The Four Winds(117)

LOREDA WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY and had to force herself out of bed. Her hands hurt like the dickens and she needed about ten hours of sleep and a good meal.

She put on her tattered pants and a shirt with long, ripped sleeves and trudged out to get in line at the bathroom.

The camp was strangely quiet. People were out and about, of course, but there wasn’t much conversation. No one made eye contact for long. A field foreman stood at the chain-link fence, hat drawn low, watching people. She knew there were more spies about, listening for any talk of a strike.

She got in line for the bathroom. There were about ten women in front of her.

As she waited, she saw a flash of movement back in the trees. Ike, at the water pump, filling a bucket. Loreda wanted to walk right over to him, but she didn’t dare.

She finally made it to the front of the line and used the bathroom.

She exited from the back door, closing it quietly behind her. She looked around, didn’t see anyone loitering or watching. Trying to look casual, she strolled over to the water pump.

Ike was still there. He saw her coming and stepped aside. She bent over and washed her hands in the cold water.

“We’re meeting tonight,” Ike said quietly. “Midnight. The laundry.”

Loreda nodded and dried her hands on her pants. It wasn’t until she was halfway back to her cabin that she felt a prickling of awareness along the back of her neck. Someone was watching her or following her.

She stopped, turned suddenly.

Mr. Welty stood there in the trees, smoking a cigarette. Staring at Loreda. “Come here, missy,” he said.

Loreda walked slowly toward him. The way he looked at her, through narrowed eyes, sent a shiver down her spine. “Yes, sir?”

“You pick cotton for me?”

“I do.”

“Happy for the job?”

Loreda forced herself to meet his gaze. “Very.”

“You hear any of the men talking about a strike?”

Men. They always thought everything was about them. But women could stand up for their rights, too; women could hold picket signs and stop the means of production as well as men.

“No, sir. But if I did, I’d remind them what it’s like not to have work.”

Welty smiled. “Good girl. I like a worker who knows her worth.”

Loreda slowly walked back to the cabin, shutting the door firmly behind her. Locking it.

“What’s the matter?” Mom said, looking up.

“Welty questioned me.”

“Don’t draw that man’s attention, Loreda. What did he ask?”

“Nothing,” Loreda said, grabbing a pancake from the hot plate. “The trucks just drove up.”

Five minutes later, they were all out the door, walking toward the line of trucks parked along the chain-link fence.

Quietly, they joined their fellow workers and climbed up into the back of a truck.

When the sun rose on the cotton fields, Loreda saw the changes that had been made by the growers overnight: coils of spiked barbed wire topped the fencing. A half-finished structure stood in the center of the field, a tower of some kind. The clatter and bang of building it rang out. Men she’d never seen before paced the path between the chain-link fence and the road, carrying shotguns. The place looked like a prison yard. They were readying for a fight.

But with guns? It wasn’t as if they could shoot people for striking. This was America.

Still, a ripple of unease moved through the workers. It was what Welty wanted: the workers to be afraid.

The trucks rumbled to a stop. The workers got out.

“They’re afraid of us, Mom,” Loreda said. “They know a strike—”

Mom elbowed Loreda hard enough to shut her up.

“Hurry up,” Ant said. “They’re assigning rows.”

Loreda dragged her sack out behind her, took her place at the start of the row she’d been assigned.

When the bell rang, she bent over and went to work, plucking the soft white bolls from their spiked nests. But all she could think about was tonight.

Strike meeting. Midnight.

At noon the bell rang again.

Loreda straightened, tried to ease the cricks out of her neck and back, listening to the sound of men hammering.

Welty stood on the scales’ raised platform, looking out at the men and women and children who worked themselves bloody to make him rich. “I know that some of you are talking to the union organizers,” he said. His loud voice carried across the fields.

“Maybe you think you can find other jobs in other fields, or maybe you think I need you more than you need me. Let me tell you right now: that is not the case. For every one of you standing on my property, there are ten lined up outside the fence, waiting to take your job. And now, because of a few bad apples, I have had to put up fencing and hire men to guard my property. At considerable cost. So, I am lowering wages another ten percent. Anyone who stays agrees to that price. Anyone who leaves will never pick for me or any other grower in the valley again.”

Loreda looked at her mother over the row of cotton that stood between them.

The structure in the middle of the field was nearly complete. It was easy now to see what they’d been building all morning: a gun tower. Soon one of the foremen would be up there, pacing, carrying a rifle, making sure the workers knew their place.

You see? Loreda mouthed.