Squatters
by Mario Giannone
Hector and the other farmworkers taught Sara how to weed around the cabbages. They showed her how to feel the difference between the weeds and cabbage leaves. When she grabbed a part of the cabbage to tear off, Hector slapped the back of her hand. “Wrong again,” he said. This was the first day Sara had ever taken time to feel the earth. It nestled beneath her fingernails and filled the cracks of her palms. It didn’t feel or smell like the small lawn surrounding the apartment buildings where she’d grown up. It was fine and damp. As her fingers raked the cabbage field, she thought dirt was the wrong name to call it. Dirt was filth. She decided to call it soil because soil sounded like the name of a place where things could grow.
Hector and his wife, Daphne, had given Sara a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt to wear when she worked the fields. The couple had told her the farmer would not be happy if he saw a teenage white girl working with Hector and the other men. Hector and Daphne had promised to keep an eye out for her for however long she decided to stay. They had convinced the men to pay her a bit out of their own pockets to help her out. The only other work Sara had done before this was a weeklong stint as a gas station convenience store cashier, but the manager was a creep, and she’d told him to eat shit and walked out. This—planting, picking, irrigating—seemed like all too much for her first day. After weeding, Sara moved irrigation pipe across the cabbage fields. The farmer, who was too old himself to do any real work, mostly sat in his white pickup truck and lorded over them. “Meeera,” he shouted from the truck as he pointed all over the field. He grew antsy sometimes and would hop out and work alongside them. Sara would need to keep her head down until he got winded and retreated to his air-conditioned truck.
The fields were one to two acres each and were scattered among small suburban mansions with stone facades. Entire teams had cut the lawns to the ideal length. Gloved cleaning woman maintained the insides. The people who lived in these homes all drove white SUVs, which they hid inside four-car garages. They never turned their heads to look at Sara and the workers in the fields.
By noon, the crew had weeded and watered two cabbage fields. Sara’s knuckles bled. Her arms were exhausted and useless. One of the men came back from a deli with lunch for everyone. Hector gave Sara two sandwiches and a jug of lemonade. She sprinted across the field. When she was out of sight, she took her hat and hood off and let her hair trail behind her.
In the chicken coop, Gracie rubbed her pregnant stomach. Even with the baby, Gracie must’ve weighed no more than one-forty. She looked like a kid trying to smuggle a watermelon out of a store by stuffing it beneath their shirt.
“Howdy ho, Farmer Brown,” Gracie said when Sara arrived.
The coop was a long concrete block structure with a cement floor. Hens had not been kept there for many years. The roof had collapsed over most of it, and it seemed like the section Sara and Gracie lived in would not stand for much longer either. When they first moved in, the place had been overrun with field mice, but the girls had spent a week killing them with a shovel. There was a groundhog that lived there still, but he never bothered them, and Sara had grown fond of his fat face. Gracie had spray-painted “Cleaned And Claimed By Gracie And Sarah” on the wall, and Sara never worked up the courage to tell Gracie she’d spelled her name wrong.
Sara had stayed in worse places. Park bathrooms, beneath overpasses, warehouse loading docks, and Southside squats. Before she’d linked up with Gracie and her friends at Croxton Yard, she’d been staying at Crash’s shithole for a week, where she stayed up for three days straight, getting high until she saw giant shadow spiders crawling up the walls.
Gracie rested on the old mattress that she and Sara shared. They’d found it on the side of the road one day and had dragged it back to the coop. The mattress was covered in strange yellow stains that they had to actively ignore when trying to fall asleep. Something had made a home inside of their bed among the springs and foam. Sara would slap the mattress throughout the night and scream, “Shut up in there, for Christ’s sake.”
“How much longer till you’re done?” Gracie asked as they ate the sandwiches. “I’ve never been so bored in my life.” Sara wanted to say, “Till four,” but by the time she had gathered the energy to speak, she’d forgotten what they were even talking about.
“I haven’t been able to stop pissing today,” Gracie said.
“I can smell that,” Sara said, pointing to the bucket they used as a toilet. Now that it was hot, the bucket’s stink filled the coop by midday. Gracie never emptied it herself. She claimed it was too heavy to carry. She was expecting after all.
Sara had only known Gracie for a month, but Sara thought of her as her best friend. She did not tell this to Gracie, who would’ve laughed and called Sara a baby. The girls had ridden the same gondola cart from Jersey City down to Atlantic County. When the transit cops had chased them and the others off the train, the girls took refuge in the coop and had decided to stay.
Gracie tossed a tomato slice at Sara. It stuck to her hair, and Gracie laughed.
“Somebody liked that,” Gracie said, rubbing her stomach.
Gracie wasn’t sure how far along she was. During her last visit, Daphne had estimated she was at about six months. Gracie said the baby’s father was some piece of shit named Rat. The last time she saw him he had thrown her out of his car while heading down the BQE. Gracie grabbed Sara’s hand and placed it at the top of her stomach. Sara felt the beat of the baby’s dance against her palm. The child wanted something from her, but she did not know what she could give it.
Sara and Gracie’s plan was for Sara to make enough money to buy the two of them bus tickets to Jacksonville. Sara had a cousin there who she used to instant message all the time. Sara promised Gracie her cousin would let them crash on her sleeper sofa for a bit, even though Sara had not spoken to this cousin in the year since Sara had left home. Sara would give the baby the Florida sun. With her hand still on Gracie’s stomach, and the baby still kicking away, she pictured a pale child with blonde, nearly white, hair like Gracie’s. She imagined pushing it in a stroller beneath palm trees. “Okay that’s enough excitement for now,” Gracie said and moved Sara’s hand.
