How to Pronounce Knife

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

  My mother drove us—it was just me and her—out to the hog farm. Driving was something she liked to do. She got her licence not long ago. She had failed the test four times, but she kept going back until she passed.

  She had bought the car from our neighbour. Their daughter was going off to college, someplace far, so the girl couldn’t take her car with her. It was bright orange and shaped like a jelly bean. It had tinted windows my mother didn’t need. We drove out in the quiet, no radio on, the car’s headlights leading us into the dark. I had the window down because I wanted the cold air to wake me.

  I didn’t know what kind of job my mother had signed us up for, dressed like this at one in the morning. I had heard from a friend that there are always jobs at the hog farm, for those who can handle it. You can clean the shit from the floor, or clean the hogs when they’re still alive, just before they put them out on the line. Or you can rub the male ones to get them excited to mate. I didn’t want that to be my job and hoped my mother hadn’t signed me up for anything like that. But a job is a job, and even one like that, you could still have your dignity.

  My first day on the job wasn’t a good one. I did everything wrong. What I was asked to do didn’t turn out to be so easy.

  Me and my mother were the only women. There were about fifteen men, and they were all Lao like us. We were what people called us—nice. I had seen these men before at the card parties my mother went to. She cooked meals with their wives in the kitchen. When we all sat down to eat on those nights, everyone would talk about their work, their bosses, how hard it was back home, how they all came to the country we live in now—but no one cried or talked sad. They all laughed. The sadder the story, the louder the laughter. Always a competition. You’d try to one-up the person who’d come before you with an even more tragic story and a louder laugh. But no one was laughing here. Every face was serious.

  Out in the field, my mother put on something like a headlamp—small, with a red light—that freed up her hands. She took out the soup cans with the rice in them and handed one to me. I followed her and tried to do what she did. To begin, she scanned the field and picked a spot far from the other workers. They talked, she said, and the sound of their talk kept their worm count low.

  Then she squatted and placed the soup can on the ground near her ankle. When she moved forward, she’d also move the can so it was always within reach, shadowing her. We were supposed to wear gloves, but my mother didn’t. She said you got a better grip this way. After each pick I watched her dip her hands into the soup can and rub the tips of her fingers in the uncooked rice. That was how she kept her fingers dry. She told me her hands were always cold, but she had to keep them the same temperature as the worms otherwise they could feel the heat of her hands and slip away before she got close to them.

  As she crept along, she pulled worms out of the cool earth with her bare hands and dropped them into the Styrofoam cups that were attached to her lower legs with a scrunchie. Everyone had their own way of attaching the cups to themselves. Some tied them to their legs with cloth or rubber bands; others had sewn pockets onto the bottoms of their pants. Inside the cups were a few strands of fresh grass so the first pick of worms had a bit of cushion and wouldn’t land so hard. It also gave the worms something familiar to feel, so they wouldn’t panic and squirm around, injuring themselves. In half an hour, my mother had gone back and forth across the field four times and had already dumped eight Styrofoam cups into a large Styrofoam box, next to which was a man in charge, keeping count of her harvest.

  At first, I forgot my can of uncooked rice as I moved along the line and let the slime build up on my hands, making it difficult for me to hold on to anything. I wasted time looking for the can in the field and forgot where exactly I had last picked. I didn’t stay bent down and close to the earth. Every time I picked, I stood up, and by the time I got my fingers back to the ground again, all the worms were gone. They heard me coming. So I tried to stay crouched down like my mother. Even then, when I found a batch and pulled at them, they did not come out of the ground smooth and whole, but in pieces. I had pulled too hard and their bodies were broken.

  The easiest way to get your numbers to be good was to find a mound of worms, all roped together and mating. When you got one of those, speed was everything, as the worms below that pile start to crawl back into the earth. But my mother got those too. She pulled at them slowly and steadily, giving the worms enough time to let go of what ground they were crawling back to and come out whole into her hand. She filled her Styrofoam cups easily, with all their bodies intact.

