A day in the sun, not my favorite.

A day in the sun

In my mind, I cursed the heat. If I cursed out loud, it was a venial sin, and I’d have to confess it. If I didn’t say it, I could fudge. It wasn’t an impure thought, and I hadn’t taken the Lord’s name in vain, anyway. A cloud bank slid over us for maybe a minute, casting a shadow. Just long enough to feel a faint breeze. Just enough time for me to finish my row and get to my thermos bottle. I poured the water into the little lid that was supposed to be a cup; it was warm and tasted stale.

In August, in Southern Minnesota, people didn’t spend time outside until the sun went down, or it was at least thinking about setting. We kept the doors open, screen doors closed, blinds drawn and fans on, all day and night. I double dog dared it to rain.

We had lots of Elms, the tallest things in town. Their shade lowered the temperature. When they were cut down because of Dutch Elm disease, I hurt with an ache that closed my throat and weighed on my chest. Afterwards the town never looked the same. Every time I saw the tiny twigs they had planted in replacement, I thought it takes a lifetime to grow a tree to any decent size. There were big stretches in between the sticks, like even the town didn't have the patience to start a tree.

In the swelter of the open farmland, I longed for rain, a good soaking rain, it would feel good. One of the other kids, who was on their second summer, said working wet was great, until it got muddy and until the sun came out and hugged those wet clothes like they were a long-lost relative. Good recipe for heat stroke. If there was lightning, everybody out of the field.

“Time,” the shift supervisor yelled. It couldn’t have been 10 minutes. Suckers and tassels. The corn was tall enough I couldn’t see over the tops. If I was lucky, I heard someone a row over rustle the sharp leaves on the stalks, as they moved forward. By the time I was twenty feet in, I couldn’t see the start of the row behind me. There were thirty inches between rows. Every row went on forever. The field closed in.

“Ending now,” Agnes Swenson, shouted. She was the first one to finish our row.

“Another row,” the team leader yelled back. Low moans, from the girls. I didn’t make a noise, and neither did Rosemary Schueper. If she didn’t groan, neither would I. The shift supervisor got extra pay if we reached our goal in the shortest time every day. She kept her distance from us, unfriendly and motivated to drive us like sled dogs. There was a low grumble from a row over.

“I hope she trips on a stalk and gets shredded.” The leaves were sharp as knives and Janice Snowbrich was ruthless in her contempt.

But she needed the job. While the rest of us were earning money for something we wanted, Janice needed the money to help her grandparents survive. She lived with them, because her mother had left her there. Rumor was, she didn’t have a dad. I didn't care what people said, but I wasn’t sure what to make of her. Sometimes I liked her, but she blew hot and cold.

Once she took me to her neighbor’s house. The lady was friendly, old, and she wore a faded dress, what my mom called a house dress. Her place smelled funny. Not bad, just funny like old dust and cabbage. She offered us tea. When it was ready, she put hot full cups on the table with a bowl of sugar cubes. I remember feeling grown up and special. I know now that the woman had brewed that tea for a while, probably the appropriate time, long enough to make it unpalatable even with four cubes of sugar. One of those times where you try to drink enough to be polite but not enough to get acquainted with the taste. She put homemade cookies on a plate. I tried to be polite, but this time it meant not eating all of them myself.

After that experience, I was never temped to make a cup of tea for myself, until years later. The Hobbit, Bennet sisters, and later Mma Ramotswe, cherished their tea. It made me want to try again. I eventually learned to like it, no cream, no sugar. Today, when I make tea, I dunk the bag in the water just long enough to turn it a transparent brown.

“Bathroom break,” Janice yelled. On my left Susie Gupman said, “You did that on the last row.” I didn’t comment. I didn’t like Susie, and the feeling was mutual. She lived on a dairy farm about a mile out of town. Her family was rich. They had three grown boys and farmed two thousand acres.

I guessed Janice just needed a rest. At least, in the middle of rows of corn, a quarter mile long, you had privacy if you had to pee. Dehydration kept that function to a minimum. But claiming to need a break was an excuse to lag behind. It was a relief, to me, when we had to wait for someone to finish. Another moment of rest.

At lunch we sat at the end of the rows, lined up for our next round. Rosemary ended up next to me. I always thought she had a Snow-White skin look. Hair as black as ebony, skin as white as snow. Now it was sloughing off her shoulders, revealing new blisters on the layer of skin below. She refused to wear a shirt with long sleeves and her burns layered on top of burns. Stubborn. She was a farm girl and too proud to concede to what sissy town kids wore.

