California, 1936
The Cold Water
In the 1930s, drought and dust storms drove hundreds of thousands of families off their farms in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Great Plains. Many drove west to California for work, where their children picked cotton and fruit for a few cents and lived in roadside camps.
We are in California now. We have been here a while. Back home is Oklahoma but there is no point talking about back home because the farm is gone and the dust took it and we are not going back, so I try not to think about it the way I try not to think about a lot of things.
I pick cotton. You drag a long sack behind you down the row and you pull the bolls and the bolls cut your fingers up at first until your fingers go hard. Mine are hard now. You get paid by the weight of what you pick, so the whole day is just trying to make the sack heavier. I think about the weight of the sack the way I used to think about other things. It fills up your head and there is not much room left for anything else, which is maybe a mercy.
We eat beans. It is beans most every day and I have got used to it. There was a time I would have wished it was something else but wishing makes the beans taste worse, so I stopped. When the beans are hot and there is enough of them that I am not still hungry after, that is a good supper. That is all I ask of a supper now.
There is a road by the field and cars go by on it. Nice ones sometimes, people going somewhere, people who do not have to stop and pick anything. There is a town with a diner and once I saw through the window people eating pie off white plates, just sitting, eating pie in the middle of the day like it was nothing. I am not angry about it. I just noticed it. I notice the people who get to sit down.
The dust is the worst part really. It gets in everything, in your food, in your teeth, in your nose so you taste it. When the wind comes up bad you cannot see the next person in the row. You just keep your head down and keep pulling.
Here is the good part of today. At the end, when the picking was done and the sun was going down and it got cool finally, some of us kids went to the irrigation ditch. The water in it is brown and cold and it runs along the edge of the field. I got in. I let it take the dust off me, all of it, the day off my skin, and I lay back in the cold water and looked up and the sky was going pink and orange the way it does and there was no dust in the sky just then, it was clean up there. I floated and I did not think about the sack or the beans or back home. I just floated in the cold water under the colors.
That was the good part. I am going to think about the cold water tonight when I am trying to sleep in the heat. Floating in it, with the sky going pink. That was a good thing and it was free and it was mine.