  I didn’t like how the worms felt in my hands, so cold and slimy, and raw. There was no mistaking they were alive. They never stopped slinking and slithering around, stretching their bodies out into such a length that I wasn’t even sure these were worms I had just picked. I could feel their bodies pulse and throb and tickle in my hands, and they would jab at me with a head or tail—I couldn’t tell which, both ends looked the same to me. I wanted to scream, to yell out about how gross it all was, and to throw them back to the ground, but I didn’t want to shame my mother in front of everyone. So I held on. This was a job wanted by many, and I was lucky my mom got me in.

  As we drove back home later that morning, still in the dark, my mother said, “That was fun, wasn’t it? Picking together like that.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You didn’t do so good on your first day, huh?”

  I had picked only two cups compared with what was probably my mother’s hundreds. It had taken so long for me to fill the cups that the worms I picked piled up and crushed my earlier pickings. I hadn’t realized the weight of them would be too much. I had a bunch of dead worms no one was going to pay for. They had to be alive to be worth something.

  “Next time. Next time you’ll get more,” my mother said. “Everyone does bad on their first day.”

  I thought of my father then, what he would think of us doing this, picking worms. What he would say. My father was a good man. No one who knew him had a bad thing to say about him. He died early in my life. I can hardly see his face in my mind anymore. I do remember that he used to call me Ugly. My mother said he called me that so my looks wouldn’t go to my head. She said the time for thinking about looks was after you get educated and work a good job. Then looks, if they’re any good, are worth something to you. But you couldn’t do it the other way around.

  I often wondered if my mother would marry again. Most of the people we knew were married or had someone. When I asked if she was ever lonely and sad, listening to her Elvis tapes late at night in her room, she said, “What do you want me to do? Get one of them white guys? Can you imagine. They probably will want me to say things like ‘Me lope you long tie’ and pump me like one of them hogs. I got my pride and I ain’t lowering it for no man. I rather be alone.”

  You could say I was spoiled. I’d never had a job before, but I was fourteen, getting to be that age where it was costing my mother money to have me around. I got good grades, and so she had this idea that I might go to college someday.

  Back in her country, she had never gone to school. She said a family had to have money for that, and even when there was money it went to her brothers. “Wasted it all on them, if you ask me,” she said. She had seen schoolgirls in their white-collared shirts and navy-blue skirts walking to school while she sat and looked after the chickens in the yard. She was responsible for chasing all the chickens back to her property. It wasn’t a hard job. It was just something her family needed done.

  “I was a peasant girl. You don’t know anything about that. I wanted to be wearing one of them navy-blue skirts and white-collared shirts, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen for me. But it’s going to happen for you. You’re going to be one of them navy-blue-skirt-white-collared-wearing girls going to school. I might not have been one of them myself, but I brought someone into the world who will be. I sure can be proud of that.”

  I didn’t tell my mother they don’t wear uniforms i
n college here. I wanted her to have her dreams.

  Every Saturday morning, I went back to that hog farm and picked those worms. The rest of the week, my mom went on her own and picked with the regulars. I got to be real good at it, but not like my mother. She really was a natural, if ever there was one. She didn’t pick like the others. For one thing, she was the only one who took off her shoes and went barefoot. She said, “I don’t like them rubber shoes. I know they can hear me coming. My feet don’t make noise at all this way.” Sometimes she even got to turning off her headlamp and feeling her way through the line. She knew where the worms were without having to see them, picking blind and bringing them back in large numbers. My mother called the worms “shit of the earth.” She would always say, “Man, I love shit of the earth,” after every pick we did.

  When I got tired, she told me to take a break. I’d go sit in the car and watch her in the field. You wouldn’t know just by watching them that it was worms everyone was picking. From this distance, it looked like some rich woman had lost a diamond ring and everyone had been ordered to find it. I knew my mother was out there too, although I didn’t know where exactly, and I didn’t worry about her as it wouldn’t be too long before she emerged to hurriedly add to her worm count.