“You’re going to have scars,” I said.

“I’m fine, I don’t feel it,” she answered. I looked at her blisters and thought she was stupid.

My mother had insisted I wore layers, one of my brother’s long sleeve shirts, worn so thin you could see through it. Underneath, I wore one of his old tee-shirts with the arms cut off. No one wore hats, and no one wore gloves. Back then, they hadn’t discovered the correlation between sunburns and cancer. We were lucky to have Coppertone. It cost a lot. You used it after it started getting hot. Just once, didn’t want to waste it. Besides, everybody knew that one application of sunscreen lasted all day.

By quitting time, my sweat soaked both shirts. My hands were sore and bleeding. I’d ask my dad if he could get me a pair of gloves. He was the editor of the town newspaper, really the newspaper for about five other towns. He had a due-bill set up with the grocery stores, including the general store. This arrangement was a trade of sorts. So much credit, exchanged for so many inches of advertisements. Dad did all our shopping. Mom felt it was something women shouldn’t have to do, I guess. Unless it was in another town, for something other than groceries, and she didn’t drive. She was more aware of the idiosyncrasies of social hierarchy than anyone else in town.

It was brutal in the sun, but a job detasseling corn was a plum job. Competition ran high. If you didn’t know someone on the crew, you could forget about a job. At fourteen, there wasn't any work that didn’t involve physical labor. If I made it through the two weeks of detasseling without missing a day, the corn company added a fifteen cent an hour bonus on top of our 85 cents an hour wage. I stunk at math but even I could add the numbers. My best baby-sitting job paid fifty cents an hour, but the family I worked for the most, gave me twenty-five. And I had to do all the housework.

When I was sixteen, I would find a real job. I didn’t know where. Not much work in a town of 800 people. I was lucky. Bonnie’s mom gave us a ride every morning. She dropped us off at seven. I was still tired. At least the mornings were cool, until about eight, then the temperature would climb into the nineties. There were days it topped a hundred. The humidity was a weighted blanket, heavy enough that breathing was a chore.

It was mid-morning, and I was dragging. When I pushed a couple of stalks to the side, I could see the sun was almost straight up, almost lunch time. Eight hours marked by breaks and lunch. I never counted the rows, but I could estimate. One hour up and down, quarter mile each way. At our noon break, I sat on the edge of the field, hoping for shade, and opened my lunch bag. Peanut butter and jelly, water, and today I had scrounged an apple. When I made my sandwiches, I slathered jam on my bread, so the peanut butter didn’t paste my mouth shut. I wanted the lunches my mom packed for my brothers. I craved one of those little cans of Vienna sausages, with a small bag of chips, and a sandwich with meat, egg salad, or cheese. Though sausages were pricey. Mom made our food go far, but she told me and my sister to wait until the men took their food before eating. My brothers had jobs on a carpenter crew. Mom said they worked hard, were growing boys, and needed a nutritious lunch. But I was growing too, and probably more active than either of them. Every day, I wished Mom had taken a turn in the fields.

My favorite sandwich was one I saw Rosemary’s cousins, the Schueper twins, eat. Thick slices of homemade bread with butter and Miracle Whip with a fried egg inside. The egg was cold. We couldn’t eat an hour before communion, so, kids brought breakfast. I think I made toast if I had time in the morning before mass, sometimes I didn’t eat.

“Time,” the supervisor yelled. I got to my feet, stretched, and started a new row. Two more hours and the day was over. I imagined what it would be like if I couldn’t quit, like I was forced to work every day. I always identified with the underdog, every underdog, and was rabidly supportive. Not so appreciated in a town with no color. The migrants didn’t count. They lived on the farms where they worked, in falling down chicken coups with no bathrooms. In town, there was one half Soiux Indian and 799 white people.

When the supervisor called lunch we sat for the 20-minute break, the crew talked. From the first day, the twelve of us sorted into two groups. The farm kids and the town kids, of which there were three. Me, Bonnie, and Janice. About six days in, Bonnie missed a couple of days and then didn’t show up again. My dad took us. Rosemary sniffed when she noticed. I was determined to get the bonus. Then one of the farm kids got sunstroke and had to drop out. They were a sturdy bunch. I didn’t care. It was a personal goal to prove how tough town girls could be. I knew I could count on Janice. Unfortunately, if there was the slightest competition, I’d throw myself at it. When I got my teeth into something, I was like a bulldog, one of my friends told me.

