“I’m tired.”
“I have to be back at Mr. Lowry’s tonight. Would you mind if I hang around a little while before I head up the road?”
“I’ve got to clear my head, Aaron.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
Not as much as I, I thought.
We didn’t speak the rest of the way to her house.
* * *
I WOKE EARLY THE next morning and went into the dining hall with Cotton and Spud and sat down for a big breakfast of eggs and biscuits and bacon and any kind of juice and cereal we wanted. Mr. Lowry and his red-haired, jolly Irish wife fed their employees right. Plus, Mrs. Lowry, with her South Boston accent, always had a good word for everyone in the serving line. She also had the fresh, clean smell of a strawberry cake. No one used profanity in her dining hall. Some of the Mexican families leaned toward one another and said grace. In the coolness of the morning and the softness of the light and the white clouds bunched on the royal-blue magnificence of the mountains, I wondered if the earth could be any better.
I also wondered if this plateau high above the Great American Desert wasn’t more than just the earth, in the same way you wonder sometimes if we are not already inside eternity. I wondered if the columns of sunlight spearing through the clouds on the hillsides and the meadows and the dairy barns and the freshly plowed acreage and the cottonwood trees along the stream were not indeed the pillars of heaven, rising into a kingdom where our predecessors were at work and play in the fields of the Lord.
“What are you thinking about?” Cotton asked. He was sitting across from me, eating scrambled eggs with a spoon, his palm wrapped around the handle.
“I guess we’re bucking bales today,” I said.
“You’re not thinking about that waitress, are you?” Spud asked. Both of them were grinning now.
“I can’t remember what I was thinking about,” I said.
“Right,” Spud said. “The preacher at our church used to call that impure thoughts. He was the same preacher who baptized me by immersion in the Cumberland River and was so drunk he dropped me in the current. A colored woman in the bulrushes pulled me out with a fishnet. That’s a true story.”
“You and Moses?” I asked.
“I’m glad you caught that,” he said. “Us Caudills have friends in high places.”
Cotton took out his cigarette papers and a bag of Bull Durham and cupped a single paper with his index finger and poured tobacco into it. He wet the glue along the rim and rolled the trough into a tight tube and put it in his mouth. “When do you get your stitches out?”
“Three or four more days.”
“Word of caution?” he asked.
“Go ahead.”
“The Vickerses will get theirs down the line,” he said. He struck a paper match and lit his cigarette, his eyes on mine.
“You mean I shouldn’t go after them?” I asked.
He blew out the match. “I didn’t say nothing one way or the other.”
“Then what did you mean, Cotton?”
“Everybody gets the same six feet of dirt in the face. There’s some need it earlier than others.” He opened a Classics Illustrated comic book he had just bought and began reading. Spud’s eyes were as big as quarters.
Chapter Nine
PEOPLE WHO ARE unknowledgeable about agriculture often refer to farm labor as unskilled. Take bucking bales. Try inserting your fingers inside the twine on ninety pounds of compacted grass after it has been rained on, then flinging it up on the flatbed of a truck and repeating the process every four minutes for eight hours. If you want to up the ante, do it in an electric storm.
That’s not all that’s involved. Second-cut hay is usually high-octane and can cause pasture bloat in your cows. Bad grass can also sour their milk. Red clover can give Angus the scours or what is called the bloody shits, whichever term you prefer. That said, and all science aside, if you want sciatica or a slipped disk or a double hernia, there is no better way than bucking bales to fix yourself up proper.
Cotton and Spud and I were stacking them four layers high on a flatbed truck driven by a tiny Japanese woman who, regardless of the weather, always wore baggy blue jeans and a denim coat with a scarf tied under her chin and