Sara worked a chard field in the afternoon. Hector was not there. He had been sent with a different crew to the cabbage field down the road. He had assured her Tomas would keep an eye on her, but she didn’t know who that was, and everything was moving too fast for her to go around and ask. She did not understand what anyone was saying at first. Then she realized that most of what they discussed was numbers, the quantities of things that still needed to be done.
Sara and the men clipped the leaves from the chard and packed them in boxes. The heat pounded on Sara’s head like a toddler throwing a fit. Who needed this shit? She could hop another train or trick some dumb guys into driving her and Gracie to at least North Carolina. All this for just two bus tickets. “Screw this,” Sara yelled. She got to her feet and threw her hat down. None of the men looked up as she walked off. In the field sat her half-filled box. The men harvested without interruption. They cut the leaves, glazed and purple like a new scab, then packed them away without stopping to wipe their brow. The field was silent except for the slight snips of their pruners. If anyone were to so much as cough, it would destroy the frequency of their work. Sara went back to her spot and continued picking. One of the men returned her hat.
“Tomas?” Sara asked.
“No, Luis. That’s Tomas,” Luis said, pointing down the field. Tomas waved and smiled.
At night Daphne came by to check on Sara and Gracie, mostly Gracie. Daphne had been fixated on Gracie and her baby ever since she’d discovered the girls in the coop trying to make a campfire from dryer lint and damp magazines. Daphne worked on the cleaning crew of a local hospital, and, when she could, she’d snag supplies for Gracie. The girls curled up with each other on the mattress and watched Daphne lay out the items she’d brought them. A belly support band, prenatal vitamins, a worn baby name book, and two cans of beer yoked together by plastic rings.
“Hector wanted me to bring you these,” Daphne said, handing the beers to Sara. “He said you did a good job today.”
“First thing I’m doing when the little fella comes out is chugging a beer,” Gracie said. “When we get to Florida, we should hit a margarita bar.”
“Cheers,” Sara said, raising her can. The beer was warm and foamy.
Daphne shook her head at the giggling girls. “A lot of the guys are leaving the end of September,” she said. “You two could move in then.”
“I don’t plan on staying around here a second longer than I have to,” Gracie said.
In the morning, Sara helped plant lettuce seedlings. She sat next to Hector in the transplanter while Tomas pulled them with the tractor. Sara took the seedlings from the tray in front of her, reached down into the small plow next to her foot, and let the transplanter take the seedling away and drop it into the ground. Behind them two of the other men followed on foot, resetting the plants that’d fallen out of line. The seedlings were just three small leaves in a two-inch-deep tray. They looked like the crabgrass that, as a child, Sara would pull out of her grandmother’s garden.
“This leaf is going to become a whole cabbage?” Sara said. “You got to be shitting me.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” Hector says. “One day, your sister’s baby will be an adult like us. Hopefully he won’t be doing this crap though.”
Sara started to correct Hector but then stopped herself. Gracie and she could be whoever. “I can’t wait to be an aunt,” she shouted over the machinery.
She and Gracie spent the late afternoon lying out by a retention pond. It hadn’t rained in a while, and the pond was nearly dried up. A sweet smell filled the air despite the hot stagnant puddles at the bottom of the pond. Gracie picked a few honeysuckle blossoms from a bush and sat beside Sara. She tore the bloom off. On the bare stem was a drop of nectar the size of a teardrop. Gracie licked the stem clean.
“You a goat now?” Sara said.
Gracie pulled the bloom from a second one and let the nectar fall onto Sara’s tongue. Sara ran over to the honeysuckle bush and grabbed a bunch. She sucked the nectar from all of them, but no matter how many she ate, she never felt full.
“I think once the baby comes,” Gracie said, “I’m going to apply for a housing grant. Get a little apartment. Go to school to become an x-ray tech. I have a friend whose cousin makes a bunch of money doing that, and she isn’t that smart.”
Sara rubbed her foot. There was a long nascent scar on her instep from when she’d stepped on a crack stem someone had left on the floor of Crash’s house. “What about Jacksonville?” Sara asked.
“After Jacksonville,” Gracie said. “Got to stay two steps ahead.”
“Haven’t thought past Jacksonville yet,” Sara said.
Gracie was already planning a life after Sara. She would find somewhere for her and her child, a place that was the right size for the two of them but just small enough to exclude Sara, who had been dumb enough this whole time to think that she and Gracie would get jobs in Florida and find a small place together a few blocks from a beach, where on the weekends they would take the baby so he could play in the sand. Gracie struggled to her feet and asked Sara if she wanted to see if there was anything good to eat in the dumpster at John Ricky’s Tavern. Sara turned her down. She returned to the coop alone and fell asleep right at sunset. For a moment, she woke up to find Gracie feasting on stale chicken wings.
Sara worked the fields the rest of the week. They would pick the crops from one of the fields and then began getting the ground ready for the next round. Luis let Sara stand on the side of the tractor while he plowed. The discs shredded the earth. Sara jumped up and down on the tractor’s wheel well and Luis had to keep grabbing her by the arm and shouting “No” over the racket of the engine. The next week they would plant basil there, but for now there were other things to be done.
On Friday, Sara and the men weeded around the eggplant sprouts. The sun and the humidity beat down on her. She felt like she was being buried beneath it. When a breeze came by, Sara and the men stood up, removed their hats, and let the air cool their faces for that brief moment. Once it passed, they returned to their hunched positions. Sara went from field to field moving irrigation, weeding, sowing new crops. Unless someone told her, she had no idea what the green stems emerging from the soil were. She just knew they needed tending to.
