by Aaron Gwyn
* * *
The cotton was laid by, tall enough that the weeds were drowned in shadow. The hoeing came to an end. The plants were shoulder-high, and then they were taller than the men who’d tended them, large and leafed out. Buds appeared, growing fatter all through August, the branches drooping under the weight.
Late one night, Cecelia was lying on her pallet, putting the day out of herself before she dropped down into sleep, and she felt a shift in the air, a kind of opening, and she woke the next morning to find that the bolls had exploded: everywhere you looked, the fields were snowed with white fluff. Fibers drifted on the breeze. Just as Ruby told her, the cotton had come.
And why haven’t you run yet? she thought.
It has to be perfect. I’ll only get one chance.
Her first day picking, Cecelia was assigned again to Okah, but there was concern in the man’s face when he handed her the sack. Something passed across his features like a cloud across the sun.
“Keep close to me,” he said. “It’ll take you time to get the sleight of it.”
Cecelia had felt relieved the picking was about to start, no more chopping, no more stooping over the hoe.
“I’ll keep up,” she told him, irritated he seemed to think she couldn’t. Ruby had been assigned to their crew today. He ought to be worrying about her.
Okah nodded, but she could tell he didn’t believe her. He held a hand up, closing his thumb, index, and ring fingers into a claw.
“You’re using these three to pick with,” he said. “Just these three. Don’t use your pinky or your mid finger; you’ll stab it on a boll.”
Cecelia looked at her right hand. She touched the tips of her ring and forefinger to her thumb. It felt wrong. Wasn’t natural. She glanced up at Okah and saw him reading her thoughts.
“You want to pinch that cotton,” he said. “Don’t leave a speck of it behind.”
“I won’t,” said Cecelia, and her words had a raw edge to them. She’d already shown what kind of hand she was, outstripping the men, hoeing out ahead of them, nearly as fast as Okah himself.
“I’ll try not to push too hard,” he said, “but I can’t let Mister Timothy see us dawdle, neither.”
“Don’t hold back on my account,” said Cecelia, and now she was mad. She’d get away from all these people—poor Ruby and this man who questioned her strength. I’ll leave all of them behind.
The cotton went running to the pink horizon. Okah and his crew formed up at one end of the field, each hand choosing a row. Ruby had the one right next to Cecelia, that baby slung on her back, her skirt dragging with the weight of the dew.
Cecelia couldn’t think about the girl right now. She stooped and started picking.
Straightaway, she could see what the problem was going to be. She was right-handed as you could be, but you had to pick the left side of the row as well as the right, one side and then the other. She had the picksack slung over her right shoulder, the mouth of it on her left hip. She reached for the first puff of cotton, gripped it with those three digits Okah thought were so important, pinched and pulled away. She pinched too hard, and some stem came off with the actual cotton, and she had to remove it with her left hand before slipping the fluff in her sack. When she reached for the next handful, her middle finger got in the way, and she felt a sharp prick.
She jerked her hand back and stuck the finger in her mouth, sucking it. Then pulled the finger from between her lips and studied the tip: a bright bead of blood swelled like a baneberry. Her eyes shot to Okah and he was looking back at her. He lifted a hand and slapped his ring and forefinger against his thumb. She nodded to him and bent back to work.
Within half an hour, she was wishing for the hoe. You had to use that odd grip, and you had to do it perfectly every time. She couldn’t do it perfectly even once. She picked away the stem and fibers, or she caught only a piece of cotton and came away with strands. All four fingers of her right hand were bleeding, and the little cotton in her sack was blotched with red. And her palms that were always sweaty, slick on the handle of the hoe, were dry as a bone. The cotton sucked all the moisture out of them, such an odd feeling, your hands like a buzzard’s talons.
She stopped and studied them a moment. She didn’t want to look up, knowing she’d fallen behind the others. Then she remembered Ruby. She’d forgotten the girl for the last hour, but now Cecelia needed her, needed to watch Ruby struggle. It was cruel to enjoy someone else’s misery, but Cecelia couldn’t help herself. She stood up straight and looked around.
Ruby was no longer there beside Cecelia. The girl had picked out ahead of the crew, out ahead of Okah. There she went, picking with her right hand and her left, both hands at once, fingers dancing among the bolls like a fiddler’s upon the strings, right and left, right and left, both hands going, pulling white. Cecelia had never seen anything like it, and she started suddenly to cry, though she couldn’t afford tears, couldn’t spare the water. She reached out and touched the cotton with her claw.
* * *
Evening, when it was too dark to tell bolls from leaves, they emptied their last sacks into the baskets, and carried the baskets up to weigh. Mister Timothy was in the shed with his tablet and pen. He’d call out each picker’s name as the captains hung the baskets on the steelyard and weighed them up.
“Little Stephen,” he said. “Hunnerd forty-pounds.”
Or, “Jim Hawkins. Hunnerd seventy-one.”
Or Ruby. The girl had picked two hundred and thirty-six pounds, the most of anyone that day.
