him down because we got more points that way, working with someone. It was fine with me. It was just an egg, that’s all it was.
When James came over to work on the assignment after school, he talked to my mother. She adored him because he looked a little like Elvis. I didn’t want her to get too attached to him. I didn’t want him to break her heart. I tried to get James to quit our project. I was careless with the egg and dropped it on the floor during the few hours I had alone with it. After that, I thought he’d quit on me and the project, but he said, “It was an accident. Things like that happen in life.”
Still, I didn’t want James to be so nice to me. I showed him my worm-picking outfit with the slime stains on it, but he didn’t find that disgusting at all. He said, “That’s awesome! I’d love to go do that with you sometime.” I never heard of such a thing. Someone other than my mother who actually wanted to pick worms.
I wanted him to know that it wasn’t awesome at all. I wanted him to see that it was hard work and you needed real skill to be a good picker. James was so good at things, I wanted to see him fail at something. I wanted to see him struggle to fill a box, to step on the worms because he didn’t know where to look for them, to pull too hard and have their bodies break apart in his hands. I wanted him to be yelled at when his count was low, and for him to depend on something for his living that he had no control of—the weather.
When I got up at one that Saturday morning, James was already having coffee with my mother in the kitchen. He wore jeans and a plain blue T-shirt. We gave him the can with the rice in it and he said, “Cool. I’m so excited!”
We drove out to the farm and he leaped out of the car. My mom told the farmer that this boy wanted to come along, that he didn’t have to worry about pay because he’d work for free. The farmer liked the idea. He said, “C’mon now. Let’s see what you can do.”
James wore the little light on his head and started like the rest of us, but it turned out he was just like my mother. His counts were very high for a first-timer because she was the one who trained him on what to do. All the little things that had taken her months and seasons to learn and figure out on her own were given freely to him. She was there guiding him. And he picked with enthusiasm because it was her way, grabbing at those bodies as if it were all a fortune in gold.
Back in Laos, the men who worked in this field had been doctors, teachers, farmers with their own land, like my mom. None had set out for a life spent crouched down in the soft earth, groping for faceless things in the night, this shit of the earth. And they picked like it. James had never been anything else, except a kid. James picked like a man who was free.
NOT LONG AFTER THIS, James, at fourteen, became our manager. The man who owned the business said he wanted someone else to take over for him, and since James spoke English so good he could have the job. He was impressed that James had been willing to work for free the first few times. Said he was an example to all of us.
I looked over at my mother, but I couldn’t see anything because it was so dark. I knew what James got was something she wished for herself. She loved this job and she had been at it for much longer than James, but no one had noticed her work at all. And James? He was happy to have a job that paid so well. He didn’t wonder if he deserved the job or not. He was fourteen and he was boss.
Now my mother had some things to say about James and him getting to be boss on our drives home. It all came out then. He wasn’t riding with us anymore. She said she didn’t care how he got to the farm—his parents probably drove him or the farmer went to get him himself. “They help each other out like that, you know.” She said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? I brought that fucker, and he takes my job. What the fuck. He’s a fucking kid. And they accuse us of taking their jobs. Well, you know what? That coulda been my job. My job! And he fucking took it. He doesn’t even need the money. What’s he going to buy with it that his parents can’t get for him? I’ve got someone to raise. And why am I so pissed? It’s just shit of the earth. Shit of the earth.”
James started to change the way we picked. He said rice was something you ate, that it wasn’t something to waste. The uncooked rice in our cans was replaced with sawdust. My mother got splinters drying her hands with it. The cuts got infected from the fertilizer in the soil and the sores worsened.
Then James told my mother she couldn’t go barefoot anymore. She had to wear the full gear now—the rubber boots and gloves, the crinkly plastic bag with holes cut out for the head and arms. He said, “That’s the equipment. You have to wear it.” She did, and her harvest numbers fell.
To make up for the lower numbers, she stayed out on the field longer. She began to forget the things she once did so naturally. She didn’t move with the same ease and love she had before, and the worms sensed her coming and slunk back into the ground and out of reach. I watched her heart break. She had been the best, but it hadn’t mattered. The low count of her harvest now didn’t tell you what had happened to the job or how it had changed. And yet the numbers could be used to say a picker was unskilled or lazy. Those things, I knew my mother was not.
THE EVENING OF THE SCHOOL dance came. Although it had only been a few weeks since James first came picking with us, it felt like a lifetime. So much had changed and become confusing to me. I knew James as boss out at the farm, and I knew James as the fourteen-year-old boy I went to school with. They seemed like different people. When I was at work, I would watch him, waiting for his newfound coldness to turn into something else, the way one waits to be loved, to be recognized as someone to be loved. I didn’t look at that face too long because I didn’t like what I saw, and maybe what I wanted to see had never been there.
The night of the dance, my mother laid out the pink dress I was supposed to wear on my bed. She wasn’t going to be home when he came. She would be out at a card party. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, how to live your life,” she said. “You go on now, if you want to go with him to that school dance. But I don’t want to be here when he gets here. You know how I feel about it. I can’t be nice about it all. It’s just not in me. But you, you’ve got a chance in this life. Pick those worms and get out of this town. Be nice.”
James arrived alone. He was dressed in a black tuxedo, hair slicked back, and wearing black shoes that clicked on the concrete. He had, in his hand, a pink thing that flopped. A flower.
I had turned out all the lights. It looked like no one was home. The streetlamp was like a spotlight. I could see the front lawn and when he walked into the light, I could see his whole face. It was small at first and then it got bigger, his forehead looming closer.
He rang the doorbell. Then he rang it again. When after a few minutes I still did not open the door, he started banging and struggled to turn the knob, but it was locked. He grabbed and pulled at his own hair, and it came loose and wild and undone. I saw it all, standing on the other side of the door, in the dark, watching him in the golden circle that framed the peephole. I did nothing. Not even when I heard him sob. I pressed a finger up to the peephole and held it there. I did not want him to see my open eye.