In the afternoon, when the farmer got tired and went home, the men turned up the radio. Sometimes one of the other workers, rows away, would sing along, and the others would laugh. “Can I have a turn?” she asked Hector. He deferred to the other men and they shrugged. She changed it to a pop station and danced among the rhubarb until someone changed the station back.
At the end of the day, Hector gave Sara her pay: two crumpled twenties and a ten. She stashed the money inside her bra. In just a few more weeks she would have enough to get her and Gracie to Florida.
Saturday mornings were the best for dumpster diving at John Ricky’s. Friday nights the bar was packed with people ordering extra food that just got tossed in the dumpster, which went unwatched until eleven the following morning. Gracie complained that she was cramping too hard to climb into the dumpster, so Sara dove in.
“Three more weeks,” she told Gracie. Trash juice filled her shoes. She rummaged through bags of wing bones and glass bottles. “We’ll be in the Florida sun in no time.”
“I’m getting sick of the sun,” Gracie said. “Why don’t we head north. Vermont or something.”
“Wherever you want, mama.”
Sara found a container with most of a cheeseburger and two untouched club sandwiches. Gracie helped her climb out of the dumpster and picked the filth from her hair. It was when they got back that Sara realized her first week’s pay was no longer in her bra. The girls ran back to the dumpster, and Sara dug through the leaking black bags. They searched the side of the road between the coop and the bar. It was gone. A week’s worth of work had disappeared.
At the coop, Gracie kicked all their belongings. She punted a carton of lemonade and it soaked Sara’s shins. The noise of the tantrum traveled out and over the fields. Sara tried to wrestle Gracie in a bear hug, but she shrugged her off.
“I got to get out of this shithole,” Gracie said. “Living in a fucking chicken coop for almost a month.”
“We’ll leave soon,” Sara said. “Can you stop doing that?”
She tried to constrain Gracie by grabbing both of her arms. Gracie wriggled free and continued ranting and kicking things. She kicked over their toilet bucket and its contents spread across the concrete.
“We’re not leaving,” Gracie said, “or at least you’re not. There’re a million ways to leave if you really want to. The train’s not far, we could hitch a ride, take a bus, whatever. I’m getting on the first thing that’ll take me away from these fucking cabbages.”
She sat on the mattress and cried with the bottom of her t-shirt against her face. Her stomach was out, and it was the first time that Sara had ever really seen Gracie’s baby bump, which was always carefully concealed by a t-shirt and a jacket no matter what the weather was. Her stomach was perfectly round as if she had swallowed the moon whole. A pattern of purple and pink stretch marks decorated it. Sara sat with Gracie while Gracie cried the last of her tears.
“I’m sorry. These hormones are making me crazy,” Gracie said.
Sara held her. She ran her fingers through Gracie’s hair and cleaned the dirt from beneath her fingernails with her own. “We can leave tomorrow. We’ll find a train and see where it takes us.”
“We’ll wait for Jacksonville. It’s okay. Margaritas and sand.”
Sara fell asleep on the mattress hugging Gracie’s arm. She dreamed of a field of pumpkins and her dead mother’s voice, a voice she hadn’t heard in many years, saying, “Sara, where’s the dog?”
She woke up to Gracie screaming. The sheet was wet and something sticky was all over Sara’s thigh. She threw the sheets off. A puddle of blood had formed on the mattress between Gracie’s legs. Sara begged Gracie to tell her what was wrong, but all she did was shout for help. Sara didn’t remember getting up and leaving the coop, but she suddenly found herself running through the fields and down the dirt access roads. She tripped over cabbage and stomped unripe eggplants until she came to the house Daphne, Hector, and the others shared. Luis sat on a couch on the porch, yelling into his phone. He looked at Sara’s bloodstained clothes and ran inside. There were calls for Daphne coming from inside the house. She came out still dressed in her grey work scrubs. Sara took her by the hand, and they ran back across the fields. From two fields over they could hear Gracie screaming and moaning. Daphne sprinted in front of Sara. Hector and some of the other men ran by her too.
When she made it, Sara had to push past the crowd to get to Gracie. Sara cradled Gracie’s head while Daphne worked between her legs. Gracie had bitten through her own lip and Sara wiped her chin with her shirt. “Use this,” she said, putting a bunched-up undershirt in Gracie’s mouth.
Daphne ordered Hector and the others to bring the van. Sara didn’t know how long it all went on for. Daphne mumbled to herself, while Gracie cried and moaned. Sara would not look anywhere but Gracie’s face for fear of seeing something she didn’t want to see. But Gracie’s face was twisted and soaked with tears and sweat. “Make it stop,” she said. “Get it out. Get it out.” And Sara just wanted it to end so she didn’t have to hear all the begging. The field mice huddled in the corners and the spiders clung to their webs. It was just Sara and Daphne comforting Gracie while they waited for Hector to return.
Sara could feel Gracie’s bones and muscles shifting. It felt like there was something else trapped inside Gracie alongside the baby, and it was demanding to be freed. Daphne’s hands were smeared with blood. “It’s okay,” Daphne repeated in a hushed tone. Sara pushed Gracie’s body off of her and crawled across the coop on her hands and knees. She wept until Hector and Luis carried Gracie to the van. Daphne jumped in the back with her. She tried to give Gracie a bottle of water, but she slapped it away. Daphne closed the sliding door, and Hector sped off.
