Staking
by Nick Rossi
The boy’d been anxious about working with the quiet man when they’d gotten paired. Of all the men on the crew, this man was by far the most intimidating, never smiling when the others talked about the day’s job or told dirty jokes on their lunch break. His thick eyelashes gave his silence an essence of brooding, maybe bordering on anger. The boy’d wished he’d been assigned any other crew member for a job that was essentially hanging out for eleven hours in a field.
The job was simple: tie three hundred and thirty-six trees to metal poles they were to drive themselves. Auxiliary tasks included: cutting strips of twine, pulling the trailer forward every third tree behind the four-wheeler, and straightening poles that were found crooked before setting and staking them three strokes into the dirt at the base of each tree. This last task was vital. Crooked pole meant crooked tree meant lost money for the boss meant no job. The farm manager, a strong man in the deformed, wiry way some old laborers are, had selected and straightened a sample pole of his own the first morning, inserting the aluminum tube into a slightly bigger tube welded shut and to the back end of the flatbed. Slide, yank, repeat. The boy had noticed the bulging veins pushing from the farm manager’s taut, leather-skin arms when he’d climbed onto the trailer and driven the pole down with what the boy could only think of as a giant metal condom. After successfully clinking the pole into place with guidance from the man’s hands, the farm manager had let his limbs dangle and asked, “You think you guys can handle that?”
Once on a drive out to Peotone to spend the day squinting in the heat and chopping down endless fields of weeds with a wacker, the boy and the manager had shared the old man’s truck cab with the familiar voice of Rush Limbaugh. The boy usually tuned the radio out and vacantly watched cornstalks cut by country roads flit on the way to the jobsite, but that day he’d listened to Limbaugh’s circular tirade about the abhorrent possibility of the ascension of Hillary Clinton. He’d scoffed softly at the theatrical ignorance, wearing a dirty Nirvana shirt under his flannel work shirt and having semi-formed adolescent political opinions himself. The manager’d asked with a grin, “Rush makes you laugh, huh?” He’d responded, “Yeah I guess,” and returned to his rows of corn. If it didn’t have to do with work, he knew better than to talk too much.
So he’d been glad to see the old man’s truck pull out of the field onto the paved road that first day on the tree farm, even if it meant being left with hours of work with the quiet man. He offered to be the stake slammer, objectively the harder job physically, but the man simply shook him off.
“You guide and tie. I’ll stake.”
And so they did. No breaks. No talking. The sound of metal crashing and unsheathing four hours, broken only by the motor of the four-wheeler. The tirelessness of the man seemed like a test, his dark eyes watching when the boy had trouble with a knot or couldn’t get the curve out of a pole on the first yank. The boy, proud himself, didn’t stop for a drink or lean on a tree the whole morning. When they’d reached the irrigation post in the middle of the first row and the sun beat down directly overhead, they’d both seen but not spoken it as a logical place to break for lunch. The man had pulled his cooler off the flatbed and sat against the back axel, facing the adjacent soybean field and leaving no room for the boy to join. Thirty minutes later, the man stood, wiped his hands on his jeans, and begun walking the mornings work, checking the boy’s knots with eyes and hands.
They worked this way all afternoon, finishing a row and half before the manager pulled back into the field around five to check their work. Inching his Ford along in the tracks of the trailer, the manager eyed the twine and followed poles down to the dirt. The boy and the man just kept pounding stakes until they heard the horn of the truck followed by “Hey guys. Come over here.” Crossing rows and careful not to kick the irrigation tubes, they approached where the old man stood with his hand against one of the trees they’d done a lifetime ago that morning. “You see this.” The man tapped the base of pipe with the toe of his boot. “This is garbage. Basura. Too far away from the tree. No more than three inches. Comprende?” He made eye contact before pulling a pocket knife and slicing the twine. “Fix this shit before you leave. Pull it and restake it. I’ll check the rest. Bring the rig back to the garage when you’re done and we’ll drive back to shop.” He got back in his truck and inched forward down the row.
“Pinche pendejo,” the man muttered and looked at the boy, shaking his head slightly. He patted the boy on the back and pointed back towards their workstation. “Let’s go.” The boy smiled and followed. An hour later, he was perched on the back of the flatbed getting pulled back to the garage, wiping dirt and sweat from around his eyes into his sleeve.
