Read Chinaberry for Free Online Page A

hundred pounds a day.
    We were to work apart from this crowd, who busied the rows like a swarm of bees feeding on clover. We chose a set of rows and began. For me, it was as if I'd never left the business; with the others it was an awkwardness gradually overcome. To picka boll of cotton would seem not to be difficult, as it is not. The point is cotton weighs like air, next to nothing, and pays a cent a pound, so elbows must fly. And there is an art to snatching the locks without puncturing the cuticles of your fingers on the dry sharp point of the boll. I had acquired this art. Cadillac and Rance and Ernest had bleeding fingers within a half hour. And there was the sun beating down even at five in the evening, apparently refusing to set, and there was the headache breeze fanning across the land. That half hour convinced the three of them that our stay at Chinaberry had to be short, that we should move on as soon as we could raise a stake of money enough for grub and gasoline. And to replace all four tires, which were slick as a pool ball. The transmission had also been acting up.
    The pickers strode back and forth to the wagon, where the waiting baskets were filled with cotton, then weighed and dumped. The three of us together—the Knuckleheads and I— had not yet filled a single basket. I was performing with the best of them, if not better, but still we hadn't gathered much.
    We saw Anson approaching at a distance on his saddle horse, Blue. Blue was a roan, her name at odds with her coat. The identifying number at the auction where she was purchased had been stamped in azure paint on her rump.
    On a Texas afternoon with the air like glass, you can see farther than any place earthly, and the man and his horse appeared long before they drew up at the wagon.
    Anson set a glass jug—full of lemonade and wrapped in burlap—on the wagon and hitched Blue to the wagon wheel. He strode out to us, walking beside me and dropping cotton into my sack.
    The three of us had not a dry thread on us and the water was dripping from our noses. Anson's face was dry as a hat. Not a bead of sweat dampened his brow.
    Anson sauntered away down the row, an imposing silhouette against the white sky.
    â€œDon't that man ever sweat?” Rance whispered.
    In the field, a jackrabbit sprang up and hopped away, in not too much of a hurry.
    â€œGosh dog!” the Knuckleheads said as one.
    Being only familiar with the cottontails back home in Alabama, we were astounded. It was as if a mouse had become as large as a cat.
    â€œThem ears!” said one.
    â€œBig as a calf!” said the other.
    Ernest was less impressed. The sun beating down and the prospect of the endless rows of cotton before us would have dampened any elation. Lifting his hat, he rubbed a hand across his head back to front where the hair was thinning, and the gathered sweat came off in a shower.
    â€œIf you Knuckleheads don't get to work, you'll be
eating
jack-rabbits,” Ernest said. We were so stuffed with food from Anson's table that it made the work all the more laborious. To the right of us, the pickers were cleaning up the cotton, working like machines, elbows flying, hands snatching.
    I got drowsy and yearned to take a nap. The heat was like a curtain we moved through, our motions dulled and heavy.
    My drowsiness grew.
    â€œYou're getting too hot,” Anson said, appearing beside me as if out of the blue. “Let's go to the wagon, get you a drink of lemonade, rest awhile.”
    I followed. He poured me the cold lemonade. The alkaline taste of the water surmounted even the lemon juice and the sweetening. It tasted like medicine. But it was cold.
    I sat in the shade of the wagon, and I could not keep my eyes open. Anson had not spoken. Now he said, “Sleepy sleep. Sleepysleep.” Those were the two words I was to hear nightly in the future, when I started sleeping in his room.
    I slept, and when I wakened, the sun had lowered a bit.