  Whenever I had any time to myself, I often got to thinking of my father. You aren’t supposed to remember things from when you’re two, but I did. All we wanted was to live. To put it into words is to bring back what happened. He was there, his head above the water, pushing me and my mother across the river, and then I looked over and saw his head go under. He came back up once more, and his mouth opened, but he made no sound as he went under again. I couldn’t swim and my mother couldn’t either. But somehow she managed to steer us across, holding on to a rubber tire. Afterwards, my mother asked me if I saw what happened to my father, and I said I didn’t. I didn’t want her to know. Now I like to believe he ended up somewhere in Malaysia. Maybe he lost his memory and was living with a new family. Just to know he is living, that’s good enough for me.

  The last sound he made wasn’t a sound, even.

  I didn’t want to go to the school dance. But my mother insisted. She said I shouldn’t miss out on things in life. I knew it was a big deal for her. She made me a pink, bubbly dress, and I tried the thing on for her to get the fit right.

  Some guy at school asked if he could take me to the dance. James was his name. I thought he was all right, I guess. He sat next to me in the classes we had together. I didn’t understand why. There were other seats free. He drew helicopters on the corner of my notebooks. When I asked why he went and did that for, he said, “So we can fly away together.” I erased or crossed them out. When it rained outside, he would turn to me and say, “It’s raining,” as if it was an important thing in his life, to see that it was raining and to have someone to tell about it.

  He was around me a lot because we were paired together for this parenting unit in Family Studies. I didn’t want to be anyone’s partner. I wanted to raise the egg we were given on my own, but James said, “I’m not going to let you raise it alone.” I didn’t turn him down because we got more points that way, working with someone. It was fine with me. It was just an egg, that’s all it was.

  When James came over to work on the assignment after school, he talked to my mother. She adored him because he looked a little like Elvis. I didn’t want her to get too attached to him. I didn’t want him to break her heart. I tried to get James to quit our project. I was careless with the egg and dropped it on the floor during the few hours I had alone with it. After that, I thought he’d quit on me and the project, but he said, “It was an accident. Things like that happen in life.”

  Still, I didn’t want James to be so nice to me. I showed him my worm-picking outfit with the slime stains on it, but he didn’t find that disgusting at all. He said, “That’s awesome! I’d love to go do that with you sometime.” I never heard of such a thing. Someone other than my mother who actually wanted to pick worms.

  I wanted him to know that it wasn’t awesome at all. I wanted him to see that it was hard work and you needed real skill to be a good picker. James was so good at things, I wanted to see him fail at something. I wanted to see him struggle to fill a box, to step on the worms because he didn’t know where to look for them, to pull too hard and have their bodies break apart in his hands. I wanted him to be yelled at when his count was low, and for him to depend on something for his living that he had no control of—the weather.

  When I got up at one that Saturday morning, James was already having coffee with my mother in the kitchen. He wore jeans and a plain blue T-shirt. We gave him the can with the rice in it and he said, “Cool. I’m so excited!”

  We drove out to the farm and he leaped out of the car. My mom told the farmer that this boy wanted to come along, that he didn’t have to worry about pay because he’d work for free. The farmer liked the idea. He said, “C’mon now. Let’s see what you can do.”

  James wore the little light on his head and started like the rest of us, but it turned out he was just like my mother. His counts were very high for a first-timer because she was the one who trained him on what to do. All the little things that had taken her months and seasons to learn and figure out on her own were given freely to him. She was there guiding him. And he picked with enthusiasm because it was her way, grabbing at those bodies as if it were all a fortune in gold.

  Back in Laos, the men who worked in this field had been doctors, teachers, farmers with their own land, like my mom. None had set out for a life spent crouched down in the soft earth, groping for faceless things in the night, this shit of the earth. And they picked like it. James had never been anything else, except a kid. James picked like a man who was free.