The leaves of the newly sprouted chard bowed and rose in the wind like the head of a dog watching a bouncing ball. Along the horizon, a slice of pink sunlight fought against the night. Sara just wished it would be dark already. She wanted everything in front of her to disappear. For a moment, she thought she was alone. Then she remembered that Luis was standing behind her. He had the neckline of his shirt pulled up over his nose to shield from the stink of the coop. Her nose was blind to the smell, but Sara pulled her shirt over her nose too. “It fucking reeks in here,” she said. Luis led her back to the house.
The workers let Sara stay with them while she waited to hear from Daphne and Hector. Luis insisted Daphne would call once they knew something. Thirteen people occupied the three-bedroom house. The couples lived in one room with two twin mattresses on the floor. The others slept in the remaining two bedrooms which were filled with cots and backpacks. Luis slept on the couch and kept all of his things in a wheeled hamper.
Tomas gave her an oversized t-shirt to change into, and his wife, Carla, washed Sara’s out in the tub. As she dried off, she jutted out her stomach to see what she would look like pregnant. She balled up her towel and stuffed it beneath her shirt. The fabric of her shirt pulled tight against her back and ribs. The sharp angles of her body revealed themselves. It had been some time since she’d seen her reflection in something that wasn’t a store window or a puddle. She rubbed the pretend stomach, but then the towel fell from beneath her shirt.
Carla forced Sara to eat something. She heated up some rice and some kind of stew for her. When Sara raised her fork to her mouth, she saw a dried blood clot smeared across her thumb.
She took her plate to the living room where some of the men had gathered around a laptop to watch a soccer game. They talked shit to one another over the announcers and hissing crowd. Luis tried to explain some of the game to Sara, but once he’d had his third beer, he’d forgotten all about her. When the game was over, most of the men erupted in cheers and ran out of the house. Their play kicked up clouds of dust.
The backyard ended in a field of basil whose smell overwhelmed the yard when the wind blew their way. At the border of the property, the farmer had planted a row of grapes. The trellises created a wall between his backyard and the workers’ house. He sat on his back porch smoking. Neither he nor his workers acknowledged one another.
Carla waved to Sara and held out the house phone for her. It was Daphne. In the background Sara could hear hospital commotion. The PA made demands. Children screamed.
“What is Gracie’s last name?” Daphne asked.
“Never mentioned it,” Sara said. “Where is she?”
“Did she have any ID or say where she was from or anything like that?”
“What happened to her?”
“Did she say if she had any family?”
“Where is she? Is she okay?”
“We can talk about it when I get home,” Daphne said.
“You can tell me now,” Sara said, but Daphne begged for Sara to wait until she returned. Only bad news ever had to wait.
Sara was shouting now, and the wind picked up her voice and dusted it onto the nearby fields. The men stopped wrestling to stare at her. Sara fell back against the wall and started to cry. Crash had once told Sara that all the junkies in New York who die and have no family are buried in an anonymous grave on an island off the Bronx.
When Daphne came home, it was nearly three in the morning. She told Sara about how the baby’s placenta had burst, and its blood had mixed with Gracie’s and poisoned her. She said this to Sara as if an explanation meant there was no need to feel any way about Gracie dying.
Daphne made Sara a makeshift bed on the floor of the couples’ room. Although the floor was more comfortable than the old mattress in the coop, she couldn’t fall asleep. The men in the other rooms snored and woke up to piss throughout the night. Some of them were still awake and either watched TV or played games on their phones. Sara snuck past them and headed back to the coop. She knew she was someone who could just disappear in the middle of the night. In the morning, Daphne would see the empty space on the floor, call Sara’s name a couple times, then just shrug and go about the rest of her life.
On her way to the coop, she walked through the cabbage field. They were ready for harvesting, and that’s what the men’s work would be that coming week. They’d pack them all in the boxes with the wax coating and stack them in a big pyramid on the back of a truck. They’d get bored midafternoon, like always, and shove dirt and cabbage leaves into the back of each other’s pants as a joke. Sara undid the leaves of one of the cabbages. She thought there might be something tucked away at its center, like a human head or big-eyed critter, curled up and sleeping. There were just more and more cabbage leaves and some bugs that crawled up her arm.
The mattress was still in the coop, and Sara didn’t know why she had expected it to be gone. The bloodstains had probably turned to a rust color, but it was too dark to see. Sara took her last beer off the ground and, without wiping the dirt from it, buried it deep in her bag. She went through Gracie’s backpack and found five dollars, a few pairs of socks, some loose cigarettes that had snapped in half, but no ID. Gracie was no one. She was from nowhere. Sara tried a handful of chewable prenatal vitamins. They were strawberry-flavored, and she spit them out. She spent the rest of the night under the awning of a bank drive thru sipping the beer until daybreak.
At a nearby gas station, she hitched a ride from an older woman with a Pomeranian in her back seat. “Settle down, Kisses,” she said to the dog whenever it whimpered. Sara asked the woman to take her to a bus station, and the woman had to pull over again to look up directions on her phone. “You’re not a hooker or something are you?” the woman asked. Sara held up her hands. The skin was chapped. Callouses had started to form on her palms. “Farm work,” she said.
At the bus station, she learned her last few bucks wouldn’t even get her to Philadelphia. She walked a few blocks until she came to a substation surrounded by train tracks. Inside the fence a couple of guys slept in the shade of a transformer. “Where’s this train head to?” she shouted to them, but they didn’t respond. She followed the tracks west. No trains came. After an hour of walking, there still weren’t enough miles between her and the coop and Daphne and Hector and all the rest.
