A Painted House (3 page)

When the yelling stopped, the paperwork began. The Mexicans clung together on the sidewalk in front of the Co-op. Occasionally, they would glance at us and the other farmers who were gathering along Main Street. Word was out—the new batch had arrived.

Pappy got the first ten. The leader was Miguel. He
appeared to be the oldest and, as I noticed from my initial inspection, he had the only cloth bag. The rest of them carried their belongings in paper sacks.

Miguel’s English was passable, but not nearly as good as Juan’s had been. I chatted him up while Pappy finished the paperwork. Miguel introduced me to the group. There was a Rico, a Roberto, a José, a Luis, a Pablo, and several I couldn’t understand. I remembered from a year earlier that it would take a week to distinguish among them.

Although they were clearly exhausted, each of them seemed to make some effort to smile—except for one who sneered at me when I looked at him. He wore a western-style hat, which Miguel pointed to and said, “He thinks he’s a cowboy. So that’s what we call him.” Cowboy was very young, and tall for a Mexican. His eyes were narrow and mean. He had a thin mustache that only added to the fierceness. He frightened me so badly that I gave a passing thought to telling Pappy. I certainly didn’t want the man living on our farm for the weeks to come. But instead I just backed away.

Our group of Mexicans followed Pappy down the sidewalk to Pop and Pearl’s. I trailed along, careful not to step close to Cowboy. Inside the store, I assumed my position near the cash register, where Pearl was waiting for someone to whisper to.

“They treat them like animals,” she said.

“Eli says they’re just happy to be here,” I whispered back. My grandfather was waiting by the door, arms folded across his chest, watching the Mexicans gather what few items they needed. Miguel was rattling instructions to the rest of them.

Pearl was not about to criticize Eli Chandler. But
she shot him a dirty look, though he didn’t see it. Pappy wasn’t concerned with either me or Pearl. He was fretting because the cotton wasn’t getting picked.

“It’s just awful,” she said. I could tell Pearl couldn’t wait for us to clear out so she could find her church friends and again stir up the issue. Pearl was a Methodist.

As the Mexicans, holding their goods, drifted to the cash register, Miguel gave each name to Pearl, who in turn opened a charge account. She rang up the total, entered the amount in a ledger by the worker’s name, then showed the entry to both Miguel and the customer. Instant credit, American style.

They bought flour and shortening to make tortillas, lots of beans in both cans and bags, and rice. Nothing extra—no sugar or sweets, no vegetables. They ate as little as possible, because food cost money. Their goal was to save every cent they could and take it back home.

Of course, these poor fellas had no idea where they were going. They did not know that my mother was a devoted gardener who spent more time tending her vegetables than she did the cotton. They were quite lucky, because my mother believed that no one living within walking distance of our farm would ever go without food.

Cowboy was last in line, and when Pearl smiled at him, I thought he was going to spit on her. Miguel stayed close. He’d just spent three days in the back of a trailer with the boy and probably knew all about him.

I said good-bye to Pearl for the second time that day, which was odd because I usually saw her only once a week.

Pappy led the Mexicans to the truck. They got into the bed and sat shoulder to shoulder, feet and
legs intertwined. They were silent and stared blankly ahead as if they had no idea where their journey would end.

The old truck strained with the load but eventually leveled out at thirty-seven, and Pappy almost smiled. It was late in the afternoon, and the weather was hot and dry, perfect for picking. Between the Spruills and the Mexicans we finally had enough hands to harvest our crop. I reached into my pocket, and pulled out the other half of my Tootsie Roll.

Long before we arrived at our house, we saw smoke and then a tent. We lived on a dirt road that was very dusty for most of the year, and Pappy was just puttering along so the Mexicans wouldn’t get choked.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Looks like a tent of some sort,” Pappy said.

It was situated near the road, at the far end of our front yard, under a pin oak that was a hundred years old, very near the spot where home plate belonged. We slowed even more as we approached our mailbox. The Spruills had taken control of half our front yard. The large tent was dirty white with a pointed roof and was erected with a mismatched collection of hand-whittled sticks and metal poles. Two sides of the tent were open, and I could see boxes and blankets lying on the ground under the roof. I could also see Tally napping inside.