  Not long after this, James, at fourteen, became our manager. The man who owned the business said he wanted someone else to take over for him, and since James spoke English so good he could have the job. He was impressed that James had been willing to work for free the first few times. Said he was an example to all of us.

  I looked over at my mother, but I couldn’t see anything because it was so dark. I knew what James got was something she wished for herself. She loved this job and she had been at it for much longer than James, but no one had noticed her work at all. And James? He was happy to have a job that paid so well. He didn’t wonder if he deserved the job or not. He was fourteen and he was boss.

  Now my mother had some things to say about James and him getting to be boss on our drives home. It all came out then. He wasn’t riding with us anymore. She said she didn’t care how he got to the farm—his parents probably drove him or the farmer went to get him himself. “They help each other out like that, you know.” She said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? I brought that fucker, and he takes my job. What the fuck. He’s a fucking kid. And they accuse us of taking their jobs. Well, you know what? That coulda been my job. My job! And he fucking took it. He doesn’t even need the money. What’s he going to buy with it that his parents can’t get for him? I’ve got someone to raise. And why am I so pissed? It’s just shit of the earth. Shit of the earth.”

  James started to change the way we picked. He said rice was something you ate, that it wasn’t something to waste. The uncooked rice in our cans was replaced with sawdust. My mother got splinters drying her hands with it. The cuts got infected from the fertilizer in the soil and the sores worsened.

  Then James told my mother she couldn’t go barefoot anymore. She had to wear the full gear now—the rubber boots and gloves, the crinkly plastic bag with holes cut out for the head and arms. He said, “That’s the equipment. You have to wear it.” She did, and her harvest numbers fell.

  To make up for the lower numbers, she stayed out on the field longer. She began to forget the things she once did so naturally. She didn’t move with the same ease and love she had before, and the worms sensed her coming and slunk back into the ground and out of reach. I watched her heart break. She had been the best,
but it hadn’t mattered. The low count of her harvest now didn’t tell you what had happened to the job or how it had changed. And yet the numbers could be used to say a picker was unskilled or lazy. Those things, I knew my mother was not.

  The evening of the school dance came. Although it had only been a few weeks since James first came picking with us, it felt like a lifetime. So much had changed and become confusing to me. I knew James as boss out at the farm, and I knew James as the fourteen-year-old boy I went to school with. They seemed like different people. When I was at work, I would watch him, waiting for his newfound coldness to turn into something else, the way one waits to be loved, to be recognized as someone to be loved. I didn’t look at that face too long because I didn’t like what I saw, and maybe what I wanted to see had never been there.

  The night of the dance, my mother laid out the pink dress I was supposed to wear on my bed. She wasn’t going to be home when he came. She would be out at a card party. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, how to live your life,” she said. “You go on now, if you want to go with him to that school dance. But I don’t want to be here when he gets here. You know how I feel about it. I can’t be nice about it all. It’s just not in me. But you, you’ve got a chance in this life. Pick those worms and get out of this town. Be nice.”

  James arrived alone. He was dressed in a black tuxedo, hair slicked back, and wearing black shoes that clicked on the concrete. He had, in his hand, a pink thing that flopped. A flower.

  I had turned out all the lights. It looked like no one was home. The streetlamp was like a spotlight. I could see the front lawn and when he walked into the light, I could see his whole face. It was small at first and then it got bigger, his forehead looming closer.

  He rang the doorbell. Then he rang it again. When after a few minutes I still did not open the door, he started banging and struggled to turn the knob, but it was locked. He grabbed and pulled at his own hair, and it came loose and wild and undone. I saw it all, standing on the other side of the door, in the dark, watching him in the golden circle that framed the peephole. I did nothing. Not even when I heard him sob. I pressed a finger up to the peephole and held it there. I did not want him to see my open eye.