The ground rumbled, and Sara turned to see a freight train heading towards her. It chugged by. She ran alongside the tracks, chasing after the service ladder on the side of one of the grain cars. Her bag jostled on her back. Ragweed whipped her shins. The train slammed down on the tracks like a tight upper jaw. Its gears coughed on rust. Sara lost her footing and slid down the ballast bed. The train gained speed. Only a few cars were left before the train would move on without Sara. She reached out for each service ladder as they flew past, but they were always just a few inches out of reach.
Hector and his wife, Daphne, had given Sara a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt to wear when she worked the fields. The couple had told her the farmer would not be happy if he saw a teenage white girl working with Hector and the other men. Hector and Daphne had promised to keep an eye out for her for however long she decided to stay. They had convinced the men to pay her a bit out of their own pockets to help her out. The only other work Sara had done before this was a weeklong stint as a gas station convenience store cashier, but the manager was a creep, and she’d told him to eat shit and walked out. This—planting, picking, irrigating—seemed like all too much for her first day. After weeding, Sara moved irrigation pipe across the cabbage fields. The farmer, who was too old himself to do any real work, mostly sat in his white pickup truck and lorded over them. “Meeera,” he shouted from the truck as he pointed all over the field. He grew antsy sometimes and would hop out and work alongside them. Sara would need to keep her head down until he got winded and retreated to his air-conditioned truck.
The fields were one to two acres each and were scattered among small suburban mansions with stone facades. Entire teams had cut the lawns to the ideal length. Gloved cleaning woman maintained the insides. The people who lived in these homes all drove white SUVs, which they hid inside four-car garages. They never turned their heads to look at Sara and the workers in the fields.
By noon, the crew had weeded and watered two cabbage fields. Sara’s knuckles bled. Her arms were exhausted and useless. One of the men came back from a deli with lunch for everyone. Hector gave Sara two sandwiches and a jug of lemonade. She sprinted across the field. When she was out of sight, she took her hat and hood off and let her hair trail behind her.
In the chicken coop, Gracie rubbed her pregnant stomach. Even with the baby, Gracie must’ve weighed no more than one-forty. She looked like a kid trying to smuggle a watermelon out of a store by stuffing it beneath their shirt.
“Howdy ho, Farmer Brown,” Gracie said when Sara arrived.
The coop was a long concrete block structure with a cement floor. Hens had not been kept there for many years. The roof had collapsed over most of it, and it seemed like the section Sara and Gracie lived in would not stand for much longer either. When they first moved in, the place had been overrun with field mice, but the girls had spent a week killing them with a shovel. There was a groundhog that lived there still, but he never bothered them, and Sara had grown fond of his fat face. Gracie had spray-painted “Cleaned And Claimed By Gracie And Sarah” on the wall, and Sara never worked up the courage to tell Gracie she’d spelled her name wrong.
Sara had stayed in worse places. Park bathrooms, beneath overpasses, warehouse loading docks, and Southside squats. Before she’d linked up with Gracie and her friends at Croxton Yard, she’d been staying at Crash’s shithole for a week, where she stayed up for three days straight, getting high until she saw giant shadow spiders crawling up the walls.
Gracie rested on the old mattress that she and Sara shared. They’d found it on the side of the road one day and had dragged it back to the coop. The mattress was covered in strange yellow stains that they had to actively ignore when trying to fall asleep. Something had made a home inside of their bed among the springs and foam. Sara would slap the mattress throughout the night and scream, “Shut up in there, for Christ’s sake.”
“How much longer till you’re done?” Gracie asked as they ate the sandwiches. “I’ve never been so bored in my life.” Sara wanted to say, “Till four,” but by the time she had gathered the energy to speak, she’d forgotten what they were even talking about.
“I haven’t been able to stop pissing today,” Gracie said.
“I can smell that,” Sara said, pointing to the bucket they used as a toilet. Now that it was hot, the bucket’s stink filled the coop by midday. Gracie never emptied it herself. She claimed it was too heavy to carry. She was expecting after all.
Sara had only known Gracie for a month, but Sara thought of her as her best friend. She did not tell this to Gracie, who would’ve laughed and called Sara a baby. The girls had ridden the same gondola cart from Jersey City down to Atlantic County. When the transit cops had chased them and the others off the train, the girls took refuge in the coop and had decided to stay.
Gracie tossed a tomato slice at Sara. It stuck to her hair, and Gracie laughed.
“Somebody liked that,” Gracie said, rubbing her stomach.
Gracie wasn’t sure how far along she was. During her last visit, Daphne had estimated she was at about six months. Gracie said the baby’s father was some piece of shit named Rat. The last time she saw him he had thrown her out of his car while heading down the BQE. Gracie grabbed Sara’s hand and placed it at the top of her stomach. Sara felt the beat of the baby’s dance against her palm. The child wanted something from her, but she did not know what she could give it.
Sara and Gracie’s plan was for Sara to make enough money to buy the two of them bus tickets to Jacksonville. Sara had a cousin there who she used to instant message all the time. Sara promised Gracie her cousin would let them crash on her sleeper sofa for a bit, even though Sara had not spoken to this cousin in the year since Sara had left home. Sara would give the baby the Florida sun. With her hand still on Gracie’s stomach, and the baby still kicking away, she pictured a pale child with blonde, nearly white, hair like Gracie’s. She imagined pushing it in a stroller beneath palm trees. “Okay that’s enough excitement for now,” Gracie said and moved Sara’s hand.
Sara worked a chard field in the afternoon. Hector was not there. He had been sent with a different crew to the cabbage field down the road. He had assured her Tomas would keep an eye on her, but she didn’t know who that was, and everything was moving too fast for her to go around and ask. She did not understand what anyone was saying at first. Then she realized that most of what they discussed was numbers, the quantities of things that still needed to be done.