Their truck was parked beside it, and another canvas of some sort had been rigged over its bed. It was anchored with baling rope staked to the ground so that the truck couldn’t move without first getting unhitched. Their old trailer had been partially unloaded,
its boxes and burlap bags scattered on the grass as if a storm had hit.

Mrs. Spruill was tending a fire, hence the smoke. For some reason, she had chosen a slightly bare spot near the end of the yard. It was the exact spot where Pappy or my father squatted almost every afternoon and caught my fastballs and my curves. I wanted to cry. I would never forgive Mrs. Spruill for this.

“I thought you told them to set up out behind the silo,” I said.

“I did,” Pappy answered. He slowed the truck almost to a stop, then turned into our place. The silo was out back, near the barn, a sufficient distance from our house. We’d had hill people camping back there before—never in the front yard.

He parked under another pin oak that was only seventy years old, according to my grandmother. It was the smallest of the three that shaded our house and yard. We rolled to a stop near the house, in the same dry ruts Pappy’d parked in for decades. Both my mother and grandmother were waiting at the kitchen steps.

Ruth, my grandmother, did not like the fact that the hill people had laid claim to our front yard. Pappy and I knew this before we got out of the truck. She had her hands on her hips.

My mother was eager to examine the Mexicans and ask me about their traveling conditions. She watched them pile out of the truck as she walked to me and squeezed my shoulder.

“Ten of them,” she said.

“Yes ma’am.”

Gran met Pappy at the front of the truck and said, quietly but sternly, “Why are those people in our front yard?”

“I asked them to set up by the silo,” Pappy said, never one to back down, not even from his wife. “I don’t know why they picked that spot.”

“Can you ask them to move?”

“I cannot. If they pack up, they’ll leave. You know how hill people are.”

And that was the end of Gran’s questions. They were not about to argue in front of me and ten new Mexicans. She walked away, toward the house, shaking her head in disapproval. Pappy honestly didn’t care where the hill people camped. They appeared to be able-bodied and willing to work, and nothing else mattered to him.

I suspected Gran was not that concerned either. The picking was so crucial that we would’ve taken in a chain gang if they could’ve averaged three hundred pounds of cotton a day.

The Mexicans followed Pappy off to the barn, which was 352 feet from the back porch steps. Past the chicken coop, the water pump, the clotheslines, and the toolshed, past a sugar maple that would turn bright red in October. My father had helped me measure the exact distance one day last January. It seemed like a mile to me. From home plate to the left-field wall in Sportsman’s Park, where the Cardinals played, was 350 feet, and every time Stan Musial hit a home run I would sit on the steps the next day and marvel at the distance. In mid-July he’d hit a ball 400 feet against the Braves. Pappy had said, “He hit it over the barn, Luke.”

For two days afterward, I’d sat on the steps and dreamed of hitting ’em over the barn.

When the Mexicans were past the toolshed, my mother said, “They look very tired.”

“They rode in a trailer, sixty-two of them,” I said, eager, for some reason, to help stir things up.

“I was afraid of that.”

“An old trailer. Old and dirty. Pearl’s already mad about it.”

“It won’t happen again,” she said, and I knew that my father was about to get an earful. “Run along and help your grandfather.”

I’d spent most of the previous two weeks in the barn, alone with my mother, sweeping and cleaning the loft, trying to make a home for the Mexicans. Most of the farmers put them in abandoned tenant houses or barns. There’d been a rumor that Ned Shackleford three miles south had made his live with the chickens.

Not so on the Chandler farm. For lack of another shelter, the Mexicans would be forced to live in the loft of our barn, but there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt anywhere to be found. And it would have a pleasant smell. For a year my mother had gathered old blankets and quilts for them to sleep on.

I slipped into the barn, but stayed below, next to Isabel’s stall. She was our milk cow. Pappy claimed his life had been saved in the First War by a young French girl named Isabel, and to honor the memory, he named our Jersey cow after her. My grandmother never believed that story.

