How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,43

worms were gone. They heard me coming. So I tried to stay crouched down like my mother. Even then, when I found a batch and pulled at them, they did not come out of the ground smooth and whole, but in pieces. I had pulled too hard and their bodies were broken.

The easiest way to get your numbers to be good was to find a mound of worms, all roped together and mating. When you got one of those, speed was everything, as the worms below that pile start to crawl back into the earth. But my mother got those too. She pulled at them slowly and steadily, giving the worms enough time to let go of what ground they were crawling back to and come out whole into her hand. She filled her Styrofoam cups easily, with all their bodies intact.

I didn’t like how the worms felt in my hands, so cold and slimy, and raw. There was no mistaking they were alive. They never stopped slinking and slithering around, stretching their bodies out into such a length that I wasn’t even sure these were worms I had just picked. I could feel their bodies pulse and throb and tickle in my hands, and they would jab at me with a head or tail—I couldn’t tell which, both ends looked the same to me. I wanted to scream, to yell out about how gross it all was, and to throw them back to the ground, but I didn’t want to shame my mother in front of everyone. So I held on. This was a job wanted by many, and I was lucky my mom got me in.

AS WE DROVE BACK home later that morning, still in the dark, my mother said, “That was fun, wasn’t it? Picking together like that.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You didn’t do so good on your first day, huh?”

I had picked only two cups compared with what was probably my mother’s hundreds. It had taken so long for me to fill the cups that the worms I picked piled up and crushed my earlier pickings. I hadn’t realized the weight of them would be too much. I had a bunch of dead worms no one was going to pay for. They had to be alive to be worth something.

“Next time. Next time you’ll get more,” my mother said. “Everyone does bad on their first day.”

I thought of my father then, what he would think of us doing this, picking worms. What he would say. My father was a good man. No one who knew him had a bad thing to say about him. He died early in my life. I can hardly see his face in my mind anymore. I do remember that he used to call me Ugly. My mother said he called me that so my looks wouldn’t go to my head. She said the time for thinking about looks was after you get educated and work a good job. Then looks, if they’re any good, are worth something to you. But you couldn’t do it the other way around.

I often wondered if my mother would marry again. Most of the people we knew were married or had someone. When I asked if she was ever lonely and sad, listening to her Elvis tapes late at night in her room, she said, “What do you want me to do? Get one of them white guys? Can you imagine. They probably will want me to say things like ‘Me lope you long tie’ and pump me like one of them hogs. I got my pride and I ain’t lowering it for no man. I rather be alone.”

YOU COULD SAY I was spoiled. I’d never had a job before, but I was fourteen, getting to be that age where it was costing my mother money to have me around. I got good grades, and so she had this idea that I might go to college someday.

Back in her country, she had never gone to school. She said a family had to have money for that, and even when there was money it went to her brothers. “Wasted it all on them, if you ask me,” she said. She had seen schoolgirls in their white-collared shirts and navy-blue skirts walking to school while she sat and looked after the chickens in the yard. She was responsible for chasing all the chickens back to her property. It wasn’t a hard job. It was