"He's a worker," I said.
"That's good." He looked over at the black family's shack. A little girl was playing with a doll on the gallery. "Y'all been working straight through?"
"Yes, sir, haven't missed a beat," I said.
"I don't want him playing with anybody back here."
I tried to keep my focus on Buford and the sled at the end of the row, let the words pass, like it wasn't really important I hear them.
"You understand what I'm saying?" Jude said.
"Yes, sir. You're pretty clear."
"You bothered by what I'm telling you?"
"That's the little girl who works with her mom at the cafe, ain't it?"
"Don't look at something else when you talk to me, Jerry Joe."
I raised my eyes up to his. He looked cut out of black cloth against the sun. My eyes burned in the heat and dust.
"It's time the boy learns the difference, that's all," he said.
"I'm not here to argue, Mr. Jude."
"You may intend to be polite, Jerry Joe. But don't ever address a white man as a person of color would."
Jude knew how to take your skin off with an emery wheel.
I liked Mrs. LaRose. She cooked big breakfasts of eggs and smokehouse ham and refried beans and grits for all the hands and was always baking pies for the evening meal. But she seemed to have a blind spot when it came to Jude. Maybe it was because he was a war hero and her father died in one of Hitler's ovens and Jude brought her here from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus. What I mean is, he wasn't above a Saturday night trip down into Mexico with his foreman, a man who'd been accused of stealing thoroughbred semen from a ranch he worked over in Presidio. One Sunday morning, when the foreman was still drunk from the night before and we were driving out to the rig, he said, "Y'all sure must grow 'em randy where you're from."
"Beg your pardon?" I said.
"Bringing back a German heifer ain't kept Jude from milking a couple at a time through the fence."
Later, he caught me alone in the pipe yard. He was quiet a long time, cleaning his nails with a penknife, still breathing a fog of tequila and nicotine. The he told me I'd better get a whole lot of gone between me and the ranch if I ever repeated what he'd said.
Don't misunderstand, I looked up to Jude in lots of ways. He told me how scared he'd been when they flew into German ack-ack. He said it was like a big box of torn black cotton, and there was no way to fly over or around or under it. They'd just have to sit there with their sweat freezing in their hair while the plane shook and bounced like it was breaking up on a rock road. Right after Dresden a piece of shrapnel the size and shape of a twisted teaspoon sliced through his flight jacket and rib cage so he could actually put his hand inside and touch the bones.
I blame myself for what happened next.
Buford and me were hoeing weeds in the string beans at the end of the field, when this old Mexican hooked one wheel of the pump truck off the edge of the irrigation ditch and dropped the whole thing down on the axle. I left Buford alone and got the jack and some boards out of the cab, and the old man and me snugged them
under the frame and started jacking the wheel up till we could rock it forward and get all four wheels on dirt again. Then I looked through the square of light under the truck and saw Buford across the field, playing under a shade tree with the little black girl just as Jude came down the road in his station wagon.
I felt foolish, maybe cowardly, too, for a reason I couldn't explain, lying on my belly, half under the truck, while Jude got out of his station wagon and walked toward his son with a look that made Buford's face go white.
He pulled Buford by his hand up on the black family's gallery, went right through their door with no more thought than he would in kicking open a gate on a hog lot, and a minute later came back outside with one of the little girl's dresses wadded up in his hand.
First, he whipped Buford's bare legs with a switch, then pulled the dress down over his head and made him stand on a grapefruit crate out in the middle of the field, with all the Mexicans bent down in the rows, pretending they didn't see it.
I knew I was next.
He drove out to where the pump truck was still hanging on the jack, and stared out the car window at me like I was some dumb animal he knew would never measure up.
"You didn't mind your priorities. What you see yonder is the cost of it," he said.
"Then you should have took it out on me."