Luisa came back to work the next day, as she’d said she would. She was still a little swollen and blotchy-looking, but not too bad, and she acted perfectly normal. At least, I was pretty sure she did. I was almost afraid to look at her with Manuel hovering around all the time.
The aches in my body hadn’t gone away; they might even have been worse than when I started. I looked for visible signs of the new muscles I could feel so acutely, but my arms and legs looked the same as ever. The good news was that I’d recovered from the sunburn, and my embarrassing pink-and-white stripes were turning a respectable tan.
We finished planting the south field by noon. I was mighty glad to see that job come to an end. After lunch, I jounced out to the new field in the back of the truck with everybody else, not knowing what we were going to do next, just feeling happy that I didn’t have to spend the afternoon behind the stinking, roaring tractor.
In a neighboring field were rows and rows of tiny cabbage plants that had grown from seeds Manuel and the others had put in while I was still in school. Now those long rows of plants were up, and they had to be hoed and weeded by hand. I thought, Weeding…hoeing…How bad can it be?
An hour later I knew exactly how bad it could be. The crew spread out, each of us taking a row. The idea was to move down the row doing two things at once, thinning and weeding. Cabbage plants are set real close together to start with. Then you have to go back and thin them, so there’s room for them to spread out and grow big.
It sounds simple but, believe me, it’s not. While removing the extra cabbage plants, you’re also uprooting any weeds that have begun to grow. You have to move down the row quickly, sizing up which cabbage plants to leave and which ones to hack down with your hoe, and at the same time attack the weeds. The idea is to leave behind the sturdiest, strongest-looking cabbage plants, eighteen inches apart, surrounded by nothing but freshly turned soil.
The others moved along in a group, working at about the same pace, except for Rafael, who was always slower than everybody else but me. Their rows looked perfect, almost as if machines had cultivated them, although there were no machines that could do this work. It had to be done by hand. And some people’s hands, I quickly realized, were way more skilled at it than others’.
I watched Manuel from the corner of my eye. The motion of his hoe looked smooth and effortless. He talked and joked and laughed as he moved speedily down the row. When I tried to keep up the same pace, I found it difficult to control my hoe. The minute I stopped paying close attention or tried to hurry, I got all messed up. I’d take a wild swing and chop off everything, including the cabbage plant I meant to leave. Then I’d try to replant it, and when that didn’t look as if it was going to work, I tried to hide the evidence by kicking dirt over the mangled body, which only made me fall farther behind. A couple times, I was sure I’d come close to chopping off my foot. Dad, or somebody, kept those hoes sharp.
After a while, I felt a fierce hatred for cabbage plants. I wished a plague of rootworms and beetles upon them all. I felt like whacking every plant on the planet. The only thing that kept me from trying was knowing that if Dad inspected the field, I’d be in for it. I didn’t want Manuel to see my screwups, either. I didn’t want him coming over to teach me his fabulous technique. I’d figure it out myself or die trying, which was starting to seem more likely.
My back was already killing me. Blisters were forming on my palms and fingers. Manuel and the rest of the group were at the end of the row, having a drink of water and laughing at something. I was less than halfway down my row. I did my own little inspection, looking back at what I’d done. It wasn’t pretty.
I was tempted to throw the hoe to the ground and stomp away. But where would I go? Home, to explain to Mom and Dad that I couldn’t hack it, after all? To a phone to report my parents’ cruel and unfair treatment of me? I was fourteen. So what? So was Luisa. This wasn’t even against the law.
I kept hoeing.
When the day finally ended, all I could think about was eating a ton of food at dinner and falling asleep in front of the television set, and that’s exactly what I did.