John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Anywhere but North Carolina,” says the Judge, and leaves his son in the breakfast room, dented hat in hand.

Hod hacks at the chalky ground as tow-headed Mormon boys crawl beside him. Big Ten is over two rows, backing up as he stabs his shovel down, leaving a jagged rut behind. The older Mormon boys have long-handled hoes, crouching to block out plants from the tangled mat of sugar beet, making them into separate islands of green, while the smaller ones crawl after them, rags wound around their bony knees, chopping each cluster back till only the thickest stem remains. The air is dry heat and flies and fine dust coughing up from the mat like a rug beaten on a line and flies, always flies this time of year, worrying your eyes and nose, frantic in your ear as you hack baked soil into yet more dust. Sweat runs off Hod’s face, cutting salty rivulets down his mask of dust and crisping away in the dry oven heat before it can reach the thirsty ground. Other young men, Saints, scrape out irrigation rows off to the right, joking and calling out to each other, keeping a cautious distance from him and the big Indian. Big Ten wears a bowler mashed down on his head and barely sweats, chopping his shovel down as if killing snakes.

Hod’s ditch is uneven but the first run of water will smooth it out. Saints got just enough sense to plant their stand near the American Fork, he thinks, and have jiggered all kinds of canals and gates, reservoirs and tanks to bring it close. There is no water at the moment, though, the little boys charged with running buckets making a wide arc around Hod and Big Ten to serve their own people, Hod’s tongue a dusty hank of wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands have blistered and cracked and blistered again, the gloves he bought in Reno worn through and tossed away two states ago, and there is sticky blood beneath his palms on the wood of the hoe.

“You been to Chicago?” asks Big Ten.

They’re not supposed to talk much, Indians, but this one never heard about it. In the barn at night Hod pretends to snore so he’ll shut the mouthworks down.

“Never got that far.”

“I tried it a few years back.”

“Find a job?”

Their blades fall into rhythm as they chop and shovel, Hod moving forward, Big Ten backing up.

“Oh, there’s plenty of work, you got a strong back and a weak mind.” He says he’s from Wisconsin, that he’s Ojibwe and Cree and at least half French. “Only it’s too jumbled-up there.”

If you don’t shift your hands on the shovel, just keep them clamped tight the same way, they won’t hurt so much.

“You ever been in these beets through a harvest campaign?”

Hod has bucked barley and wheat, has husked corn and dug potatoes, chopped and picked cotton, loaded melons and cut cane in Texas, even picked strawberries once. “Can’t say I have.”

“You turn the crop up, it’s a big fella—” the Indian works methodically, regular as a steam-hammer, “—slice the tops off for the sheep, knock away the dirt, and you got a nice fat sugar beet. Only sometimes it got the root-crazies. Then it isn’t just one taproot, it’s dozens of em, hundreds maybe, all twisted over and around each other. Make your stomach feel funny just to look at it.”

“I never seen that,” says Hod. “I come up, we had turnips, and they’d get the knot gall.”

Big Ten shakes his head as he chops. “Chicago they got so many different kind of people living all up against each other, over and under each other — if you know who you are when you get there you bound to forget it pretty damn soon.”

“A big city.”

“I kilt hogs there.” The shovel blade slams down and a chunk of crusted earth breaks free. “In the winter the steam come up from the blood when it’d blow out of em, then it froze hard on the ground. Hogs’d shit, scream, kick, and die. Haul that one away, there’s another thousand pressing down the chute to take its place. I come back nights, somebody look at me wrong, I just as well cut their throat too.”

There is no anger in the telling, the Indian fixed on the hard ground at his feet, chopping and digging.

“Believe I’ll give it a pass then,” says Hod.

Big Ten wears huge clodhopper brogan shoes with twine for laces and black pants and a black undertaker coat he never takes off even in the middle of the day with the old dusty bowler crammed down over his ears. He chops the shovel blade into the hard ground the Mormon boys have exposed with their thinning, twists and flicks the soil aside. Hod is slashing with a hoe, the heaviest he could find in the barn, and would be swinging a rock pike if they’d offered him one. He can’t recall how many days he’s been cutting this ground, can barely remember, in the heat and the dust and the constant flies, how he came to be here.

“Only thing a place like that is good for,” says Big Ten, “is if you got to disappear.”

Disappearing is not Hod’s problem. There is a little piece of mirror glass, a jagged triangle stuck in one of the stall posts in the barn that he can’t help but look at least once a day while it is light, and the thought is always the same.

Still here?

“You got a reason to make yourself scarce?” asks Hod. The Indian has hinted before that he is some kind of fugitive.

Big Ten lifts his chin at something behind him. “Garvey comin.”

Hod sneaks a look back and there is Elder Garvey wandering through the beet-vacation boys, pretending to be looking over their work. Never good when the boss man steps into a field.

Hod puts his head down, chops at the earth. The stand of plants stretches to the horizon, flat and dusty green. It’s best never to look at the work ahead, just punish the little bit of it lying at your feet.

“You two!”

Hod blows flies away from his ear and turns to face the farmer. “I’m just loosenin it up,” he says, defensively. “Then I come back through with the shovel and scoop it out.”

Elder Garvey looks off past him to the untamed crop. They look you in the eye to holler orders and argue pay, but when they look away—

“I got kin showed up,” he says.

Hod has to peel his hands off the shaft of the hoe.

“You want us to finish the day?” asks Big Ten. He is still chopping the blade of his shovel down, still backing up as he digs.

“Figured you’d want time to find something else.”

Meaning we’re let go, thinks Hod. Meaning off the property by nightfall.

Big Ten drops his shovel in the jagged trench he has dug and starts to walk away.

“If it wasn’t kin,” mutters Elder Garvey, looking off to the other side of Hod. He told them there was work all the way past the harvest campaign. Back then there was fruit to pick down by Provo, there were shovel jobs for the railroad, but he promised them that this would last through the winter. “Pay you for a half-day,” he adds.

Hod nods and steps around the old man, carrying the hoe on his shoulder. The nickel-a-day thinners don’t look up as he passes, fixed on their little patch of pain, and the older boys turn their heads away and keep blocking. He drops the tool and catches up with the big Indian.

Grasshoppers and beetles scatter in a frenzy on the ground before them, uncovered by the tow-headed boys, and a flock of lake gulls feast on the insects, rising and falling like a white blanket flapped by the wind.

“Make a white man feel like a nigger,” Big Ten grumbles when Hod catches up. Hod chooses not to point out he is the only white man been fired this day, and gingerly pulls his fingers straight.

When they reach the yard, Normal, Garvey’s oldest son, has a plow laid upside-down and is sharpening the coulter with a file. “I got your pay,” he says without looking up. “Gon’ pick up some lumber at the station later, I could run you in.”