Under the Same Sky (3 page)

Making a guy get out of bed at six-thirty in the morning on the first day of summer vacation ought to be a crime. Mom and Dad were already up, and Mom had a big breakfast on the table: scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and orange juice. But my stomach just wasn't ready for food at that hour of the morning. I slugged some juice and choked down a piece of toast, with Mom fussing the whole time about how I needed a good meal if I was going to be working all day.

“I'll be fine,” I assured her. Then she began asking if I had a hat, and had I put on sunscreen and mosquito repellent, and didn't I want a jacket, and shouldn't I take a water bottle. It was too much to think about; I wasn't even awake. “Mom, don't worry about it,” I pleaded.

“Your mother's right, Joe,” said Dad.

I took the bottle of sunscreen Mom handed me and went into the bathroom, where I quickly slapped some on my face. Then I grabbed my baseball cap.

“All set?” asked Dad, already standing at the door waiting to leave.

“Yep.”

Mom came over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “See you at lunchtime, Joe. Have a good morning.”

“'Bye, Mom.”

I followed Dad out to the driveway, where a bunch of guys waited next to Dad's pickup and the big farm truck. One of them stepped forward, saying good morning to Dad.

“Morning,” Dad replied. “Manuel, you know my son, Joe, don't you? He'll be setting cabbage with you, like we talked about.”

Manuel nodded to me, and I got my first good look at his face under the brim of his hat. I stared in astonishment. Manuel wasn't some old man, which was what I'd assumed for some reason. He looked like a kid, not much older than I was. Sixteen, maybe seventeen.

“I was thinking you'd start in the south field near the permanent pasture,” Dad went on.

“Yes. I check the ground out there yesterday,” Manuel answered. “It's wet, but not too bad. So I left the big tractor and the planter there for today.” Manuel's English was fairly good, I noticed, although he had a strong accent.

“Good,” Dad said approvingly. “So you've got eight workers and Joe. That'll cover it.”

Oh, thanks, Dad. Eight workers and Joe. What did that make me?

Manuel nodded. “No problem.”

I watched Dad smile at Manuel and slap him on the shoulder in a kind of man-to-man gesture. For a minute, I hoped that I, too, would feel that same comradely hand on my shoulder. But instead Dad turned to me and said, “You listen to Manuel. He'll show you what to do.”

Then he headed over to his pickup and started it up. As he pulled away, he called to Manuel that he had to drive to the nearby town of Penn Yan to pick up a part for the sprayer and would probably be gone all morning.

Manuel addressed the rest of the group in Spanish, and they began walking toward the barn, looking as if they knew exactly what they were doing. Even though I'd grown up on the farm, I really didn't know much about the day-to-day work. Thanks to Mom, I'd never had to do it. I'd never belonged to 4-H or done a lot of the other stuff most farm kids did, either. This hadn't ever bothered me before, but at the moment my cluelessness made me feel like an idiot.

Manuel motioned for me to follow the others. Everybody was picking up boxes filled with baby cabbage plants and carrying them out to the truck, so I did, too. As we walked back and forth, I sneaked peeks at my co-workers. They were older than Manuel, which struck me as weird, since he was clearly in charge. It was hard to tell exactly how much older they were, because they wore hats that hid their faces and they had obviously spent many days out in the sun.

I tried not to stare at a guy whose left arm was just a stump. It ended above where his elbow should have been. I wondered how he managed to work.

Another guy smiled at me, showing lots of gold on his teeth. His skin was really dark, with wrinkles that resembled furrows in a plowed field.

I looked away. My face felt too stiff to smile, and it wasn't from the early morning chill in the yard. It was everything: getting up at dawn to work on the first day of summer vacation, and then being treated like a little baby by my father while he acted as though this Manuel kid was his big buddy.

Then one of the other workers passed me and sort of smiled, too, and I realized she was a girl. She had a long black braid hanging out the back of her baseball cap and real dark eyes. Her teeth were very white against her skin as she flashed them at me shyly, before glancing away.

