day hoeing beets.”

  Another nod. “When there are beets to hoe. But when it rains or the beets are done, so are you. I'm offering steady work here for the rest of the summer.”

  Again Lynette was there—a clear picture. The boy nodded. He'd seen her exactly twice, she was at least a year older than he was and yet he could not stop thinking about her. “When do I start?”

  By this time the Mexicans were at the end of the driveway and he thought to run after them and say goodbye but he stopped, thinking of Lynette, and then they turned the corner onto the road, walking all in white to the next job, and were gone and he did not see them again and would never
in his life see them again. He walked with Bill back into the yard and it was in this way he came to work a steady job and to fall in love for the first time.

  FOUR

  HE NEVER ONCE SPOKE TO LYNETTE.

  Bill set him up in a small trailer next to the machine sheds that had once been used for camping but was now falling apart. It had a bunk across the end covered with rfiouse droppings and a small table next to the bunk. No lights, no heat, and when it rained it leaked like a sieve.

  “You won't be in here that much,” Bill told the boy. “We work all the time summer and fall. You'll bê working from light to dark and then some.”

  Except that it wasn't work, not like hoeing beets had been. It was just sitting driving a tractor. Bill had two large Case diesel tractors and it only took him a few minutes that first day to teach the boy how to refuel and run one of them. He hooked the diesel onto a disc and sent the boy off to work the fields he'd leased.

  The fields were a good three miles from his farm and once the boy was there working, Bill kept him there until well after dark. Alice drove out in a pickup and brought him cake and sandwiches for forenoon lunch, a full hot meal in lard buckets for midday dinner, cake and sandwiches again for afternoon lunch and then a full supper, always taken in the field so he could keep working.

  He had thought at first they might send Lynette with the food but it was always Alice, always good food, more than he could possibly eat but always Alice. She brought him coffee to drink in a Thermos and he hated coffee but drank it anyway, with sugar she brought in an old peanut butter jar, to keep awake on the droning tractor he was driving.