Days passed.
The rains come.
Florida heated up hotter than a griddle. Even in shade. But a picker doesn’t have any shade at work. Nary a stick of it. For years I rubbed lard on my daddy’s burnt back, because Dan Poole had never worked in shade during the all of his life.
Only beneath a cooker of a sun.
When you’re stooped, as Coo Coo and I were day after day, there wasn’t no shade along the endless rows of every kind of vegetable anybody could name.
Melons, cucumbers, limas, sweet potatoes, greens, celery, tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuce, cabbage, carrots …
It made me wonder how the growers could ever find enough people to eat it all. Bag upon bag. Baskets full. Truckloads, and then trainloads. I picked each vegetable one at a time, working so long in the soil that I’d become nothing but a vegetable myself.
Between two rows of produce there runs a little narrow dirt road. A roadway for us pickers. Little wide. But so long that you can’t begin to see where the lane started, or where it might end. For me, it was the road of life.
Also a road of death. Almost every day or so, a picker would die on his long narrow alley of shadeless death.
I waited for it to happen to Coo Coo.
The summer heat was frying him into a skinny strip of red leather inside a rag. He was bending over yellow squash, on his knees, panting like a whipped dog. Each breath laboring as hard as he did on the produce. Whenever he’d slow down, I’d make certain to toss a squash into his bag instead of my own.
Coo Coo would look at me like he really was my granddaddy, but couldn’t spit out a “thank you” through his dry, cracked lips.
He didn’t have to. Not for me.
Afternoons it would usual rain. Not always. Rainless days were the killers.
But when the rain final come, so thick you couldn’t recognize the worker on the other side of the vegetable row, the cooling water was a blessing. We never quit our picking, rain, or no rain. I’d stand up in the rainfall, letting its shower wash me clean and cool. For a hour or so afterward, the air weren’t dusty at all, and was actual fit to haul into a lung.
Under the rain, all us pickers stood up tall.
It was like a prayer. Every face uplifted, looking at the storming sky, and giving a silent thanks. Each man in his own way.
Our baptism.
Oh, the raindrops did sting. It felt like being bited by a hundred chiggers at one time. Again and again. But the little pinchers of pain didn’t real matter. It was a good hurt that didn’t last. A herd of tiny needles nipping you alive.
“I’m not dead,” I’d say. “I am Arly Poole.”
Funny, but I could only say such during a heavy rain. And only to the sky. I’d thank God for my letter.
I didn’t know any prayers.
Brother Smith had telled Huff Cooter and me, a time ago, that it weren’t necessary to put words to a prayer. Because a prayer wasn’t said, it was felt. A silent secret that a person whispered to the Lord.
Sometimes I had the urge to shout it loud, fearing that God Himself wouldn’t listen to a orphan.
I loved rain.
Because it was a gift from Heaven, only for picker people, like Coo Coo and me. And my father. Rain didn’t bless the bosses. At the first timid drop, a crew boss ran for cover, under a shelter. It usual pleased me to watch a boss man scurry for a truck, git below a wagon, or duck into a shed. The bosses wouldn’t receive the blessing. Dry folks were never bathed by the Lord.
Sometimes, during a rain, the thunder would warn us ahead of time. Then the lightning would crack the sky into broken pieces. Like a busted purple roof.
“Lie down, Arly.”
Coo Coo usual forced me flat, sometimes even in a puddle of wet muck. He’d not allow me to stand up below lightning.
“You’ll be toast,” he’d warn.
Never did I quite understand the heat of lightning until one afternoon, during a cracker-boomer of a electric storm, when I actual saw the lightning hit a tree. There was the rain, pelting hard. That big old pine must’ve been drenchy wet, but it burnt like a torch. All aflame.
Coo Coo and I both watched.
Standing there in the rain, he nudged me. “Now you seen it happen,” he said. “And if lightning can do such to a big old pine, think what it’ll perform on a child … or even a growed man.”
From then on, at about the first nearby bolt, I’d flatten myself like a lily pad, or close to, and remain flat until the storm passed us by.
“You’re learning,” Coo Coo said.
It was 1928.
Years have numbers, just like us field hands. I’d learnt that last year when Miss Hoe, our first and only schoolteacher, come to Jailtown. And a year is chopped into twelve parts, called months, and this month was August.
At night some of the people talked about a orphan man named Mr. Hoover who was going to be our next president. He wasn’t yet. The president’s today name I already knowed:
Mr. Calvin Coolidge of Vermont.
I’d asked Coo Coo where Vermont was located and what it was like in there, but Coo Coo claimed he honest didn’t know, because the only place he’d knowed was right here … in Florida.
That was the day when Coo Coo happened to squint out of our blue bus window and then near to jumped up out of his seat.
“Boy,” he said, “I know where we be. Yes, I been right here afore. And I know where we’re at.”
He said it like it was important.
And it was. Because we’d be bus riding and vegetable picking for what seemed to me to have been a heck of a dang time. Months and months and months. We never knowed where we were, and we were smart enough never to ask a crew boss. Mr. Boss didn’t want us to know. He hated questions.
“When people don’t know where they are, they’re easy to harness. If they know, maybe they’ll itch to run away.” That’s how Coo Coo explain it. He didn’t figure out everything. Just enough to spend out his life.
So when Coo Coo spring out of his bus seat, and pointed, and claimed that he knowed where we was at, I wanted to know, too.
“Where?”
“North of Pahokee.”
My brain lit up like a Coleman lantern. Well, maybe not that brilliant, but at least like a wet smudge pot.
“Hey,” I said, “I know about Pahokee.”
“You do?”
“Honest. Miss Hoe said it was a place, a town, on Lake Okeechobee … like Jailtown or Clewiston or Moore Haven.” I quit showing off my education long enough to take a breath. “So we gotta be close to Moore Haven, where I’m going … if I can ever figure how to scoot away to there.”
“Easy,” said Coo Coo.
“You want me to make Moore Haven, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes, but wait until sundown, and you’ll learn more, boy. A fact is worth something.”
“What is it?”
“Sit patient. Sundown’ll git here.”
Waiting weren’t easy right then.
After a while, we felt the bus stop and heard the familiar “Unload” order.
We didn’t have to sleep in no bus that night. Instead, all us pickies got to stretch out on a shack floor, with straw. But it weren’t very fresh. It’d been sleeped on by many a man and rolled into loose yellowy dust.
It beat a bus seat.
We got fed. Nothing special. Cold beans and greenedge bread and the customary company wine. I traded my bottle to Coo Coo for half his beans, which he sometimes give me anyhow. He said I was still growing and could use beans better than he could.
“In you,” Coo Coo said, “them beans’ll make into manhood.” He laughed. “But inside me, they’ll only blow a toot.”
The sun final went down.
Coo Coo pointed at it like he was fixing to be certain I’d not miss seeing the sunset.
“Figure it out,” he said.
The two of us sat on a half-log bench, our backs leaning against the picker shack. As we looked across Lake Okeechobee, the pink sunset set fire to the surface water, and burnt it all orange and pink.
“Sunset,” said Coo Coo. “That’s west.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Moore Haven and Jailtown is clear across Okeechobee, boy. We ain’t near at all to them westerly places. We’s east.”
My fists tightened as I looked westward toward home. A town where I was going to git to, or die trying. I could feel my letter tucked inside my shirt.
“I’m close enough,” I said.