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Cicadas cried out. I was bathed in perspiration, and Anson was fanning me with his hat. My cotton sack had little more than a wad of cotton inside, but he had shoved it under my head. There was not a dry thread on me, despite Anson's fanning.
    When I opened my eyes, Anson peered down at me. “Little Man, let's go to the house,” he said. Then he called to Ernest, “I'm taking this boy to the house. The heat is getting to him.”
    Ernest, with a sweep of his hand, indicated go ahead.
    The Knuckleheads had stopped picking and were watching us. I saw their mouths working and knew what one of them was saying: “This makes my tail cut cordwood.”
    But before Anson lifted me into the saddle, he picked me up and hung me by the galluses of my overalls on the steelyards, weighing me as he might a sack of cotton. He trembled, and he trembled again swinging me up onto the horse's back.
    â€œSixty-nine pounds and thirteen years old,” he remarked. “We need to put some pounds on you.” And then, “Are you right sure you're thirteen?”
    I said I was right sure.
    â€œLet's say you're six,” he said. “To me, you're six.”
    I didn't respond. I didn't know then that he had had a child who had died at that age. Little Johnnes.
    Now at last he asked my name. I told him. He studied me a moment.
    He was never to address me by it.

We were to only have that one day in the cotton fields. Anson hadn't needed us in the first place.
    On our second day at Chinaberry, he had other jobs for us. Having already apprized Ernest's experience in the livery trade, he proposed that Ernest work with the horses at the ranch, in part to spell himself. That way, at least until fall roundup, he'd have more time at home. Cadillac and Rance were hired to deliver ice in drays to houses in a town some dozen miles away, starting from an ice plant the Winters family owned. All leapt at the chance of doing otherwise than they were now doing. Particularly Ernest, who saw a chance for higher-class employment.
    â€œNow you Knuckleheads won't have to pop another sweat,” Ernest said to Cadillac and Rance. “And you can eat all the ice you want.”
    In hindsight, I believe that when he first laid eyes on the four of us, the wheels were already turning in Anson's head. In things that mattered to him, he was fast on the draw. The second morning of our stay, I woke up and found that Ernest was already off to the ranch and the Knuckleheads were gone to the ice plant. Anson had preceded Ernest in a truck, Ernest following. Blunt had taken the boys in the pickup truck. Ernest had apparently abandoned his mandate, aware that I was in more caring handsthan his own. And he had been told about Blunt and his longtime career as guardian of Anson and Jack in childhood, so he figured Blunt would become my shadow as well.
    I waked in that far room at Chinaberry, alone. The house had blinds rather than shades, and they were half-open, the sun already high outside. I heard doves calling. And I had hardly cracked my eyes before Lurie was standing in the door with a pan of water, a washrag floating in it, and in her other hand a goblet of water with a floating lump of ice. Even with my taste buds dulled by the ice, the water was just barely drinkable.
    Lurie set the pan down on a bureau, looked into the chamber pot by the bed, and finding it empty, pointed to it and withdrew. I jumped out of bed, used the pot, and pushing it under the boards, climbed back in. I was sleeping in the single nightshirt I had with me. Lurie returned, pulled back the sheet, and set about washing my face and neck, not neglecting my ears. She examined my feet ruefully. I had washed the surface dirt from them the night before, and Ernest had torn a strip from a clean handkerchief and anchored the unshed toenail anew. My rusty heels and ankles shamed me.
    â€œWe'll do something about that toe tonight,” she said, more to herself than to me, and