The week continued this way: the three driving out to the tree farm at dawn, dragging the trailer out to find the last tree from the day before, cutting a pile of twine, crawling along the line until lunch and then until the white Ford pulled up to assess and add to the day’s work. But the workers were quick learners: by Wednesday there were only three trees to be restaked when the truck pulled out.
As their work tightened up, the workers loosened. Conversation didn’t flow, but the man began humming under his breath as they staked and taught the boy how to start the four-wheeler. Occasionally, he’d toss the sheath down into the dirt when a pole hit a root or underground rock. “Break.” They’d sit under the trailer and trade snacks, pretzels for Bimbo cookies. They’d drink deeply from water jugs, looking vaguely at the bases of trunks and the rubber irrigation tubes that fed them until the man said “vamanos” and they returned hot metal between hands.
Friday found them at the end of a row at lunch and the man parked the trailer so they could sit against the rear axle and watch the soybeans as they ate, slow waves on a green ocean. There, mouthful of chicken and wheat, the boy decided to ask the man something he’d wondered often since he’d started this summer job the year before. He’d never felt uncomfortable around the other workers, but this was the first time he’d felt anything close to intimacy with any of the men he worked with. So between bites, he looked out onto the crop and asked, “D’you like it here?”
The question hung. The field sighed.
“America?”
“Yeah.”
The man chewed and gazed. The boy glanced to check his expression. Brooding, as usual.
“Sí. I like it. It’s work.” He unwrapped the foil from a taco.
“D’you ever miss home?”
“Cada día.”
“D’you have family there? Back in Mexico?”
“Sí. Wife and son.”
A tank truck slid silently past the speedway out on the horizon.
“How old’s your son?”
“Eight years old.”
“D’you go back and visit often?”
“Too hard.”
The boy peeled a banana and checked to make sure he wasn’t making the man upset. He still couldn’t read him, but the man looked calmed so he asked, “when’s the last time you saw your son?” He remembered stories his dad had told him when he was younger about his dad disappearing on Christmas Eve, working at a bar two towns over, and not talking to his family until his kids were grown and damaged. No cards, no gifts, no money. Just years of silence breeding resentment. He hoped the man wasn’t doing the same.
“Cuando?” the man rubbed his eyes. “Three years. Send money from here,” the man poked the dirt at his side, “and go Mexico when possible.”
“When was the last time before three years ago?”
“When my son was born.”
The boy nodded thoughtfully but couldn’t really understand. Working landscaping was not an easy job nor did it pay well, but he didn’t have a connection to the office jobs or summer houses his friends who didn’t work at Jewel had. The sponsor of his sister’s softball team had asked if he wanted a job so he’d bought a pair of Caterpillar boots and found out how dig holes the right way. He’d learned how to toss mulch and smooth rock with a shovel, gone home exhausted and reeking most days. Gotten strong and tan and paid. He liked being able to say, “Sorry I have work in the morning,” when his friends texted him to come to a bonfire or a movie or whatever other bullshit they had going on. He had a job, a real job.
But he still got to go home and eat with his parents, get ice cream with his sister, fall asleep to X-Men cartoons with his girlfriend. He couldn’t imagine going home to whatever the man did after work. He knew the man lived in an apartment in Joliet with some of the other crewmembers, all carpooling in a Dodge Caravan to the shop each morning, but couldn’t see this man drinking or playing cards or really doing anything that the rest of the crew laughed about over lunch. He seemed more like a sit-and-watch-and-think kind of guy. The man seemed like a father, but instead of enjoying time with his family at night he had to share a house with the men he’d sweat alongside all day.
A naïve, romanticized image of the quiet man holding a picture of his wife and child in a twin bed floated through the boy’s head and he asked, “Do you want them to come here?” expecting a nod and a gaze.
The man thought and sipped and said, “No.”
He turned his head to look at the boy, eyes sharp but not angry. Thinking. After a moment he answered, looking back out at miles of flat farmland stretching like a sheet towards the horizon, at his reluctantly adopted workland. “This is not my home. And it’s not theirs. Maybe in future, but not now.” He closed the lid on his cooler, pulled from his water jug, and pushed himself up into the sun, into the sky.
The boy stirred, but didn’t stand. He was waiting for the man to say more, to open up, to teach him. But the man just squinted and waved towards the next row of trees.
“Vamanos.”
Nick Rossi is a co-founder / editor / designer at Sobotka Lit Mag / Ursus Americanus Press / No Rest Press. His work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Rejection Letters, Hooligan Mag, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.