We had arrived at siesta, that period between high noon and two when the Texas sun is at its most torrid and brightest, and the leaves of the trees hang limp and blades of the corn curl. “Nappy time,” Anson dubbed it. All labor ceased. Following dinner, everybody slept or found a cool spot to await a lessening of the heat.

The sounds of our approach aroused Blunt and set him to gathering horse apples. Blunt was a full-blooded Comanche Indian. He was father and grandfather to the workers in the field and the house, having married a Mexican woman in years past, and he was a longtime guardian of Chinaberry. How close a watchdog I was to learn. I had noticed that no dog had run out to greet his master when we had first arrived at the house. In Alabama every house has a dog to bark warning at the strangers. Blunt served this purpose at Chinaberry.

While he scooped the apples into a coal scuttle with a stone shovel, he aroused two women from a hammock strung from live oaks behind the house. They were Angelica and Rosetta, who aided in the housekeeping and cooking. At Chinaberry the siesta was elongated, from eleven until four. Cotton gathering began at four in the morning and continued until dark. You can see cotton before you can see anything else, and later.

Anson had said, “We've got some hungry workers here,” and that was all that was needed to set Angelica and Rosetta to cooking and Blunt to lighting a charcoal brazier. We were shown to our quarters, down a hall on the right side of the house, two doors below the parlor, which Lurie, for reasons of her own, had never entered and never would. Later I would learn that this was not from distaste, but because the parlor was sacred to her husband.

In our room there were two beds. Cadillac and Rance would occupy one, Ernest the other. A trundle bed was rolled in for me. The size of the building indicated it had once housed a family greater in size than occupied it now. Anson and Lurie rarely crossed the hall to this side of the dwelling. The house had recently been wired for lights, but the sockets were empty, awaiting a gasoline generator.

Things began to happen. The aroma of grilling steaks drifted from the yard. We were invited to clean up before the meal, to use the shower in an outbuilding directly in front of a tank fed by a windmill. The water was more than tepid. Our clothes, thrown out the door for Angelica to pick up and thrust into a gasoline-driven washing machine, were soon on the line, drying. Ernest alone had a fresh change available; the rest of us had soiled the extra pairs of bib overalls we possessed by the time we had reached the Louisiana line. These too were washed in due course.

At least our faces and hands were clean when we sat down to a table covered with a variety of foods. Even sweet potato pie, my favorite. Lurie stood by until we had our first serving, then left the room, Ernest's eyes following her as she passed the dishes and until she left us. There can be so much food that some hunger is assuaged by merely looking at it. Ernest was to remark later, “You'd of thought they knew we were coming,” and Cadillac, reading Ernest's thoughts, said, “That's some woman he's got. Who'd of figured on finding such a looker out here in the middle of nowhere?” Ernest had only grunted.

At the table Anson stood beside me, and when he saw I tasted the glass of water and rejected it, even with lumps of ice, he poured a tumbler of buttermilk for me, the summertime drink of choice in Alabama. And noting my difficulty cutting a piece from the steak, he divided it into bite-sized pieces. He even took up a fork and poked a morsel into my mouth, with Cadillac and Rance taking note the whole while. I shunned the beans and potatoes, the beets and mustard greens. As nobody counseled me to make a better choice of foods, as they would have at home, I dined mostly on pie and pound cake and pear preserves. And drank buttermilk. My thirst seemed endless.

It was no wonder that we were ready for a nap on the cool grass under the chinaberries after such a gorging. But not before the Knuckleheads got in their licks.

“Boy, have you got it made,” said one.

“Got him eating out of your hand,” said the other.

“If I was in your place I'd make it pay off.”

Ernest added a halfhearted piece of advice. “Just watch yourself.” He saw that he was losing authority.

Surfeited with food and drink as we were, we slept longer than intended. About four o'clock, Ernest waked us and said, “Let's get cracking. We're making no dough laying here.” Blunt brought cotton sacks for the three of them, and Anson led me into the house for a fitting of my own sack. It was already sewed, lacking only the strap, which needed merely stitching on. Though something of a toy sack, it would drag along the ground a full yard and a half behind me, as did sacks in Texas, where rows seemed endless. A body picked until the bag was half-full, then cut off a row and picked back toward the beginning. A wagon would be there with steelyard scales to weigh the harvest.

Lurie sewed on the loop and hung it across my shoulder for measurement. Then she suddenly pressed my head against her bosom. My face tore up. I cried soundlessly, tears smearing my cheeks. I hardly knew why I cried. Because I was so far from home—from Alabama?

“My baby,” Lurie breathed.

Through my tears I saw Anson's discomfort, a sudden jerking of his head so his own tears might not be seen and his leaving the room for a moment. A wound had been opened, as I was to learn. Anson and Lurie had been together three years and were childless, for whatever reason. Lurie was in her late twenties, Anson in his mid-thirties.

Blunt was waiting at the door to lead me to the fields, along with Ernest and the Knuckleheads. When Anson brought me out he hesitated. “Maybe the boy ought to stay at the house. He's already had a long day,” he said.