The overseer wrote each hand’s weight next to his name in the ledger. Then he nodded for the captains to remove the wicker basket from the scale, and hang up the next.
That was Cecelia’s. Okah carried her basket, hung it on the steelyard, then stood there eyeing the dirt.
“Twenty-eight pounds,” Mister Timothy said, then looked at Cecelia over his tablet.
Cecelia swallowed. Or tried to swallow. Her throat felt like fur.
“You know what that means?” Timothy asked.
She had no idea.
“Twenty-eight is your bottom,” he told her. “We’ll say thirty, starting tomorrow. It’s a lash for every pound you’re short.”
Cecelia nodded, and then she was walking toward the cabins. From behind her, she could hear Timothy calling out the next hand’s name.
Then Okah was there at her side.
“You done all right,” he said. “You’ll get better.” He held up both hands, thumbs and forefingers and ring fingers. “Practice it.”
She lay on the pallet after her supper of cornbread and salt pork—no radishes tonight—practicing her claw. There was a sharp pain across the back of her right hand, and she couldn’t make the ring finger of her left hand hook in correctly: it brought the middle finger with it. She thought she should slip out and make her attempt right then, but her brain was so fogged she could barely think. She drifted off at some point and woke to the noise of the blaring horn. Her right hand was crusted with blood from the day before. She couldn’t make it into a fist.
They were out in the fields come sunrise, twelve of them lined up with picksacks on their hips. Cecelia thought, Thirty pounds. It does not have to be but thirty. Her captain today was a small, quiet man named Whitmore. His tattered shirt hardly covered his hams. He stepped into a row, stopped and began picking. Cecelia stepped forward too. The sun was coming up behind her, and the field of cotton was purple and pink. A scraggly shadow stretched out from her feet and angled down her row. She squeezed her right hand, massaged it, but it wasn’t working. She’d have to get by with her left.
She went along, clawing up the cotton, pricking herself on the bolls, but she couldn’t think about any of that. She had to think about those thirty pounds.
In an hour, she’d sweated her dress completely through. It was September, but hot as ever. The sun was a gr
eat lidless eye. She ate her cornbread breakfast and emptied cotton from her sack into the wicker basket at the head of the row. She drank a ladle of water and felt her body soak up every drop.
Noon, she was in the middle of the field, picking with her one good hand, wiping blood on her dress. Her fingers were so sticky with it she couldn’t get the cotton to fall into the sack, had to scrape it from her fingers with the blade of her right hand. Children were coming down the rows with buckets balanced on their heads, bringing it out to the pickers from the wagons. Like little angels, she thought. They brought it out, then bore the empty buckets back to the wagon, and Cecelia saw that several had hairless circles atop their heads where the buckets rested, little boys of six and seven with bald spots like old men.
She stood in front of the shed that evening, swaying in the twilight.
Mister Timothy was calling names, calling weights. The captains hung the baskets on the scale. The overseer made marks in his ledger.
She was drifting inside herself when she heard her own name being called. The fatigue bled away, and she was alert as the overseer’s expressionless face. Okah and Whitmore lifted her basket and hung it on the steelyard. Mister Timothy studied the scale.
“Twenty-nine pounds,” said Timothy, and then motioned the captains to bring up the next basket.
She stood there thinking, Twenty-nine. He said twenty-nine. And she was still thinking that number when everyone was weighed up and had started for the cabins. It was dark now, and the shed was lit by two pine knot torches stuck in the ground. The overseer was writing in his ledger. She’d turned to walk away when she heard the man say, “You owe me a pound.”
Cecelia didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t know if she was supposed to.
“On your belly,” Timothy said.
He spoke so matter-of-factly, it didn’t even seem that this was what she was supposed to do. Perhaps she’d imagined it.
“Get on your belly,” the man said.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her. She dropped to a squat and looked up at the man. He nodded for her to continue, pulling the whip from his belt.
Lord Jesus, she prayed, and terror chased the rest of it from her brain. She lay breathing against the earth. Maybe the man wouldn’t strike her. Maybe it was just a threat.
Then she felt him flip her dress up, exposing her bare legs and nethers. The shame of it took the fear away. He tugged the dress up to her armpits.
“Mister Timothy,” she said, “I would—”
The lash knocked the wind from her, and she lay there gasping. She felt her bladder go from the shock of it, and then she felt the white-hot pain across the middle of her back. She would’ve cried out, but she didn’t have the breath to do it. She was fighting for air, on her side now, lying in the mud she’d made.
Her breath came back all at once, burning her lungs. It hurt so bad you couldn’t even cry. The muscles in her back were in spasm, and she didn’t know how she’d stand.
She saw the overseer from the corner of her eye, coiling his whip, then tucking it back in his belt, his calm face flickering in the light of the torches.
“Thirty pounds,” he told her, then stepped off into the night.
* * *
She was lying face down on her pallet when she felt that someone was kneeling there beside her, and she opened her eyes.
It was Ruby, the skeleton girl, the girl of the dancing hands.