Was this the Luisa Meg had talked about? We'd had whole families with kids come to the farm plenty of times. Maybe this girl was the daughter of one of the older guys. Was she the only girl, or were there more here? If so, why was she the only one working on the crew? I'd have to remember to ask Mom.

When the boxes were loaded, Manuel slipped into the driver's seat, and the guy with gold teeth got in beside him. The rest of us climbed into the big, open flatbed with the boxes of plants and a bunch of tools, cans of insect spray, plastic jugs of motor oil, empty pop bottles, and other junk.

Manuel drove down the network of rutted farm lanes that led out to the field where we were going to plant. We all bounced and jostled around in the back of the truck. Nobody whooped or giggled the way kids do on a bumpy ride, and they didn't groan or complain the way old people do. They just sat there. So I just sat, too, trying not to shiver and wishing I'd listened to Mom and brought a jacket.

Manuel parked at one end of the field, and we got out. He gestured for me to watch, so I did. The others carried boxes loaded with plants over to the planter and took seats, facing backward. Then Manuel fired up the tractor that pulled the planter and put it into gear, calling, “Joe! Sometimes the plants go in wrong. You come behind, fix, yes?”

Huh?

The tractor pulled away and began a slow journey down the field. I watched, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. There were four big metal circles, or wheels, on the planter with what looked like little rubber fingers poking out. Two workers sat at each wheel, and as the wheels went around, they took turns placing baby cabbage plants from the boxes into the rubber fingers. The rubber fingers held the plant, poked it into the ground, roots down, and came around again, empty.

I began to get the picture. Manuel, the Big Cheese, got to drive the tractor. The others got to ride on the planter in what looked like a fairly comfortable position. They sat in pairs, taking turns feeding plants into the fingers on the four wheels, so that four rows got planted at a time.

Pretty slick. Except that I, Joe, the boss's son, had to walk behind them in the wet, clumpy soil, racing back and forth across all four rows, checking each plant to make sure it had been securely stuck, right side up, in the dirt, and bending down to replant it if it wasn't. Unbelievable.

Let's just say I wasn't chilly for long. Soon the sun was beating down. This was good because it drove away the hordes of mosquitoes that tormented me at first, but awful because I was wearing a black T-shirt. I felt as if every ray from the sun was drawn directly from the sky onto my sweating back. Finally, I took off the shirt and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans, which helped a little, but not much.

I hadn't brought a watch or, as Mom had pointed out, a water bottle. Thank goodness we stopped at the end of the field after each pass to get more plants from the truck, and if I moved quickly, I was able to get some water from the big jug in the truck bed.

I'd overheard the others calling the guy with the gold teeth Gilberto. On one quick break, after I'd slugged down some water, I said his name and mimed looking at my wrist for the time. He held up his arm so I could read his watch.

Only eight-thirty. No way! I couldn't believe my eyes. I had been sure it was noon or very close to it. Three and a half more hours until lunch. Then five more hours after that. It wasn't possible. I'd never make it.

I hated that the crew sat on the planter facing backward, which meant they were all looking my way. It made me really self-conscious. I couldn't hear much of what they said over the noise of the tractor, and I wouldn't have been able to understand them anyway. But every once in a while, they'd all burst out laughing. I could feel myself flush every time, remembering what Randy had said about them talking about me. I glared at them with fury, sure that he'd been right.

I looked at Manuel, riding along in his easy position on the tractor. His shirt was dry as could be. He had slipped on headphones that were attached to a little cassette player in his back pocket, and the sight of him listening to music while I was practically dying really ticked me off.

The work was so boring and monotonous that there was nothing to think about except my own misery. My mind constantly went over every little aspect of my body's pain and discomfort. This only added to my anger. I was mad at Mom and Dad, especially Dad, for making me do this. I was mad at Randy, who probably wasn't even up yet, for getting a motorbike without having to work for it. I was mad at the other workers, for getting to ride while I walked. Not only that, but I was sure they could do a better job of loading the plants in those little fingers, if they wanted to. It seemed as though at least one plant in every eight went in wrong, which meant I had to bend over and fix it.

