The Convict and Other Stories

“What about you, Juanita?”

“Why do you ask me?” She kept working along the row without looking up.

“Because sometimes your brother brings short dogs on the bus and sells them to people like Billy Haskel.”

“Then you can talk with my brother and Billy Haskel. Then when my brother calls you a liar you can fire him, and the rest of us will leave, too.”

Both Mr. Willis and I stared at her. At that time in Texas a Mexican, particularly a young girl who did piecework in a vegetable field, didn’t talk back to a white person. Mr. Willis’s gray eyes were so hot and intense that he didn’t even blink at the drops of sweat that rolled from the liner of his sun helmet into his brows.

“Billy’s been picking along with the rest of us, Mr. Willis,” I said. “He just cuts up sometime when it’s payday.”

“You know that, huh?”

I hated his sarcasm and righteousness and wondered how anyone could be fool enough to sit in a church and listen to this man talk about the gospel.

He walked away from us, stepping carefully over each row, his starched overalls creasing neatly behind the knees. Billy was at the water can in the shade of the oaks with his back to Mr. Willis and was just buttoning his shirt over his stomach when he heard or felt Mr. Willis behind him.

“Lord God Almighty, you give me a start there, Preacher,” he said.

“You know my rule, Billy.”

“If you mean chunking the ’mater, I guess you got me.”

Mr. Willis reached out and took the bottle from under the flap of Billy’s shirt. He unscrewed the cap and poured the wine on the ground. Billy’s face reddened and he opened and closed his hands in desperation.

“Oh, sweet Lord, you do punish a man,” he said.

Mr. Willis started walking toward his house at the far end of the field, holding the bottle lightly with two fingers and swinging the last drops onto the ground. Then he stopped, his back still turned toward us, as though a thought were working itself toward completion in his head, and came back to the water can with his gray eyes fixed benignly on Billy Haskel’s face.

“I can’t pay a man for drinking in the field,” he said. “You had better go on home today.”

“I picked for you many a season, Preacher.”

“That’s right, and so you knew my rule. This stuff’s going to kill you one day, and that’s why I can’t pay you while you do it.”

Billy swallowed and shook his head. He needed the work, and he was on the edge of humiliating himself in front of the rest of us. Then he blinked his eyes and blew his breath up into his face.

“Well, like they say, I was looking for a job when I found this one,” he said. “I’ll get my brother to drive me out this afternoon for my check.”

He walked to the blacktop, and I watched him grow smaller in the distant pools of heat that shimmered on the tar surfacing. Then he walked over a rise between two cornfields and was gone.

“That’s my fault,” Juanita said.

“He would have fired him anyway. I’ve seen him do it to people before.”

“No, he stopped and came back because he was thinking of what I said. He couldn’t have gone to his house without showing us something.”

“You don’t know Mr. Willis. He won’t pay Billy for today, and that’s one day’s wage he’s kept in his pocket.”

She didn’t answer, and I knew that she wasn’t going to talk the rest of the afternoon. I wanted to do something awful to Mr. Willis.

At five o’clock we lined up by the bus to be paid. Clouds had moved across the sun, and the breeze was cool off the river. In the shadow of the bus the sweat dried on our faces and left lines in the dust film like brown worms. Billy’s brother came out in a pickup truck to get Billy’s check. I was right about Mr. Willis: he didn’t pay Billy for that day. The brother started to argue, then gave it up and said, “I reckon the sun would come up green if you didn’t try to sharp him, Preacher.”

Juanita was standing in front of me. She had taken her bandanna down, and her Indian hair fell on her shoulders like flat star points. She began pushing it away from the nape of her neck until it lay evenly across her back. Someone bumped against me and made me brush right into her rump. I had to bite my teeth at the quiver that went through my loins.

“Do you want to go to the root-beer place on the highway?”

I said.