Rosemary set the caste system. She mostly ignored me. I tried to be part of the conversation, not successfully. Janice watched my efforts and sneered at me for trying.

As difficult as the job was, I was grateful I didn’t have to go back to the pickle patch. I had done that a week before the corn was ready. The days weren’t as long, but the entire time I was on hands and knees or bending over. They paid us by the pound. Every day, the owner showed us the size of the cucumbers he wanted, the only ones he would accept. Every day I bitched to myself as I followed the rows of low growing vines, scouring them for small cukes someone picked the day before, leaving the big yellow cukes. If you tried to add the overgrown ones to your bag, you were docked, when they sorted them. No matter how hard I worked, my haul was puny. The pay sucked, and I longed for the cornfields. But that was before I knew what detasseling meant.

“Not many town kids signed up,” Rosemary started the lunch talk one day, before Bonnie left.

“There aren’t more than five girls in town. Farm kids are all over,” I said. Rosemary didn’t acknowledge me.

“Not much to get in your town. We go down the road to Lamsey for our shopping. Or to Oak Falls. There’s almost nothing to buy in White Rabbit, and we’re as close to Oak Falls as we are to you.”

You, as if I was the whole town. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? We had a general store, a smaller grocery, the pharmacy that was small but made good money, an office for selling insurance, even though nearly no one could afford it. A doctor who left, a dentist who drank, four bars, a diner, and six churches. Oh, and two gas stations, one on the edge of town that sold 3-2 alcohol. Depending on who was asking, 3-2 didn’t count as alcohol. According to my mother, it was the same as near-beer, and near-beer counted as alcohol.

Comparing White Rabbit with the two bigger towns hit a sore spot with me. Somehow it made us townies even more inferior. Rosemary knew I was miffed. Rosemary knew she had made a score that day and never missed a chance after that to point out the inferiority of our town compared to the larger towns in our county.

I looked it up. Cities have a population of over 5000, a town has somewhere between 2500-4999, a village has under 2499. We were just barely a village, but Lamsey was only a couple hundred more wasn’t a town either. Oak Falls, even sixty-six years later, still had a population under 5,000 people. They hovered around being a city, but they never were.

Three days left. We were getting down to the wire. Rosemary’s back looked like fire with tiny white spots around the edges. Really dumb. Still wore short sleeves. Janice had to miss a day because her grandmother was sick. I knew they couldn’t go to the hospital, couldn’t afford it. Doc made house visits when things were bad. I wasn’t sure Janice’s grandparents could afford to get medicine. They didn’t even have a car. No one could get help for bills in those days and even if the county or the state had programs like they do today, no one would have applied. Charity was almost as bad as a criminal record.

The day Janice couldn’t make it, Rosemary was in her element. “Are you going to stick it out,Mary? Looks like you’d be the only townie to complete the job. What is it now? Two out of three town kids quit and only one of the farm kids dropped out?” She had one of those eyebrows that she could raise at will. I wanted to ignore her, but I needed to stick up for Janice.

“Something must have happened; Janice wouldn’t miss otherwise.”

Rosemary looked down her long, thin, slightly hooked nose and sniffed.

“Time,” Marcella called. We lined up at the beginning of new rows.

The next day, Rosemary didn’t show up. Her cousin said her back was infected, and she was running a temperature of over 102. Their family was better off financially than mine, but they couldn’t afford a hospital either. Even if it was in Oak Falls. Even if they had insurance through the Farm Bureau. That didn’t cover much, unless you lost a limb farming. She couldn’t come back for the final two days and lost the bonus.

Two years later Sister Antoinette paired us as a team for debate club. We won seventy-five percent of our debates, but we could have done better. We never were close. I don’t think she liked me. Couldn’t say she’d be my choice as a best friend, either. She had to wear a high neckline at prom, because of the scars on her back.

The money I earned that summer paid for a pleated plaid skirt held closed by a huge gold safety pin. I got an oxford button down top to match the skirt, and a plaid vest. It was my money. Oh, the power of money in the pocket. I didn’t detassel the next year, but for the life of me I don’t remember what I did to make money. One thing I know, every day we detasseled, at quitting time, the remaining girls, too tired to shout, said, “What a day.”