Laura McHugh - The Weight of Blood

Ransome Crowley, the field supervisor, lived in the cottage up the hill from the garage, the cottage I’d assumed was mine. She had the posture and skin of someone much older than her fifty years, which she attributed, without bitterness, to a lifetime of hard work and hand-rolled cigarettes. She was so scrawny, I thought at first that she must be seriously ill. That was before I saw how she worked the rows, heaving rocks and yanking weeds with ruthless authority, her gray hair knotted in a heavy bun at the base of her skull.

“I work the fields three seasons, put up the canning and preserves,” she said, shaking dirt out of her stiff canvas gloves. “Wintertime I do my quilting, sometimes go up to my sister’s place in Blue Eye. Job don’t pay much, but I live here for free.” She gestured at the drab cinder-block cottage. “And Crete, he leaves me be for the most part, long as the work gets done. Don’t like to get his hands too dirty.”

“You run this whole farm yourself?” It was small in comparison to my parents’ acres of corn and soybeans, but a lot of work for one person.

“Oh, he hires on a bit at planting and harvest, when we need bodies. But most of it’s me. What else am I gonna do? Got no man around to wait on.”

She didn’t look me in the eye when she talked, and she asked no questions about where I’d come from, how I’d ended up here. The gloves she’d given me were curled into the shape of someone else’s hands, and I flexed my fingers to loosen them.

“Have there been others like me?” I asked, wondering why he’d chosen now to hire long-term help. Maybe he thought Ransome was getting too old to handle it on her own.

“Like you?” She directed her gaze down a row of spiraling vines. “I wouldn’t say so. Not exactly. No.”

We spent the morning together weeding, Ransome watching closely to ensure that I could distinguish good plants from bad. During her frequent smoke breaks, she talked about the vegetables: the difference between pole beans and bush beans, the best tomatoes to eat raw and the best ones to make into sauce, the right time to pick zucchini. My shirt was soaked through with sweat by the time we stopped for lunch, and my legs and back ached from all the squatting and kneeling. Ransome rolled out a tarp under the tree that shaded the garage. I sat down and watched as she spread out the contents of her cooler. Chunks of ham. Boiled eggs. A crumbled biscuit. A jar of murky tea.

We sat together in the shade, the breeze warm as breath on my damp skin. Birds chirped and whistled in the field, and I could hear Ransome working the ham with her dentures. “Didn’t you bring anything?” she asked finally.

I shook my head. “He said meals were included.”

Ransome groaned. Apparently, Crete hadn’t mentioned anything to her about feeding me.

“He probably meant at the restaurant. Out here, you gotta bring something.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to go shopping.”

She spread her napkin out in front of me and weighted it down with an egg and a slab of ham. She handed me the plastic container that had held the eggs and filled it with tea, spilling some over the side and down my arm. Translucent slivers of ice floated at the top. I took a sip and quickly drained the cup.

“This is really good.”

“I mash up mint leaves in the bottom,” she said, not looking at me. “And plenty of sugar.”

“Thanks for the food.”

She shrugged, scanning the hills, where large patches of shadow spilled over the treetops as clouds slid by. A hawk drifted in broad circles high above us, its wings outstretched and motionless as the currents kept it aloft. “Gotta eat to work,” she said.

I spent the next few days working in the fields. Ransome shared her meals with me, claiming she was too busy to drive me into town to go grocery shopping. She must have complained about feeding me, though, because Judd stopped by the garage on the third day with a sack full of food. I was disappointed when I dumped it out on my bed and found only prepackaged snacks—crackers, Slim Jims, peanuts—nothing I could make a real meal out of. Later that afternoon, Crete’s truck rumbled down the road, kicking up dust. He tapped the horn and dangled his deeply tanned arm out the window, slapping the door like it was a horse’s flank. “Hey there,” he hollered, smiling. “Ready to get trained on the dinner rush?”

I was helping Ransome maneuver a wheelbarrow full of rocks to the end of the row so we could dump it. “Go on,” she muttered, shooing me away. “I’ll finish up.” I scrubbed my hands and splashed water on my face at the outdoor spigot, drying off with a flannel rag Ransome had draped over the handle. I hoped that I looked halfway presentable.

“You about wore out?” Crete asked as I climbed into the cab of the pickup. “I promise this’ll be an easy shift, and you can get back home and rest.”

“I can’t remember the last time I sweated so much,” I said. “Mind if I turn up the air?”

He chuckled. “By all means.”

We parked out front, and he guided me through the store by my elbow. “Gabby,” he said, flagging down a girl with frizzy blond hair who looked about my age. She wore frayed cutoffs and a white T-shirt with dane’s general store ironed onto it in shiny black letters. “This is Lila, the lovely new waitress I told you about. Take good care of her, you hear?” He gave my arm a little squeeze and left me with her.

“Hi there,” she said. “I heard you were up here the other day. I must’ve just missed you.” She had a warm, genuine smile and a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. “I’m Gabby.”

“Lila,” I said. “I guess you already knew that.”

“That’s such a pretty name,” she said. “Now, where is it you’re from, exactly? Crete didn’t say.”

“Iowa.”

“Iowa! I knew you weren’t from anywhere around here. I could tell by looking. Whereabouts in Iowa?”

“Uh… northern?” There was no point in explaining where I was from. She wouldn’t have heard of Waverly, the little farming town where I’d grown up, or Decorah, where I’d stayed with a cousin after my parents died. Probably not Cedar Falls, either, where I’d exhausted the supply of foster homes. Possibly she’d heard of Des Moines, but I wasn’t from Des Moines, not in any way that mattered. I’d boarded a bus there, was all.

She smiled and I smiled back. “We’ll have a shirt ready for you next time. Now, let’s hurry up with kitchen training so you can get on to waiting tables. That’s where the money is.”

The dinner menu was simple—greasy burgers and sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise. Judd showed me how to work the grill. Gabby had me shadow her as she waited tables. The indoor dining space held only ten people, including the two stools at the counter, but the outdoor patio was twice as big. We served Mountain Dew and Pepsi and sweet tea in plastic cups and brought out the sandwiches on red trays with little bags of potato chips.

Gabby knew everyone who came in, and most of them smiled and chatted with her. Nobody smiled at me. They stared like I was on display at the zoo. One table of inbred-looking assholes with Billy Ray Cyrus haircuts knocked their drinks on the floor and laughed while I cleaned up their mess. I wanted to kick in their teeth, but I was determined not to let anything get to me. The social worker had been right. I had nothing to fall back on. I couldn’t afford to screw up. I concentrated on the lousy tips left on the tables and did my best not to look pissed. It was six-thirty and the slow stream of customers had dried up when a burly guy in a ball cap walked toward the counter where Gabby and I were wiping down ketchup bottles. His clothes were streaked with grime, like he’d been tuning up a car or handling livestock, and I felt a familiar pang, my weakness for a good-looking workingman. Without reading any weird Freudian crap into it, I knew it probably had something to do with my grandpa and stepdad being farmers and my mom always telling me that a man with clean nails hides his dirt on the inside.