I could hear them up in the loft, moving around, settling in. Pappy was talking to Miguel, who was impressed with how nice and clean the loft was. Pappy
took the compliments as if he and he alone had done the scrubbing.

In fact, he and Gran had been skeptical of my mother’s efforts to provide a decent place for the laborers to sleep. My mother had been raised on a small farm at the very edge of Black Oak, so she was almost a town girl. She actually grew up with kids who were too good to pick cotton. She never walked to school—her father drove her. She’d been to Memphis three times before she married my father. She’d been raised in a painted house.

Chapter 3

We Chandlers rented our land from Mr. Vogel of Jonesboro, a man I’d never seen. His name was rarely mentioned, but when it did slip into a conversation, it was uttered with respect and awe. I thought he was the richest man in the world.

Pappy and Gran had been renting the land since before the Great Depression, which arrived early and stayed late in rural Arkansas. After thirty years of backbreaking labor, they had managed to purchase from Mr. Vogel the house and the three acres around it. They also owned the John Deere tractor, two disks, a seed planter, a cotton trailer, a flatbed trailer, two mules, a wagon, and the truck. My father had a vague agreement that gave him an ownership interest in some of these assets. The land deed was in the names of Eli and Ruth Chandler.

The only farmers who made money were those who owned their land. The renters, like us, tried to break even. The sharecroppers had it the worst and were doomed to eternal poverty.

My father’s goal was to own forty acres of land, free and clear. My mother’s dreams were tucked away, only to be shared with me as I grew older. But I already knew she longed to leave the rural life and was
determined that I would not farm. By the time I was seven, she had made a believer out of me.

When she was satisfied that the Mexicans were being properly situated, she sent me to find my father. It was late, the sun was falling beyond the trees that lined the St. Francis River, and it was time for him to weigh his cotton sack for the final time and call it a day.

I walked barefoot along a dirt path between two fields, looking for him. The soil was dark and rich, good Delta farmland that produced enough to keep you tied to it. Ahead, I saw the cotton trailer, and I knew he was working his way toward it.

Jesse Chandler was the elder son of Pappy and Gran. His younger brother, Ricky, was nineteen and fighting somewhere in Korea. There were two sisters who’d fled the farm as soon as they’d finished high school.

My father didn’t flee. He was determined to be a farmer like his father and grandfather, except he’d be the first Chandler to own his land. I didn’t know if he had dreams of a life away from the fields. Like my grandfather, he had been an excellent baseball player, and I’m sure at one point he’d dreamed of major league glory. But he took a German bullet through his thigh in Anzio in 1944, and his baseball career came to an end.

He walked with a very slight limp, but then so did most people who toiled in the cotton patch.

I stopped at the trailer, which was almost empty. It sat on a narrow cotton road, waiting to be filled. I climbed up on it. Around me, on all sides, neat rows of green and brown stalks stretched to the tree lines that bordered our land. At the top of the stalks, puffy bolls
of cotton were popping forth. The cotton was coming to life by the minute, so when I stepped on the back of the trailer and surveyed the fields, I saw an ocean of white. The fields were silent—no voices, no tractor engines, no cars on the road. For a moment, hanging on to the trailer, I could almost understand why my father wanted to be a farmer.

I could barely see his old straw hat in the distance as he moved between rows. I jumped down and hurried to meet him. With dusk approaching, the gaps between the rows were even darker. Because the sun and rain had cooperated, the leaves were full and thick and weaving together so that they brushed against me as I walked quickly toward my father.

“Is that you, Luke?” he called, knowing full well that no one else would be coming to find him.

“Yes sir!” I answered, moving to the voice. “Mom says it’s time to quit!”

“Oh she does?”

“Yes sir.” I missed him by one row. I cut through the stalks, and there he was, bent at the waist, both hands moving through the leaves, adroitly plucking the cotton and stuffing it into the nearly full sack draped over his shoulder. He’d been in the fields since sunrise, breaking only for lunch.

“Did y’all find some help?” he asked without looking at me.

“Yes sir,” I said proudly. “Mexicans and hill people.”

“How many Mexicans?”

“Ten,” I said, as if I’d personally rounded them up.