Sara and the men clipped the leaves from the chard and packed them in boxes. The heat pounded on Sara’s head like a toddler throwing a fit. Who needed this shit? She could hop another train or trick some dumb guys into driving her and Gracie to at least North Carolina. All this for just two bus tickets. “Screw this,” Sara yelled. She got to her feet and threw her hat down. None of the men looked up as she walked off. In the field sat her half-filled box. The men harvested without interruption. They cut the leaves, glazed and purple like a new scab, then packed them away without stopping to wipe their brow. The field was silent except for the slight snips of their pruners. If anyone were to so much as cough, it would destroy the frequency of their work. Sara went back to her spot and continued picking. One of the men returned her hat.
“Tomas?” Sara asked.
“No, Luis. That’s Tomas,” Luis said, pointing down the field. Tomas waved and smiled.
At night Daphne came by to check on Sara and Gracie, mostly Gracie. Daphne had been fixated on Gracie and her baby ever since she’d discovered the girls in the coop trying to make a campfire from dryer lint and damp magazines. Daphne worked on the cleaning crew of a local hospital, and, when she could, she’d snag supplies for Gracie. The girls curled up with each other on the mattress and watched Daphne lay out the items she’d brought them. A belly support band, prenatal vitamins, a worn baby name book, and two cans of beer yoked together by plastic rings.
“Hector wanted me to bring you these,” Daphne said, handing the beers to Sara. “He said you did a good job today.”
“First thing I’m doing when the little fella comes out is chugging a beer,” Gracie said. “When we get to Florida, we should hit a margarita bar.”
“Cheers,” Sara said, raising her can. The beer was warm and foamy.
Daphne shook her head at the giggling girls. “A lot of the guys are leaving the end of September,” she said. “You two could move in then.”
“I don’t plan on staying around here a second longer than I have to,” Gracie said.
In the morning, Sara helped plant lettuce seedlings. She sat next to Hector in the transplanter while Tomas pulled them with the tractor. Sara took the seedlings from the tray in front of her, reached down into the small plow next to her foot, and let the transplanter take the seedling away and drop it into the ground. Behind them two of the other men followed on foot, resetting the plants that’d fallen out of line. The seedlings were just three small leaves in a two-inch-deep tray. They looked like the crabgrass that, as a child, Sara would pull out of her grandmother’s garden.
“This leaf is going to become a whole cabbage?” Sara said. “You got to be shitting me.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” Hector says. “One day, your sister’s baby will be an adult like us. Hopefully he won’t be doing this crap though.”
Sara started to correct Hector but then stopped herself. Gracie and she could be whoever. “I can’t wait to be an aunt,” she shouted over the machinery.
She and Gracie spent the late afternoon lying out by a retention pond. It hadn’t rained in a while, and the pond was nearly dried up. A sweet smell filled the air despite the hot stagnant puddles at the bottom of the pond. Gracie picked a few honeysuckle blossoms from a bush and sat beside Sara. She tore the bloom off. On the bare stem was a drop of nectar the size of a teardrop. Gracie licked the stem clean.
“You a goat now?” Sara said.
Gracie pulled the bloom from a second one and let the nectar fall onto Sara’s tongue. Sara ran over to the honeysuckle bush and grabbed a bunch. She sucked the nectar from all of them, but no matter how many she ate, she never felt full.
“I think once the baby comes,” Gracie said, “I’m going to apply for a housing grant. Get a little apartment. Go to school to become an x-ray tech. I have a friend whose cousin makes a bunch of money doing that, and she isn’t that smart.”
Sara rubbed her foot. There was a long nascent scar on her instep from when she’d stepped on a crack stem someone had left on the floor of Crash’s house. “What about Jacksonville?” Sara asked.
“After Jacksonville,” Gracie said. “Got to stay two steps ahead.”
“Haven’t thought past Jacksonville yet,” Sara said.
Gracie was already planning a life after Sara. She would find somewhere for her and her child, a place that was the right size for the two of them but just small enough to exclude Sara, who had been dumb enough this whole time to think that she and Gracie would get jobs in Florida and find a small place together a few blocks from a beach, where on the weekends they would take the baby so he could play in the sand. Gracie struggled to her feet and asked Sara if she wanted to see if there was anything good to eat in the dumpster at John Ricky’s Tavern. Sara turned her down. She returned to the coop alone and fell asleep right at sunset. For a moment, she woke up to find Gracie feasting on stale chicken wings.
Sara worked the fields the rest of the week. They would pick the crops from one of the fields and then began getting the ground ready for the next round. Luis let Sara stand on the side of the tractor while he plowed. The discs shredded the earth. Sara jumped up and down on the tractor’s wheel well and Luis had to keep grabbing her by the arm and shouting “No” over the racket of the engine. The next week they would plant basil there, but for now there were other things to be done.
On Friday, Sara and the men weeded around the eggplant sprouts. The sun and the humidity beat down on her. She felt like she was being buried beneath it. When a breeze came by, Sara and the men stood up, removed their hats, and let the air cool their faces for that brief moment. Once it passed, they returned to their hunched positions. Sara went from field to field moving irrigation, weeding, sowing new crops. Unless someone told her, she had no idea what the green stems emerging from the soil were. She just knew they needed tending to.
In the afternoon, when the farmer got tired and went home, the men turned up the radio. Sometimes one of the other workers, rows away, would sing along, and the others would laugh. “Can I have a turn?” she asked Hector. He deferred to the other men and they shrugged. She changed it to a pop station and danced among the rhubarb until someone changed the station back.
