A Painted House Read Free

their families.
    Tally appeared to be perfect, though. She gazed thoughtfully across the cotton fields, and I admired her dirty dress once again.
    I knew my grandfather and Mr. Spruill had come to terms because Mr. Spruill started his truck. I walked past the trailer, past the man on the tailgate who was briefly awake but still staring at the pavement, and stood beside Pappy. “Nine miles that way, take a left by a burned-out barn, then six more miles to the St. Francis River. We’re the first farm past the river on your left.”
    “Bottomland?” Mr. Spruill asked, as if he were being sent into a swamp.
    “Some of it is, but it’s good land.”
    Mr. Spruill glanced at his wife again, then looked back at us. “Where do we set up?”
    “You’ll see a shady spot in the back, next to the silo. That’s the best place.”
    We watched them drive away, the gears rattling, the tires wobbling, crates and boxes and pots bouncing along.
    “You don’t like them, do you?” I asked.
    “They’re good folks. They’re just different.”
    “I guess we’re lucky to have them, aren’t we?”
    “Yes, we are.”
    More field hands meant less cotton for me to pick. For the next month I would go to the fields at sunrise, drape a nine-foot cotton sack over my shoulder, and stare for a moment at an endless row of cotton, the stalks taller than I was, then plunge into them, lost as far as anyone could tell. And I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice. My fingers would bleed, my neck would burn, my back would hurt.
    Yes, I wanted lots of help in the fields. Lots of hill people, lots of Mexicans.

Chapter 2
    With the cotton waiting, my grandfather was not a patient man. Though he still drove the truck at its requisite speed, he was restless because the other fields along the road were getting picked, and ours were not. Our Mexicans were two days late. We parked again near Pop and Pearl’s, and I followed him to the Tea Shoppe, where he argued with the man in charge of farm labor.
    “Relax, Eli,” the man said. “They’ll be here any minute.”
    He couldn’t relax. We walked to the Black Oak gin on the edge of town, a long walk—but Pappy did not believe in wasting gasoline. Between six and eleven that morning, he’d picked two hundred pounds of cotton, yet he still walked so fast I had to jog to keep up.
    The gravel lot of the gin was crowded with cotton trailers, some empty, others waiting for their harvest to be ginned. I waved again at the Montgomery twins as they were leaving, their trailer empty, headed home for another load.
    The gin roared with the chorus of heavy machines at work. They were incredibly loud and dangerous. During each picking season, at least one worker would fall victim to some gruesome injury inside the cotton gin. I wasscared of the machines, and when Pappy told me to wait outside, I was happy to do so. He walked by a group of field hands waiting for their trailers without so much as a nod. He had things on his mind.
    I found a safe spot near the dock, where they wheeled out the finished bales and loaded them onto trailers headed for the Carolinas. At one end of the gin the freshly picked cotton was sucked from the trailers through a long pipe, twelve inches around; then it disappeared into the building where the machines worked on it. It emerged at the other end in neat square bales covered in burlap and strapped tightly with one-inch steel bands. A good gin produced perfect bales, ones that could be stacked like bricks.
    A bale of cotton was worth a hundred and seventy-five dollars, give or take, depending on the markets. A good crop could produce a bale an acre. We rented eighty acres. Most farm kids could do the math.
    In fact, the math was so easy you wondered why anyone would want to be a farmer. My mother made