Eddie started working the next day. The night before, when Darlene told Jackie he was her son, Jackie had seemed interested in his hands. She put them up against hers and marveled at their large size compared to her own grown-up hands. That morning, How sent Eddie out with Darlene and a few other women on a weeding detail, to a wide field of young sunflowers. The topography of the field and the low height of the plants allowed Eddie to work at some distance from his mother without losing sight of her. Initially he enjoyed himself, running up and down the rows and depositing tiny clover-like plants and saplings into a cardboard box, but it didn’t take long for How to find fault with his work and ruin any pleasure he’d found in the job.
At first there weren’t enough weeds in the box for How, and he claimed that Eddie hadn’t done any work at all. Later, when How stomped out into the rows to check the kid’s progress and still found it unsatisfactory, he grabbed Eddie by the face and shoved hard enough to knock him down against a pile of rocks, where he wailed. Michelle, the mouthy one with the pigtails, protested just as loudly and pledged, to the tacit agreement of the other women, to make a report. To somebody. Somewhere. At some point. Then she tried to run, and How cursed and lunged at her, but instead of pistol-whipping her once he’d grabbed her wrists, he pulled her thrashing body back to the group.
If anybody made a report, nothing came of it. Although Eddie had only just turned twelve, there were a couple of grown workers from Mexico about his same height, and How would assign Eddie to work with them on projects that kept everybody low to the ground—weeding, laying down fertilizer, or transferring shoots from the plastic-covered greenhouses to the outdoors. At first, the other workers wondered occasionally about Eddie’s age and muttered confused sentences about why the company would allow someone so young to do the same work as older people. They clicked their teeth and said, Shame, declaring that somebody ought to do something, yet never volunteering themselves. Somebody better tell Sextus, they’d say. This could put him out of business, they’d muse, perhaps uncertain whether that would be bad in the long run. But the more Eddie began to resemble his dirty, rough-handed, tough-skinned coworkers, the less frequently the comments came, and as Eddie blended in, eventually they dwindled away entirely. Soon enough he’d grow into the job, and his age wouldn’t matter anymore. At Delicious, what you couldn’t see didn’t count.
In her more sober moments, Darlene never stopped urging Eddie to leave, to get back in school, but she mingled her urgent instructions with deeds that kept him nearby, bound him with tight hugs and tears, slept spoons with him.
You favor your father, she told him. In so many ways. Headstrong. Hardheaded man. You talk like him. Good-looking. So good-looking. She held his chin and studied his face. It’s like I’m looking at him when I look at you.
Don’t you want to leave? Eddie asked.
I owe them a lot of money. And with you working now too, we can pay off the debt faster and eventually start to make a profit. You can work here, but not out there.
Why not? Don’t kids have rights?
Darlene’s face opened. She touched Eddie’s fingertips against her own. Don’t worry, she said. The Lord will see us through. You have to think positive to get positive things into your life. She told him about the book.
Eddie accepted her burden as his own, partially because of his attachment to her, which grew stronger when he saw her need for him and felt his own for her, and partially because neither of them had any ideas about where else to go or how to get there. They might as well have been standing at the edge of an ocean, dreaming of a raft. Every so often he remembered his mission to bring her back from hell, but he couldn’t remember how that story went. Something about an apple?
Eventually they released Tuck from his quarantine, and when he joined the rest of the workers in the chicken house, he made sure, when he could, that the kid got the proper amount of rest and he argued for his pay, and checked that he had a method of saving up, though Eddie loaned so much to his mother that it never did add up, something he never admitted to Tuck. Like the rest, Tuck grumbled that Delicious had put Eddie to work too young, but Tuck’s meek protests produced either answers that weren’t answers or violence.
He’s capable of doing the work, How explained, so he can work.
Tuck’s protectiveness inspired Eddie to arrange for Tuck to pay some attention to his mother, but after a while it became clear that something he couldn’t understand kept them apart. Still, in his mind, he thought of them as his parents and invented an elaborate home life the three of them would share after they left the farm, a fantasy he tried to keep to himself but sometimes referred to accidentally.