At the end of the day, Hector gave Sara her pay: two crumpled twenties and a ten. She stashed the money inside her bra. In just a few more weeks she would have enough to get her and Gracie to Florida.
Saturday mornings were the best for dumpster diving at John Ricky’s. Friday nights the bar was packed with people ordering extra food that just got tossed in the dumpster, which went unwatched until eleven the following morning. Gracie complained that she was cramping too hard to climb into the dumpster, so Sara dove in.
“Three more weeks,” she told Gracie. Trash juice filled her shoes. She rummaged through bags of wing bones and glass bottles. “We’ll be in the Florida sun in no time.”
“I’m getting sick of the sun,” Gracie said. “Why don’t we head north. Vermont or something.”
“Wherever you want, mama.”
Sara found a container with most of a cheeseburger and two untouched club sandwiches. Gracie helped her climb out of the dumpster and picked the filth from her hair. It was when they got back that Sara realized her first week’s pay was no longer in her bra. The girls ran back to the dumpster, and Sara dug through the leaking black bags. They searched the side of the road between the coop and the bar. It was gone. A week’s worth of work had disappeared.
At the coop, Gracie kicked all their belongings. She punted a carton of lemonade and it soaked Sara’s shins. The noise of the tantrum traveled out and over the fields. Sara tried to wrestle Gracie in a bear hug, but she shrugged her off.
“I got to get out of this shithole,” Gracie said. “Living in a fucking chicken coop for almost a month.”
“We’ll leave soon,” Sara said. “Can you stop doing that?”
She tried to constrain Gracie by grabbing both of her arms. Gracie wriggled free and continued ranting and kicking things. She kicked over their toilet bucket and its contents spread across the concrete.
“We’re not leaving,” Gracie said, “or at least you’re not. There’re a million ways to leave if you really want to. The train’s not far, we could hitch a ride, take a bus, whatever. I’m getting on the first thing that’ll take me away from these fucking cabbages.”
She sat on the mattress and cried with the bottom of her t-shirt against her face. Her stomach was out, and it was the first time that Sara had ever really seen Gracie’s baby bump, which was always carefully concealed by a t-shirt and a jacket no matter what the weather was. Her stomach was perfectly round as if she had swallowed the moon whole. A pattern of purple and pink stretch marks decorated it. Sara sat with Gracie while Gracie cried the last of her tears.
“I’m sorry. These hormones are making me crazy,” Gracie said.
Sara held her. She ran her fingers through Gracie’s hair and cleaned the dirt from beneath her fingernails with her own. “We can leave tomorrow. We’ll find a train and see where it takes us.”
“We’ll wait for Jacksonville. It’s okay. Margaritas and sand.”
Sara fell asleep on the mattress hugging Gracie’s arm. She dreamed of a field of pumpkins and her dead mother’s voice, a voice she hadn’t heard in many years, saying, “Sara, where’s the dog?”
She woke up to Gracie screaming. The sheet was wet and something sticky was all over Sara’s thigh. She threw the sheets off. A puddle of blood had formed on the mattress between Gracie’s legs. Sara begged Gracie to tell her what was wrong, but all she did was shout for help. Sara didn’t remember getting up and leaving the coop, but she suddenly found herself running through the fields and down the dirt access roads. She tripped over cabbage and stomped unripe eggplants until she came to the house Daphne, Hector, and the others shared. Luis sat on a couch on the porch, yelling into his phone. He looked at Sara’s bloodstained clothes and ran inside. There were calls for Daphne coming from inside the house. She came out still dressed in her grey work scrubs. Sara took her by the hand, and they ran back across the fields. From two fields over they could hear Gracie screaming and moaning. Daphne sprinted in front of Sara. Hector and some of the other men ran by her too.
When she made it, Sara had to push past the crowd to get to Gracie. Sara cradled Gracie’s head while Daphne worked between her legs. Gracie had bitten through her own lip and Sara wiped her chin with her shirt. “Use this,” she said, putting a bunched-up undershirt in Gracie’s mouth.
Daphne ordered Hector and the others to bring the van. Sara didn’t know how long it all went on for. Daphne mumbled to herself, while Gracie cried and moaned. Sara would not look anywhere but Gracie’s face for fear of seeing something she didn’t want to see. But Gracie’s face was twisted and soaked with tears and sweat. “Make it stop,” she said. “Get it out. Get it out.” And Sara just wanted it to end so she didn’t have to hear all the begging. The field mice huddled in the corners and the spiders clung to their webs. It was just Sara and Daphne comforting Gracie while they waited for Hector to return.
Sara could feel Gracie’s bones and muscles shifting. It felt like there was something else trapped inside Gracie alongside the baby, and it was demanding to be freed. Daphne’s hands were smeared with blood. “It’s okay,” Daphne repeated in a hushed tone. Sara pushed Gracie’s body off of her and crawled across the coop on her hands and knees. She wept until Hector and Luis carried Gracie to the van. Daphne jumped in the back with her. She tried to give Gracie a bottle of water, but she slapped it away. Daphne closed the sliding door, and Hector sped off.
The leaves of the newly sprouted chard bowed and rose in the wind like the head of a dog watching a bouncing ball. Along the horizon, a slice of pink sunlight fought against the night. Sara just wished it would be dark already. She wanted everything in front of her to disappear. For a moment, she thought she was alone. Then she remembered that Luis was standing behind her. He had the neckline of his shirt pulled up over his nose to shield from the stink of the coop. Her nose was blind to the smell, but Sara pulled her shirt over her nose too. “It fucking reeks in here,” she said. Luis led her back to the house.
