The word traveled fast, it seemed. One fine morning the boy woke on the quilt he used for a bed and lay turned on his back to hear the live things around him: the wasps buzzing busily overhead in the hot air in their obscure comings and goings; the jays outside his window screaming their curses to the squirrels that shook the branches and the dew from them as they scurried about; the far-off voices of other birds deep in the woods and the high thin piping of tree-frogs so loud and ventriloquistic they could never be found. The sun was shining on him through the window and it became too hot to sleep any more.

He got up and put on his clothes and went through the house. The little girl lay like one shot dead, and his father and his mother were nowhere to be seen. In the pie safe and on shelves nailed together from boards there were cans of soup, dry rice, Granola bars. He got a Granola bar with raisins and almonds and munched it while scratching himself and wondering where his parents could be.

Going down the road later in the hot morning sun, he passed a field of hay being baled. There was a flatbed truck inching along the rows of hay, and men were walking beside it throwing the bales up to another man who stacked them behind the cab against a high wooden wall. He stopped in the dusty roadside weeds to watch them labor. Already the heat made the toiling figures hazy and vague in the distance. He could hear faint cries, the revving of the truck motor from time to time. The baler was working along with a steady drumlike sound, the red machinery pushing each bale out in stages until it leaned toward the ground and fell off the chute and another appeared behind it to follow.

He lifted a finger and drew it across the beaded sweat on his brow and flung it to the ground. He saw what looked like a boy his age and studied him. The boy was having trouble with the bales. Twice he saw him drop them. Once he broke the strings on one and the man on the truck yelled down something to him. They moved in a palpable mist of heat under a disastrous sun amid clouds of chaff. Gary tossed his can sack into the ditch and stepped down after it. He found a sagging place in the wire and stepped over the top strand.

He had to follow the truck for a while because it didn’t stop at first. On the ground were two old black men and the white boy. A white-haired man at least sixty was on the bed of the truck. A hard unfriendly face, a visage carved from burnt leather looked out from under a shredded-straw cowboy hat that held his face in shade. Gary kept trying to talk to him, but he kept looking around and going back to catch the bales. Finally Gary ran and caught the back end of the truck and swung himself up onto it. The old man leaned around and hollered into the window and the truck stopped.

They all turned and looked at him. They had on long-sleeved shirts and gloves. Their faces were encrusted with bits of hay and they were wet with sweat. The boy he’d been watching was red in the face and looked ready to drop. It looked as though they were putting on the first load.

The old man was chewing tobacco and now he leaned his head over the side of the truck and spat and hit the webs of his thumbs together twice in the gloves. He didn’t look happy.

“What you want?” he said.

“You need any help?”

The old man looked dubious. He leaned back against the wall of hay and looked out over the field. Most of it was still in long raked piles all over the ground.

“I reckon we can handle it. Throw that damn bale up here, Bobby. What you waitin on?”

The boy on the ground had been listening. He was chubby and soft-looking. He bent and grunted up with the bale and said, “Well, you stopped.” He just barely got it up over the edge of the bed and with a herculean effort at that.

“I’ll be goddamned,” the old man said.

A sharp voice inside the truck said a name.

“Well, any damn body fourteen year old ought to be able to pick up a bale of hay. Give it here.” He snatched the bale off the bed and threw it over his head into place and then glared down at the boy. The boy wasn’t looking at him. He was walking ahead. The two ancient blacks were each standing beside a bale but the old man didn’t yell at them. They were both older than he was. One of them had a solid white eye and wore glasses, the lens cracked over the bad eye as if in simultaneous injury.

“I just thought you might need some help,” Gary said. “Didn’t figure it’d hurt nothin to ask.”

“You ever hauled any hay?”

“Yessir. I’ve hauled a good bit.”

“Where at? Who for?”

“Well,” he said. “I ain’t never hauled none around here. I’ve hauled a bunch in Texas. I hauled all one summer down there.”

The old man worked his cud and looked at Gary’s thick little arms and legs.

“Can you throw one up on the truck?”

“Yessir.”

“Let’s see you throw one then.”

He got off on the side of the truck and walked to the bale nearest him. He bent his legs and muscled the bale up against his chest and walked to the truck with it. It was seventy or eighty pounds, felt like. He tossed it up over the side onto the stack and all the old man had to do was hit it on the side and settle it straight. He looked down on him.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen, I reckon. I’m just little for my age.” He was looking up and shading one hand against the sun in his eyes.

“You gonna work in that?” He was pointing to the black T-shirt Gary was wearing.

“Yessir. I ain’t got no other shirt with me. It don’t matter.”

“That hay’ll stick you.”

“It’s all right. I’ve hauled in a short-sleeve shirt before.”

“You ain’t got no gloves.”

He worked his fingers open and closed once. “My hands is tough,” he said.

“Well.” He called down to one of the black men: “Come on, Cleve.” Then: “All right. Get over here on the left and maybe you can help this boy keep up. We done had to crank the baler out twice cause he couldn’t pick em up.”

“Yessir. Thank you.” He walked behind the truck and the old man leaned around the hay. “Let’s go,” he said. The gears clashed as it went into first and the truck started rolling. Gary walked fast alongside it and hurried on to the next bale, going by the fat boy who barely got his on before the truck moved past. When it came by Gary he handed a bale up to the old man. When he went by the cab again, he saw a woman with a straw hat behind the wheel, a brown stain of snuff on her chin. She had both hands in a desperate clench on the wheel, with the truck crawling about two miles an hour. The old man cursed every time the fat boy tried to put one up.

“How much does hay haulers make in Texas?” he said.

Gary handed another one up to him and he turned and stacked it. “It just depends,” he said. “Who you work for. I worked with a bunch of Mexicans one day and got two cents a bale. I never did go back and work for that fellow no more, though.”