They stared at one another several moments, and Cecelia thought that Ruby might have been pretty if she’d had food enough to be pretty on, if she didn’t have a child taking what little flesh she had, nursing that baby and picking cotton, three meals of cornbread a day.
Ruby reached out and put her bony hand on Cecelia’s arm. There was an urgency in the girl’s eyes that Cecelia hadn’t seen before.
“He hit me,” Cecelia said, still surprised, still couldn’t believe it had happened.
“You can’t think like you do,” Ruby said.
“Okah says I need to use my hands, but I can’t use either one.”
“You can either pick or think,” said Ruby. “You can’t do them both. How short were you this evening?”
“A pound,” Cecelia said.
Ruby nodded. “You get that short again, put a clod of dirt in your sack. Just a clod will do it. It’ll break up so’s Mister Timothy won’t find it, and it’ll almost always get you a pound.”
“Could you always pick like you do?”
“No’um,” said Ruby.
“Who taught you?”
Ruby stared a moment. There was a cleverness in her eyes, and Cecelia felt guilty for the impression she had formed, for ever thinking this girl was weak.
“The whip taught me,” Ruby said.
* * *
She’d never say she learned to pick. She’d say her body learned, a second Cecelia who’d lived all these years inside her marrow, waiting to come to the surface. Was it the lash that called this stranger up or was it only shame? The feel of her dress flipped onto her back, her buttocks bared to all the world.
Whatever it was, the Stranger had emerged, and Lord could this Stranger pick! She went down the rows, almost as fast as Ruby: right hand and left hand, right and left at once.
Dancing, Cecelia thought. I have become a dance.
Stooping and picking, both claws at work. The picksack full, dump it in the basket. Water and cornbread under the sun. Water and cornbread in the torchlight by the shed, her basket hanging from the steelyard by its handles.
“Cecelia,” said Mister Timothy. “One hunnerd sixty pounds.”
Day after day, she followed her captain out across the dike. Each hand took a row, bent and started picking, and as soon as Cecelia made her fingers into a claw, she seemed to retreat inside her skull, shine and shade spreading around her, this shadow stretching away from her feet. She watched as the ragged specter pinched cotton from the bolls, and it was the Stranger picking.
Cecelia perched up there in her head over the coming weeks, out upon the ledge of herself. What was this thing that took her over? Was there more than one of her inside?
She could think like this for a time. She could sit up there on the ledge of her skull while the Stranger did her work. Using both hands: that’s what brought the Stranger on. Right Hand Cecelia, Left Hand Cecelia. Her body and the shadow that it cast.
And then she woke one morning and couldn’t think at all. She could feel the knots in her back, the dirt cool against her calf. She could hear the others coming awake in the cabin, smell them as they passed the pallet and made their way outside.
It was very odd. She got to her feet and went out the door, forming up with the others to wait for Timothy. The sky was dark and there were no stars in it. A drop of water touched her nose. Then rain was falling all around them, coming down in sheets. The overseer rode up in the black sunrise, and sat his horse, holding the umbrella in one hand to keep his ledger dry. He called out crews and captains, and then Cecelia was following Okah to the shed. The rain began to let up, and then it stopped entirely. Okah gave each of them a picksack, but when he passed Cecelia hers, he stopped and stared.
“Miss Suss,” he said.
Cecelia just looked at him.
“You all right?” he asked.
Cecelia didn’t know. It was so hard to weave a thought. She’d make the scrap of one, and then it would unravel.
Time seemed to pass. They were walking. She had the picksack on her hip and she was stooping there in a row. Her claws were moving, closing on cotton, and then a voice spoke loudly in her ear.
Nothing, it said.
She turned to look behind her, but no one was there. She’d worked out ahead of the others; she was a good forty feet from the nearest hand.
She stood a moment, listening, smelling the earth.
She’d stooped to pick aga
in, and here came the voice, inside and outside all at once.
Nothing, it said.
She turned and looked behind her. The sun breached the horizon, and threw its light upon her face.
Lying on the pallet at night, her hands opening and closing, thoughts would come to her, loose as gauze. She’d try to lace them all together, but before she could get the warp of them, she was drifting off to sleep. No thoughts in her dreams, just impressions.
Back in the field at dawn, that voice would hiss at her, harrying her down the rows. She felt it was familiar, had a face to it, a name. But names were so hard these days. They’d been syllabled inside her, but right and left hand pulled them apart.
She picked faster, trying to stay ahead of the voice, keep out in front of it, move so quickly it couldn’t catch up. Stooping and picking, placing cotton in the sack, glancing back over her shoulder, then hurrying forward, the world coming to her in flashes and specks, and then the voice coming, chasing her along, a hot hiss scalding her brain: Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
* * *
When harvest time was finished, the Stranger receded and she could think again. She was herself.
Or almost herself. The picking had changed her. Murder had grown in her breast like a brand-new organ. She imagined killing Timothy. She mused on it the way she used to long for food: prying his eyes from their sockets or sinking the blade of her hoe in his throat. She felt the most pleasurable thing in the world would be to watch him bleed.