You begged the sky for a single cloud.
The sun did not shine down, it bored into you, through your hat and hair and skull, until you could feel it inside your very brain, till little specks of that sun seemed to break away and dance around, just outside your eyes. It turned the shovel handle hot and baked the red dirt till you could feel it through your leather work boots, radiating. Your sweat did not drip, it ran, turning the dust to mud on your face, soaking your T-shirt and your jeans, clinging like dead skin. The salt in it stung your eyes, until your lids were bright red and the whites were bloodshot, like a drunk man. Every now and then you or some man beside you would uncover a ground rattler, and you would chop it to little pieces with your shovel or beat it to mush with rakes, not just because it could bite you, kill you, but because it got in your way, because you had to take an extra step, to raise your arms an extra time, under that sun.
We did the hand labor in clearing land and building roads and grading lots for construction, digging out rocks and stumps and sawing down the pines, making room for new three-bedroom brick ranch houses with two-car garages and above-ground pools, working mostly for our uncle Ed. We scurried around the big, loud yellow International Harvester bulldozers and battered Chevrolet dump trucks, like worker ants scrambling around their fat queens, trying to keep our feet from being crushed under the trucks, looking out of the corner of our eyes for Mr. Bivens, the truck driver.
We did a lot of work, for a lot of people, but this was the hardest, the most regular, the dirtiest. We all did it at one time, Sam, me, finally Mark, and we were glad to get it. Our uncle treated us decent, paid on time and bought us, twice a day, an ice-cold RC. The sun burned down on him, too, he just didn’t give a damn. I have known a lot of tough men, men who seemed immune to the elements, even to bullets, but no one ignored the pain like Ed Fair. As a child, his legs had not just been broken but shattered by a speeding car. Yet he worked twelve-hour days on those legs, pieced together with iron rods and fragments of bone, working the pedals of the big tractor, moving mountains, ignoring the pain. It was impossible to whine about the hard work to a man like that. We just did it, every summer, on weekends, after school, if he needed us. We started when we were in junior high, as soon as our momma decided we had sense enough, as soon as we were big enough to realistically do the work.
Our uncle Ed expected us to work as hard as anyone else in the crew, but the fact is he looked after us, trying to make sure we didn’t get hurt. He looked after us in other ways, too.
One summer day, I think we might have been laying sod, I went into a country store to get some cold drinks and other junk food for the crew at lunch. I was covered head to toe in grime and sweat. For some reason, maybe because I didn’t have enough money, maybe because I had forgotten what I was supposed to get, I had to turn around and go out again, and when I got back inside the store the man behind the cash register was glaring at me. “You gonna pay for the Coke you stole,” he said. There were other people in the store, and they stared at me.
I told him I didn’t steal anything. Then my uncle Ed, wondering why I was taking so long, walked in the door. He faced down the man, and I had little doubt he would have fought him right then and there.
“I know the boy. I helped raise him. The boy don’t steal,” he said. “He don’t have to steal, if he wants a cold drink. I got enough money in my back pocket to buy your whole damn store.” Then he walked out, me in tow, leaving the man red-faced and shamed behind the front counter. I hope he realizes how close he came to getting a no. 9 work boot up his behind, one with a built-up heel, to compensate for Uncle Ed’s worst bad leg.
I appreciated the work, but I dreaded it. I dreaded the last day of class, the beginning of summer vacation. The next morning our momma would wake us up, feed us a biscuit and some fried eggs and hand us a brown-paper bag that contained two skinny, white-bread, potted meat sandwiches—a pink paste made from ground pork and preservatives—and a cookie. She never sent chocolate. Chocolate melted to mush in the cab of the dump trucks, and you had to lick it off the wrapper. You rode to the job in an insidious mix of diesel fumes and gray cigarette smoke, the big trucks moaning, bouncing, jerking along the roads, and before you had done even a lick of work you were wishing the day was over, the sun was down.
If we were clearing a lot that day, we followed the bulldozer into the pines and, with chain saws that vibrated so hard you had to be careful to keep your tongue out from between your clicking teeth, we chopped up the trees that the machine pushed down. Then the work really started. The logs were cut in six-feet lengths—the only way they could be sold as pulpwood—and we had to heave them over the side of the dump trucks, which stood about eight feet high. Some of the logs weighed fifty pounds and some weighed two hundred. Sometimes, all you could do was get one end of the log over the side of the truck and try to shove the rest of it over, trying to keep it from knocking your teeth out if you failed and it fell back down on you. The sap, sticky as gum, coated your arms and face and the chips of bark gored into your eyes, and every step you made you expected to feel the needle-sharp fangs of a copperhead or rattlesnake sink into your calf, because there was no way to tell where you put your feet in that tangle of broken limbs.
But the worst of it was when we had to get a house ready for its yard, which meant every rock and root and clod of hard mud had to be dug, picked or raked away, and piled in mounds for “the trash man.” Sam and I were the trash men, because we were always the youngest in the crew. We used giant forks, half as tall as us, big enough to hold forty pounds, to shovel the trash up and heave it, over our shoulder, into the back of the dump truck. Sometimes we couldn’t get the truck between the trees—some yuppie was always afraid of getting a dogwood scratched—and we would load it into a wheelbarrow and, straining our guts out, push it up a two-by-eight onto the back of the flatbed truck, and dump it.
“Someday, you gonna get a good job,” my uncle Ed told me. “You ought to take that fork and hang it on the wall, so you’ll remember what this was like. You’ll never gripe about that good job. You never will.”
I knew this was not forever. It was the just the way, the means, by which we had things. Sam had caught the worst of it; I guess the oldest, by nature, always do. He worked, as a boy of twelve and thirteen, to help our momma, for nickels and dimes and quarters, trading his labor for a pickup load of coal. He would help a man cut hogs—the bloody castrating and nose-ringing work—for meat. By the time he was fifteen, his arms were corded with muscle, his legs hard as a pine knot. I saw him as indestructible, so much so that, one time when he accidentally ripped into his leg with the power saw, I was surprised to see him bleed.
The work was a hard and temporary thing that, I hoped, would pass in time. For me, it was a purification by fire, a thing that would make every other job, every other thing I ever did for the rest of my life, so laughingly easy by comparison.
For Sam, it was the first step in a long, long walk, where the scenery seldom changed.
Roy Webb Junior High School is a red-brick, one-story building on Roy Webb Road, and sits in the middle of the Roy Webb Community. I never bothered to ask who Roy Webb was, but if modesty was one of his virtues in life, he is twirling ’neath the red clay now. There were a few rich kids, but most of the children were the sons and daughters of working people. Even within a society like that, there are classes. I remember, when I was in the elementary school, having to answer questions about why we lived in our grandmother’s house. The word spread. “They ain’t got no daddy.”
The principal and teachers, when they recognized who we were, where we ranked, told Sam that he could sweep the narrow halls, clean the bathrooms and shovel coal into the school’s furnace, to earn his free lunch. He took out the trash and burned it and unclogged the toilet. They never bothered to teach him to read very well; he learned that on his own. They never bothered to tell him about the world outside his narrow, limited one. They forgot to show him maps of the universe or share the secrets of history, biology. As other students behind the classroom doors read about about empires, wars and kings, he waxed the gymnasium floor.