Live by Night Page 0,155

shade trees. The stringing benches had racks affixed to them. The stringers and the handers - all the baseball boys with the surgical tape on their fingers - would place a stick in the rack and begin tying the leaves to the sticks with twine until the leaf bunches hung from one end of the tobacco stick to the other. They did this from six in the morning until eight at night; there was no baseball those weeks. The twine had to be pulled tight while retaining pressure on the stick, so cord burns to the hands and the fingers were common. Hence, Ciggy pointed out, the surgical tape.

"Soon as this is done, patron? All this 'bacco hung, one end of the barn to the other? We sit for five days while it cures. Only man has a job is the man tending the fire in the barn and the men checking it don't get too moist or too dry in there. The boys? They get to play the baseball." He put a quick hand on Joe's arm. "If that's okay with you."

Joe stood outside the barn, watching those boys string tobacco. Even with the rack, they had to raise and extend their arms to tie off the leaves - raise and extend them for pretty much fourteen hours straight. He gave Ciggy a foul look. "Of course it's okay. Christ, that fucking work is unbearable."

"I did it for six years."

"How?"

"I don't like starving. You like starving?"

Joe rolled his eyes.

"Mmm hmm. Another man," Ciggy said, "don't like starving. Only thing the whole world agrees on - starving is no fun."

The next morning, Joe found Ciggy in the curing barn, making sure the hangers spaced the leaves properly. Joe told him to pull himself away, and they crossed the fields and walked down the eastern ridge and stopped at the worst field Joe owned. It was rocky, it was blocked from the sun by hills and outcrops all day, and the worms and weeds loved it.

Joe asked if Herodes, their best driver, worked much during curing.

"He's still working the harvest," Ciggy said, "but not like the boys."

"Good," Joe said. "Have him plow this field."

"Ain't nothing going to grow here," Ciggy said.

"No shit," Joe said.

"So why plow it?"

"Because it's easier to build a baseball field on level ground, don't you think?"

The same day they constructed the pitcher's mound, Joe was walking with Tomas past the barn when he saw one of the workers, Perez, beating his son, just clouting his head like the boy was a dog he'd caught eating his supper. Kid couldn't have been any older than eight. Joe said, "Hey," and started toward them, but Ciggy stepped in front of him.

Perez and Perez's son looked at him, confused, and Perez hit his son in the head again and then in the ass several times.

"Is that necessary?" Joe said to Ciggy.

Tomas, oblivious, squirmed for Ciggy, to whom he'd taken a shine lately.

Ciggy took Tomas from Joe and held him high above him as Tomas giggled and Ciggy said, "You think Perez likes to hit his boy? Think he woke up, said I want to be a bad guy, make sure the boy grows up to hate me? No, no, no, patron. He woke up saying I got to put food on the table, I got to keep them warm, keep them dry, fix that roof leak, kill the rats in their bedroom, show them the right path, show my wife I love her, have five fucking minutes for myself, and sleep for four hours before I got to get up and go back into the fields. And when I leave for the fields, I can hear the littlest ones crying - 'Papa, I'm hungry. Papa, there's no milk. Papa, I feel sick.' And he comes back day after day to that, goes out day after day to that, and then you give his son a job, patron, and it's like you saved his life. Because maybe you did. But then his son fails at this job? Cono. That son gets beat. Better beat than hungry."

"What did the boy fail at?"

"He was supposed to watch the curing fire. He fell asleep. Could have burned the whole crop." He handed Tomas back to Joe. "Could have burned himself."

Joe looked at the father and son now. Perez had his arm around the boy, the boy nodding, the father speaking in low tones and kissing the side of the boy's head several times, the