“Well,” he said. “I pay a nickel a bale and dinner. That all right with you?”

“Yes sir,” he said. He could already envision the feast. “How much we gonna haul today?” He was working and hurrying and throwing the bales up while they were talking.

“They’s another field down yonder,” the old man shouted. “Other side of that creek. See yonder?”

Gary looked. He could see a pale green square of flattened grass shimmering in the distance.

“We got another truck comin after dinner and three more hands,” he said. “We gonna haul till dark if we can. You think you can stand it?”

“I can stand it,” Gary said. The baling twine had already made deep red lines in his palms. He hurried ahead and picked up a bale and stood waiting with it.

“Uh uh,” the old man called. He put it down.

“Now see there. You havin to pick it up twice. Don’t pick it up till the truck gets to you. Wait on the truck.”

“Yessir.”

“Now, come on with it.”

He tossed it up.

“I thought you said you’d hauled before.”

“I have. It’s just been a while.”

“How much of a while?”

“Aw. A year or two.”

“Well. It’s all the same. In Texas or Missippi. All you got to do’s put it on the truck.”

He walked past the other boy and stopped beside him just as he was starting up with a bale. He was bent over from the waist, his back bowed.

“Use your legs,” he said.

The boy looked at him. He was white around the mouth.

“What?”

“Use your legs. Don’t pick it up with your back. Look here.”

He bent over a bale with his forearms resting on his thighs. “See here?” He raised the bale with his arms like a weightlifter doing a curl and straightened his legs at the same time. When he came erect the bale was at chest level. When the truck passed he threw it up.

“See there? It’s easier like that. It don’t give your back out like that.”

He smiled at the boy but the boy didn’t smile back. When the old man went to the other side to catch the hay, he walked up next to Gary and said, “That’s my granddaddy. Daddy makes me come out here in the summertime and help him. All he ever does is fuss at me, though.”

“You get paid?”

“Shit,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t come out here and do it for nothin. What you think I am, crazy?”

“I don’t guess.”

“I wouldn’t even be out here if I didn’t have to.

“Aw.”

“I don’t care if I don’t never make any money or not.”

Gary didn’t say anything to that.

“Plus I have to mow the yard and hang out clothes, too.”

“Yeah?” Gary said.

“And they don’t even pay me for that.”

Long before dinnertime the old man saw the red welts forming on Gary’s hands and gave him an extra pair of gloves. When they had the truck loaded they stopped and tied the load down, the old man on top crawling around and rigging the rope, Gary kneeling under the truck and throwing the free end of the rope around for him to take up the other side and tie off. They rode on top to the trees that held the shade at the fence and left that truck and took an old ’65 Chevy pickup back out to the center of the field. The baler was finishing up and they had what looked like about two hundred more to pick up.

“We’ll have a hundred and thirty-five on two loads,” the old man said. They had water in plastic milk jugs that had been frozen solid and wrapped in grocery sacks. It was cold and sweet and Gary knew it would ruin him if he drank too much of it. The fat boy, Bobby, turned the jug up time and time again. They took a break under the shade when they had both trucks loaded.

“You smoke?” the old man said. He pulled a pack of Winstons out of a dry shirt he’d put on.

“Every once in a while,” Gary said.

“Well, here.” He gave him a cigarette and then gave him a light. They sat crosslegged on the ground and the man looked at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “Where you live?”

Gary drew on the cigarette and looked out over the field. He rested his weight on one arm. He tensed it, felt the muscle bunch, untensed it.

“We live up on Edie Hill,” he said.

“Edie Hill?” The eyes were flat and gray. The boy could see the lifetime of hard work in them, the hundreds of days like this one still remembered and not banished by time.

“Yessir,” he said. He flicked at the fire on his cigarette with his little finger. It was quiet on the ground there, the heat rising around them and drawing the sweat effortlessly from them and already dampening and darkening the old man’s fresh shirt.

“I used to know some folks lived up around there,” he said. “Didn’t know nobody lived up there now.”

“We just livin in this old house up there,” Gary said. “I don’t reckon it belongs to anybody.”

“Is it back up there around a big pine thicket? Got some old sheds and stuff around it? Old log house?”

He drew deeply on the cigarette and studied his feet. He didn’t look up. The burning air had twisted the hair on his neck into wet locks that curled up and cooled his skin. “It’s a log house,” he said.

“You one of them Joneses that moved back here?”

“Yessir.”

The old man nodded and looked off into the distance, the blue denim of his overalls tattered and faded. He waited a few moments before he spoke.

“How much you reckon’s on them two trucks there?”

Gary looked. “I don’t know,” he said.

“A hundred on this one. Thirty on that one.” The old man got up, pulling his billfold from his back pocket. “Six dollars and fifty cents.”

The boy sat on the ground watching him, the cigarette smoking between his fingers. “What is it?” he said.

The old man didn’t answer. He stuck a thin thumb between the leather jaws of his billfold and pulled out a five and a one. The two paper bills fluttered to the ground like wounded doves and were anchored almost immediately by two pitched quarters that landed flat and soundlessly and pinned them to the faded green stubble in front of his feet. He looked up. The old man was staring down on him now with his eyes hard and unfeeling. He bent over and picked up the gloves the boy had been using. The woman and the fat boy were standing by the other truck. They had not spoken.

“Let’s go,” he said, and they climbed into the cab. The haymaster put one foot on the rear hub and gripped the bed with his dark and freckled hands and pulled himself up over it like a seal clambering onto an ice shelf. But there was no coolness in that field. Long after they had gone Gary sat motionless beneath the shade tree, watching their wavering figures struggling relentlessly over the parched ground, their toiling shapes remorseless and wasted and indentured to the heat that rose from the earth and descended from the sky in a vapor hot as fire.