Field Hands

I submitted this to the Short Shorts call for entries. It had to be 400 words or less. The piece wasn't selected but had fun writing for pleasure again. In this scene, I am sure I'm thinking about the anti-immigration sentiments around the Southwest and my own experience with the Mexican and Mexican American communities in the Red River Valley.

Field Hands
I was fifteen when you sent me out with the migrant crew that summer. I know why you did this. Our neighbors, the Gamboas, were Mexican; they had settled here after years on the migrant circuit. You had arranged for me to ride out with them to the farm near Argyle each day. Joe and his wife and Joe Jr. They’d wait for me in the alley before dawn and the Tejano music played loud in my ears from the store speakers in the back of the sedan.

In Argyle, we met up with the Mexicans just in from California. The farmer handed out supplies and then pulled me aside, telling me what to do: hoe every third sprout, take care walking between the rows, work my way down to the end of the half-mile, and come back on my left again.

We gathered at the west end of the field. They were all speaking Spanish, even the Gamboas. I measured and walked—1-2-3, hoe; 1-2-3, hoe, like a young boy, carefully learning the box step or a very slow waltz. When I looked up the others were far ahead of me, the rhythms of their hoes pricking and clicking, steel against dirt, fast—like their Spanish--and they kept it up all morning, da da deem, da da deem, da da deem.

Each day I brought something new to the fields. A scarf for my hair. A roll of toilet paper. A better lunch. Each morning we would ride the thirty miles to the fields, and every night at five back home again. At lunch break we’d sit in the shade of the cars parked in the ditch and the Mexicans would unwrap the most beautiful things from tinfoil: tortillas filled with rice and meat, corn tamales with hot peppers, orange soda in bright red water jugs.

I was getting stronger and darker with each day. My arms and legs were brown and taut and you could see the muscles in my hands and the veins blue near my bones. You told me there was a point at which a woman moves from being strong to being hard. But I did not believe this. When I looked in the mirror after my cool bath each night I’d see my torso, soft and white, a perfectly framed outline of all my private territory, all my virgin sweet spots. Tender, bright. Ready.