“No longer than the rest of us,” Ernest said. He was not relinquishing his mandate readily. “Young fellows can take it better than us older ones. They bounce back quicker.”

The walk sliced through the fields of barely opened cotton to a farther field a half mile distant where the plants had a week's advance growth. Ahead we saw the pickers, some dozen of them, snatching at the bolls. Most of them were part of Blunt's Indian-Mexican family, the rest, other hired hands. Their arms worked like pistons. The most adept could pick up to four hundred pounds a day.

We were to work apart from this crowd, who busied the rows like a swarm of bees feeding on clover. We chose a set of rows and began. For me, it was as if I'd never left the business; with the others it was an awkwardness gradually overcome. To pick a boll of cotton would seem not to be difficult, as it is not. The point is cotton weighs like air, next to nothing, and pays a cent a pound, so elbows must fly. And there is an art to snatching the locks without puncturing the cuticles of your fingers on the dry sharp point of the boll. I had acquired this art. Cadillac and Rance and Ernest had bleeding fingers within a half hour. And there was the sun beating down even at five in the evening, apparently refusing to set, and there was the headache breeze fanning across the land. That half hour convinced the three of them that our stay at Chinaberry had to be short, that we should move on as soon as we could raise a stake of money enough for grub and gasoline. And to replace all four tires, which were slick as a pool ball. The transmission had also been acting up.

The pickers strode back and forth to the wagon, where the waiting baskets were filled with cotton, then weighed and dumped. The three of us together—the Knuckleheads and I— had not yet filled a single basket. I was performing with the best of them, if not better, but still we hadn't gathered much.

We saw Anson approaching at a distance on his saddle horse, Blue. Blue was a roan, her name at odds with her coat. The identifying number at the auction where she was purchased had been stamped in azure paint on her rump.

On a Texas afternoon with the air like glass, you can see farther than any place earthly, and the man and his horse appeared long before they drew up at the wagon.

Anson set a glass jug—full of lemonade and wrapped in burlap—on the wagon and hitched Blue to the wagon wheel. He strode out to us, walking beside me and dropping cotton into my sack.

The three of us had not a dry thread on us and the water was dripping from our noses. Anson's face was dry as a hat. Not a bead of sweat dampened his brow.

Anson sauntered away down the row, an imposing silhouette against the white sky.

“Don't that man ever sweat?” Rance whispered.

In the field, a jackrabbit sprang up and hopped away, in not too much of a hurry.

“Gosh dog!” the Knuckleheads said as one.

Being only familiar with the cottontails back home in Alabama, we were astounded. It was as if a mouse had become as large as a cat.

“Them ears!” said one.

“Big as a calf!” said the other.

Ernest was less impressed. The sun beating down and the prospect of the endless rows of cotton before us would have dampened any elation. Lifting his hat, he rubbed a hand across his head back to front where the hair was thinning, and the gathered sweat came off in a shower.

“If you Knuckleheads don't get to work, you'll be eating jack-rabbits,” Ernest said. We were so stuffed with food from Anson's table that it made the work all the more laborious. To the right of us, the pickers were cleaning up the cotton, working like machines, elbows flying, hands snatching.

I got drowsy and yearned to take a nap. The heat was like a curtain we moved through, our motions dulled and heavy.

My drowsiness grew.

“You're getting too hot,” Anson said, appearing beside me as if out of the blue. “Let's go to the wagon, get you a drink of lemonade, rest awhile.”

I followed. He poured me the cold lemonade. The alkaline taste of the water surmounted even the lemon juice and the sweetening. It tasted like medicine. But it was cold.

I sat in the shade of the wagon, and I could not keep my eyes open. Anson had not spoken. Now he said, “Sleepy sleep. Sleepy sleep.” Those were the two words I was to hear nightly in the future, when I started sleeping in his room.

I slept, and when I wakened, the sun had lowered a bit. Cicadas cried out. I was bathed in perspiration, and Anson was fanning me with his hat. My cotton sack had little more than a wad of cotton inside, but he had shoved it under my head. There was not a dry thread on me, despite Anson's fanning.

When I opened my eyes, Anson peered down at me. “Little Man, let's go to the house,” he said. Then he called to Ernest, “I'm taking this boy to the house. The heat is getting to him.”

Ernest, with a sweep of his hand, indicated go ahead.

The Knuckleheads had stopped picking and were watching us. I saw their mouths working and knew what one of them was saying: “This makes my tail cut cordwood.”

But before Anson lifted me into the saddle, he picked me up and hung me by the galluses of my overalls on the steelyards, weighing me as he might a sack of cotton. He trembled, and he trembled again swinging me up onto the horse's back.

“Sixty-nine pounds and thirteen years old,” he remarked. “We need to put some pounds on you.” And then, “Are you right sure you're thirteen?”

I said I was right sure.

“Let's say you're six,” he said. “To me, you're six.”

I didn't respond. I didn't know then that he had had a child who had died at that age. Little Johnnes.

Now at last he asked my name. I told him. He studied me a moment.

He was never to address me by it.