Loreda rushed into the fields, went to the row to which she was assigned.
She yanked her long canvas sack around, slung the leather strap over her shoulder.
The bell rang again and Loreda reached into the nearest cotton plant and yelped in pain. When she drew her hand back it was covered in blood. That was when she saw the spikes on the plant. They looked like darning needles. Wincing, she tried again, more slowly this time; still, she felt her flesh tear. She gritted her teeth and kept picking.
For hours the sun beat down, until heat and dust and human sweat were all Loreda could smell. Her throat was so dry it hurt to breathe. She had drunk all the water in her canteen—almost hot enough to scald—and now there was no more. Her bag grew heavier by the minute and her hands hurt.
Nearing noon, she dragged the heavy sack behind her and moved into the line formed at the giant scales. She unhooked the strap and dropped the load and learned instantly why the other pickers hadn’t removed the strap in line: It was a bad idea. Now she had to haul the bag with her bloody, aching hands toward the scales.
She sagged in relief when it was finally her turn. A foreman slung a chain underneath her sack and hung it on the scales.
“Sixty pounds.” The foreman stamped a ticket and handed it to her. “You can cash this in town. Pick faster if you want to keep a job.”
Loreda retrieved her empty bag, backed away, and went back to work.
* * *
SEPTEMBER WAS ONE LONG, hot, backbreaking day after another in the cotton fields. Elsa’s hands bled, her back ached, her knees hurt. Hour after scorching hour. Dawn to dusk,
hunched over, picking bolls of cotton from between the razor-sharp spikes. There were no bathrooms in the fields, so it wasn’t easy for a woman at certain times of the month, and Loreda had just begun menstruating.
Still, there was work. Steady work.
By mid-October, Elsa and Loreda had learned how to pick nearly two hundred pounds of cotton each per day. That meant four dollars a day in combined earnings. It felt like a fortune, even with the ten percent Welty charged to cash their wage chits. They’d been slow to get to the two-hundred-pound mark, but everyone knew there was a learning curve for picking.
* * *
IN NOVEMBER, WHEN THE weather turned blessedly cool, and the last of the cotton had been picked, Elsa’s metal cash box was stuffed with dollar bills. She had stocked up on food, bought bags of flour and rice and beans and sugar, as well as cans of milk and some smoked bacon. There was no refrigeration at the camp, no ice, so she learned to cook in a new way—everything came from bags or cans. No fresh pasta or sun-dried tomatoes, no homemade baked bread or nutty-flavored olive oil. The kids learned to love pork and beans doctored with corn syrup, and chipped beef on toast, and hot dogs cooked over an open fire, and saltine crackers fried in oil and dusted with sugar. American food, Loreda called it.
Elsa tried to hold back as much as she could for the winter, but after so many months of deprivation, she found her children’s joy at suppertime and their full bellies to be her undoing.
Many of the camp’s inhabitants, including Jeb and the boys, had moved on, looking for an extra few days’ work in fields farther away, but Elsa had decided to stay put, as had Jean and her daughters.
It was time for Loreda to be back in school.
On this Saturday morning, Elsa got out of bed and swept the tent’s dirt floor. She didn’t know how it was possible, but dirt grew overnight, in the dark, like mushrooms. She swept the debris outside and opened the tent flaps to let in fresh air.
Outside, a layer of cool gray fog lay over the camp, blurring the sea of tents. She pulled an old newspaper from the salvaged fruit box where they stored every scrap of paper they could find, and read the local news as the coffee brewed.
The aroma brought Loreda stumbling out of the tent, her dark hair a snarl of tangles, her bangs a fringe well past her jawline. “You let me sleep,” she growled.
“No work today,” Elsa said. “You start school on Monday.”
Loreda poured herself a cup of coffee. She pulled the bucket closer to the stove and sat down. “I’d rather pick cotton.”
Elsa wished she had Rafe’s gift for words, his eloquent way of shaping a dream. Loreda needed that now, she needed some spark to relight the fire she’d had before her father’s abandonment and hardship had snuffed it out.
Unfortunately, Elsa didn’t know much about dreaming, but she knew about school and the hardships that came from not fitting in. “I have an idea,” she said.
Loreda gave her a skeptical look
“We are going to have breakfast and go somewhere.”
“My joy is uncontainable.”
Elsa couldn’t help smiling, even as her daughter’s hopelessness wounded her.
Elsa made a quick breakfast of oatmeal cooked in canned milk and topped with sugar for the kids, and then hurried them to get dressed. By nine o’clock, they were headed out from the camp, walking through a brown field draped in diaphanous gray fog.