And then she tipped her head in that way she does and gave me a nod too. She sometimes catches me watching her while she sleeps or staring at the fire when she walks into the room to see if it sparks and hisses as she draws near, and so she knows I sometimes worry Daddy might be right. Sometimes, I’m afraid of Juna too.
Two hands reach down from the back of that truck. With the sun hitting me full in the face, I can’t be altogether certain whose hand I’m grabbing, but I make my best guess and I guess right. I can feel it the instant his hand wraps around mine. It’s a large hand, strong, tight grip. It’s Ellis’s hand I’m holding on to.
He gives a tug, and I pop up onto the back of the truck. One of those brothers pulls the gate closed, and as the truck starts up again, the sound of the engine growing louder and the side rails rattling all around us, that same brother hollers at me to hold on.
A flatbed trailer of sorts takes up most of the back of the truck so that everyone is leaned up against the edge and holding on to those railings as we bounce over the deep ruts cut into the road. Two metal tubs, both covered over with tarps and tied off with thin rope, sit on top of the trailer. Two brothers, one to each tub, are holding them in place so they don’t bounce about or slide off altogether, and another brother is shuffling things around, stacking tin buckets, one inside another, tossing a pair of leather gloves to each man.
“Where’s the pegs?” Ellis hollers over the sound of the truck and the wind rushing past our ears.
I stand directly at his side and can feel his one arm brushing against my shoulder as the truck knocks us about. I lean up against the railing that wraps around the truck’s bed just like all the brothers are doing, my arms stretched back behind so I can hold on.
“God damn it all,” Ellis says as the brother who was stacking pails continues digging through all that’s piled up inside the truck and not finding those pegs.
Ellis Baine has thick, dark hair, nearly black, and tanned olive skin. He’s broad through the chest in a way few men are anymore. Though he’s not the oldest of the Baine brothers—that would be Joseph Carl, who doesn’t live here anymore—he’s definitely the most solid.
I loosen my grip as the truck gains speed, and I wait for a deep rut in the road to come along. When it does and the truck lurches to one side, I fall forward in a way I hadn’t intended. I had planned to fall into Ellis Baine so he would wrap me up in his arms, hold me, and tell me to be careful. Our faces would nearly touch. I’d be close enough to smell the lye he’d have washed up with this morning, the icy-cold water he’d have splashed on his face. But the truck is going fast and the ruts in the road are deep, and I fall forward and not into Ellis Baine. My arms fly up. I let out a squeal I’ll later wish I hadn’t let out, crack a shin on the flatbed trailer, and nearly fall into the tubs of seedlings headed to the field.
Someone grabs me by one arm and hauls me back, and I’m hoping it’s Ellis and it is Ellis. In one smooth motion, he yanks me back to right, swings one arm across the front of me, and grabs onto the railing, one hand on each side of me, trapping me between himself and the side of the truck. With my face pressed up against the center of his chest, pressed so close my cheek warms and I can feel his beating heart, I close my eyes.
“Won’t be berries left if I don’t get to them today,” Juna had said as she kept on staring at Daddy across the kitchen table. She scooted her chair to avoid the sunlight that wasn’t shining through the window. Daddy glanced over one shoulder and then the other, looking for that sunlight.
If Daddy were to send Juna to the tobacco field, Abraham Pace might not find her. No matter how often Juna fusses about Abraham Pace or how poorly she speaks of him, she’ll want him to find her. Since Juna was fourteen years old, Daddy has been beating Abraham back, telling him he is too old for Juna and that fact will never change. Too old will always be too old. Every Sunday for two years, Abraham has combed his reddish hair, tucked his shirt and buttoned it as best he could, and has come to call.