The workers let Sara stay with them while she waited to hear from Daphne and Hector. Luis insisted Daphne would call once they knew something. Thirteen people occupied the three-bedroom house. The couples lived in one room with two twin mattresses on the floor. The others slept in the remaining two bedrooms which were filled with cots and backpacks. Luis slept on the couch and kept all of his things in a wheeled hamper.
Tomas gave her an oversized t-shirt to change into, and his wife, Carla, washed Sara’s out in the tub. As she dried off, she jutted out her stomach to see what she would look like pregnant. She balled up her towel and stuffed it beneath her shirt. The fabric of her shirt pulled tight against her back and ribs. The sharp angles of her body revealed themselves. It had been some time since she’d seen her reflection in something that wasn’t a store window or a puddle. She rubbed the pretend stomach, but then the towel fell from beneath her shirt.
Carla forced Sara to eat something. She heated up some rice and some kind of stew for her. When Sara raised her fork to her mouth, she saw a dried blood clot smeared across her thumb.
She took her plate to the living room where some of the men had gathered around a laptop to watch a soccer game. They talked shit to one another over the announcers and hissing crowd. Luis tried to explain some of the game to Sara, but once he’d had his third beer, he’d forgotten all about her. When the game was over, most of the men erupted in cheers and ran out of the house. Their play kicked up clouds of dust.
The backyard ended in a field of basil whose smell overwhelmed the yard when the wind blew their way. At the border of the property, the farmer had planted a row of grapes. The trellises created a wall between his backyard and the workers’ house. He sat on his back porch smoking. Neither he nor his workers acknowledged one another.
Carla waved to Sara and held out the house phone for her. It was Daphne. In the background Sara could hear hospital commotion. The PA made demands. Children screamed.
“What is Gracie’s last name?” Daphne asked.
“Never mentioned it,” Sara said. “Where is she?”
“Did she have any ID or say where she was from or anything like that?”
“What happened to her?”
“Did she say if she had any family?”
“Where is she? Is she okay?”
“We can talk about it when I get home,” Daphne said.
“You can tell me now,” Sara said, but Daphne begged for Sara to wait until she returned. Only bad news ever had to wait.
Sara was shouting now, and the wind picked up her voice and dusted it onto the nearby fields. The men stopped wrestling to stare at her. Sara fell back against the wall and started to cry. Crash had once told Sara that all the junkies in New York who die and have no family are buried in an anonymous grave on an island off the Bronx.
When Daphne came home, it was nearly three in the morning. She told Sara about how the baby’s placenta had burst, and its blood had mixed with Gracie’s and poisoned her. She said this to Sara as if an explanation meant there was no need to feel any way about Gracie dying.
Daphne made Sara a makeshift bed on the floor of the couples’ room. Although the floor was more comfortable than the old mattress in the coop, she couldn’t fall asleep. The men in the other rooms snored and woke up to piss throughout the night. Some of them were still awake and either watched TV or played games on their phones. Sara snuck past them and headed back to the coop. She knew she was someone who could just disappear in the middle of the night. In the morning, Daphne would see the empty space on the floor, call Sara’s name a couple times, then just shrug and go about the rest of her life.
On her way to the coop, she walked through the cabbage field. They were ready for harvesting, and that’s what the men’s work would be that coming week. They’d pack them all in the boxes with the wax coating and stack them in a big pyramid on the back of a truck. They’d get bored midafternoon, like always, and shove dirt and cabbage leaves into the back of each other’s pants as a joke. Sara undid the leaves of one of the cabbages. She thought there might be something tucked away at its center, like a human head or big-eyed critter, curled up and sleeping. There were just more and more cabbage leaves and some bugs that crawled up her arm.
The mattress was still in the coop, and Sara didn’t know why she had expected it to be gone. The bloodstains had probably turned to a rust color, but it was too dark to see. Sara took her last beer off the ground and, without wiping the dirt from it, buried it deep in her bag. She went through Gracie’s backpack and found five dollars, a few pairs of socks, some loose cigarettes that had snapped in half, but no ID. Gracie was no one. She was from nowhere. Sara tried a handful of chewable prenatal vitamins. They were strawberry-flavored, and she spit them out. She spent the rest of the night under the awning of a bank drive thru sipping the beer until daybreak.
At a nearby gas station, she hitched a ride from an older woman with a Pomeranian in her back seat. “Settle down, Kisses,” she said to the dog whenever it whimpered. Sara asked the woman to take her to a bus station, and the woman had to pull over again to look up directions on her phone. “You’re not a hooker or something are you?” the woman asked. Sara held up her hands. The skin was chapped. Callouses had started to form on her palms. “Farm work,” she said.
At the bus station, she learned her last few bucks wouldn’t even get her to Philadelphia. She walked a few blocks until she came to a substation surrounded by train tracks. Inside the fence a couple of guys slept in the shade of a transformer. “Where’s this train head to?” she shouted to them, but they didn’t respond. She followed the tracks west. No trains came. After an hour of walking, there still weren’t enough miles between her and the coop and Daphne and Hector and all the rest.
The ground rumbled, and Sara turned to see a freight train heading towards her. It chugged by. She ran alongside the tracks, chasing after the service ladder on the side of one of the grain cars. Her bag jostled on her back. Ragweed whipped her shins. The train slammed down on the tracks like a tight upper jaw. Its gears coughed on rust. Sara lost her footing and slid down the ballast bed. The train gained speed. Only a few cars were left before the train would move on without Sara. She reached out for each service ladder as they flew past, but they were always just a few inches out of reach.