Summer Growth

B smm h 1,> ¿ ?> ? SUMMER GROWTH ? ^ by Ruth Dozier -«r. Chuck Jordan clattered up the long road leading to the "big house" in the rattly pickup truck which was all he owned in the world. The left door was off, gray paint rusted in spots, and the stuffing spilled out of the greasy seat on which he sat. A cloud of powdery white dust trailed behind him. It was Saturday. Payday. And he was going to the "big house" to collect his week's wages. Wages he had earned by back-breaking labor sitting on the cabbage transplanter in the hot sun. He had sat all day from sunup to sundown for six days, sticking the young green plants into the black loamy earth. Monotony! It ground into his soul. Row after row in endless lines, acre after acre stretching to the rim of the silent woods. A man did this for bread and beans and a pint of raw bootleg licker on Saturday night. The licker helped him forget he was a member of a migrant labor camp. "They belong to the lowest stratum of American life," he had heard Eve Mason say one day when he passed by her window . She was having a bridge party in her airy, spacious living room. What did she know about it? She could sit cool and clean and untouched in her comfortable house and damn a man to the lowest stratum. He pulled up under the mulberry tree that had been there over two hundred years shading the old house. He stepped through the doorless opening of the truck with his long legs and stretched his lithe body. The disk of the sun was fast dropping behind the house, sending out soft fingers of rose light which would soon catch up the day. He looked at the house, at the fresh paint on the tall columns rising to the roof of the porch, at the mellowed old brick of the walls, the old fashioned flowers hugging the graveled walks. He saw Jim Mason's long, expensive car, the small foreign car belonging to his wife Eve beside it, parked in the driveway. Envy and hate bit into him. Rich people! Aristocrats they called them. All rich people weren't aristocrats. 40 He know the difference. The Masons were both. He thought of Eve in her slim plain dresses with her black hair parted in the middle, the detached eyes the color of a deep blue pansy, black rimmed. He thought of the long whitewashed shed that housed the farm workers, of the red painted tin roof that held the heat of the long summer days through the short steamy nights. He could smell the odor of the cheap lumpy mattresses on the double row of rough bunks, the sour odor of sweat from unwashed bodies, and the acrid smell of corn-lickered breaths. He knew the crystal water from a dozen mountain streams could never wash away the stench. Always since leaving the mountains of his birth and coming to this land of flats, heat, and insects swarming in clouds, he thought of the cold swift water flowing from the calm hills over the brown rocks in the streambeds. And always the memory eased a little the tensions seething within him. Tensions caused by yearning for things forever beyond his reach. Jim Mason looked up as he opened the door to his office at the end of the east wing. "Good evening, Jordan." "Evein'." Chuck never affixed the respectful "sir" the other men used. "You're late. The rest of the men have been paid and are halfway to Sedgefield by now." "Yea, I know. The transplanter was leaking oil and I stopped to see what the trouble was." He saw the worried look cross Mason's face. Was it worry or maybe fear? What was eating him? "Good Lord, I can't have the transplanter breaking down. Two more days and the crop '11 be in and I've got to make this crop come hell or highwater. But that's not your worry." No, it wasn't his worry, but he was going to find out why it made...