Nevertheless, it pleased Eddie to get paid for the farmwork he did, plus the computer repair or other fix-it jobs. Sextus would even sometimes send him off with part of a day-old loaf of Elmunda’s homemade bread, which he devoured quickly with Darlene before they got back to the chicken house so that nobody would know and they wouldn’t have to share. When he turned fourteen, he signed the contract, and even though he handed over most of his very minuscule wages to his mother—he was among the few who did not rack up massive amounts of debt, very deliberately—he took pride in his accomplishments and considered his endurance its own type of salary. He reckoned that if you went around comparing your suffering to the suffering of Jesus, you could get through the worst of the worst like nothing happened.
For some reason, How usually sent Eddie and Tuck out on the same detail each day. The work changed every few days, but having a consistent work partner made the intense labor go more quickly, even when they had to pull weeds out from between seemingly infinite rows of sweet potatoes under a patchwork of steel-gray clouds during tornado warnings, getting soaked by thundershowers and sloshing through mud past their ankles, or, later in the year, harvest the same crop by hand, tugging the stalks and poking into the dirt for the fat tubers in 95-degree weather, with no water breaks until noon and the end of the day. Every afternoon, Tuck would fill the entire countryside with his baritone, and sometimes, once he got the gist, Eddie and some of the others joined in a chorus of “Kentucky Woman,” “No-Good Lowdown Blues,” or “Lonesome Train.” Sometimes if Tuck was in good spirits—or exceptionally bad spirits—Eddie could convince him to sing “Only Got Myself to Blame,” and on extra-special days he might get him to demonstrate to a new recruit how to sing Mad Dog Walker’s follow-up, a carbon copy that never charted, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine.”
Eddie got sunburned all over his arms and the back of his neck from being out there all day. When he complained to How that they ought to give workers sunblock, How cackled and said, Sunburn? You niggers all so black you wouldn’t get sunburn if a solar flare went up your asses. Buy some sunblock down at the store.
Six ounces of generic sunblock cost $12.99. Eddie tried to save up for it, but Darlene needed his money too often, and he gave her priority over a sunburn that really didn’t hurt that much—it stung only when you touched it, or if it touched anything else. He vowed to wear a shirt no matter how hot it got, once wearing shirts stopped irritating his skin.
Every so often, something unnameable surged in him. One June evening it had gotten to eight o’clock and they were out harvesting Charleston Crosses, a type of watermelon so big that How said he’d seen mothers in Mexico dry them out to use as cribs. Eddie was hungry, he said, and How had promised that work would stop at eight p.m., but Eddie knew that it had gone later than that and they hadn’t stopped and nobody else had complained. Nobody but How could own a watch out there, officially. Still, a couple of people hid clocks on their persons, and they had the sun to guess with until that went down.
When it got to about 8:45, Eddie’s body stopped working and he took a natural sort of rest, sitting back on his hams and panting, wiping the sweat and dirt from his forehead and shoulders with his rough palms. Sometimes, like that night, How rigged up a few spotlights on the school bus and shone them across the field so that work could continue indefinitely. When How saw that Eddie had taken a pause, he shouted for him to get off his ass. Although his voice blared through the megaphone, because of the position of the bright white lights, the glare hid everything. Eddie squinted but couldn’t see into the bus. When Tuck and TT begged How to go easy on him, pointing out that they had already been working most of the day and that Eddie was just a kid, How told them to go fuck themselves. He reminded the crew that they hadn’t met the day’s quota by a long shot because they were lazy fucks, like faggots or women.
We’ll stay out here until four in the morning if we have to, he bellowed.
Tiny splats of water dotted Eddie’s nose and shoulders. He always welcomed a thundershower after a hot day. It cooled the earth and all the workers, and made an excuse for work to slow down. Its arrival reminded everybody that when it came to their workplace, only God would show mercy. And even the merciful rain cascaded down their foreheads and over their eyebrows and blinded them. It created mud that got into their shoes and squished grittily between their toes and made it that much harder to get any work done, especially at night. The watermelons grew slippery, and if they didn’t have work gloves, which most didn’t, they’d drop the melons and bruise them, or break them open accidentally. The broken and bruised ones exposed their tantalizing sweet insides and Eddie and the others would salivate, but they knew these broken pieces would be set aside as slop for the livestock. Delicious didn’t want to give workers the incentive to damage fruit.
For another two and a half hours, the rain shot down like the blast from a fire hose, and the crew struggled to judge the ripeness of the crop in the artificial light and to heave the fat orbs into the open side of the school bus. The atmosphere resembled something out of a disaster movie, with everyone scrambling past one another, careful not to collide, desperate to arrive at a quota that had never been specified in the hope that at some point they would reach a magic number that would conclude the ordeal. Eddie had seen and experienced this phenomenon nearly every day; he’d deliberately push time out of his mind so that he could soothe the agony of longing for the end of the shift.
You people should be better workers, How told the crew once work finally ended, not long before midnight. You’re already out of it. All y’all really need to do is move your arms and legs. It ain’t that hard. He lifted his hands perpendicular to his body and let his wrists dangle, then he bugged his eyes out and took a few clumsy steps forward. It’s like Night of the Living Dead out there, he said. With watermelons.