The minutes dragged by, and I got madder and madder at Manuel. As crew boss, he could give me a break if he wanted to. He could tell someone to change places with me. He could let somebody else—like me—drive the tractor for a while. It was my father's tractor, and my father's farm. But you'd never know it from the way Manuel acted.

Sometimes the tractor itself replaced Manuel as the focus of my hatred. I fantasized about slashing its tires, cutting the fuel lines, crushing the metal frame—anything to stop the irritating drone of the engine and the disgusting stink of its fumes.

We reached the end of a row, and I was surprised to see LuAnn unloading a big coffee urn from Mom's van. Manuel called for a break, then rushed over to help her set up the urn on the flatbed of the truck. I watched, amazed, as she joked with him, partly in Spanish.

“
Buenos días
, Luisa,” she called to the girl.

So
, I thought,
it
is
Luisa
.

“
¿Con leche?
” LuAnn asked, holding up a carton of milk.

“
Sí, gracias
,” Luisa answered with a big smile.

The last thing in the world I wanted was hot coffee, but the others were lined up at the urn, filling their cups and taking cookies from the bag LuAnn had put out.

“You got anything besides coffee?” I asked. “Anything cold?”

“No, señor,” said LuAnn saucily. She really was unbearable sometimes.

“Ha-ha,” I muttered, grabbing a cup. I filled it with water, drank it, filled it twice more, then threw myself down in the shade of the truck and closed my eyes. I heard LuAnn tell Manuel that, now that she was out of school, she would come with coffee for the ten o'clock break whenever she could.

Ten o'clock? I raised my head and hollered to her, “
What
time did you say it was?”

“Ten,” she said, adding, “a little after, actually. The coffee took longer than I expected.”

Only a little after ten o'clock. I was starving, but I was too tired to get up for some cookies. Dead bugs and dirt and bits of straw were stuck to my sweat-drenched skin, making me itch like crazy. Blisters had formed and popped on my heels, and my boots were rubbing them raw. The boots themselves were covered with what felt like ten pounds of mud each. My back was killing me from bending over five billion times.

I had earned less than eighteen dollars.

The morning—not to mention the day or the week or the entire month—stretched out ahead of me with no end in sight.

When twelve o'clock finally came, we rode in from the field. The crew went to their quarters, and I went into the kitchen, where the rest of the family was already gathered for lunch.

“Hi, Joe!” Mom said cheerily. “How did your morning go?”

I could feel her and Dad and my sisters waiting curiously for my answer. There was no way I was going to complain. I'd already decided I wasn't going to run to Mommy with my problems. And I wasn't going to give Dad any reason to think I wasn't a “worker,” just as good as anybody else. I didn't know how I was going to make it through the next month, but I was going to do it. There was no way out of it without looking like a quitter and a weenie.

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, and trying not to groan as I eased my aching body into a chair.

“Your face looks funny,” said Meg, looking at me with a puzzled expression.

LuAnn laughed. “Nice job with the sunscreen, Joe. You've got stripes.”

Mom was staring at me with dismay. “Look at your chest.” She came around behind me. “And your back! Oh, Joe, that is going to hurt like the dickens later on.”

Dad's only comment was, “You know better than to come to the table without a shirt.”

I pulled the end of my T-shirt out of my pocket and slid it over my head. Yow! My shoulders and back were on fire from sunburn, but I tried not to let on as I dug into my lunch.

It was amazing: I'd never noticed before how good Mom's ham-and-cheese sandwiches tasted. I ate three, and about a dozen cookies, washing it all down with several big glasses of milk. While I was stuffing my face, Dad asked a few questions.

“How far did you get in that field?”

“Maybe halfway,” I answered.

“That planter was giving us trouble last week,” Dad went on. “No breakdowns?”

No such luck
, I thought. But I said, “Nope.”

“I'm growing my hair long, like Luisa's,” Meg announced out of the blue. “Don't you think she's really pretty, Joe?”

Where did Meg come up with this stuff? Was Luisa pretty? I remembered the quick flash of her smile and shrugged. “She's got nice teeth.”