He knew nothing about working on a farm but they said that’s all right boy we will teach you. They handed him a hoe and sent him into the fields. He learned the short clipped swing and chopped cotton for twelve hours a day and returned to the barracks so tired he hardly cared about eating. “I’ll sleep this one out,” he said to Marcus Millens, and Marcus just smiled a weary smile and turned to his rack. In dreams he wandered in a wide plain that he was sure one day he would get to the other side of but in the dream never did. In the morning when it was cool he felt like a man come to a new life not this one. He scribbled in his notebook sometimes but often he forgot to. He liked to stand up in the middle of the field and let the breeze play off him. Scatterings of birds passed over and he liked to send something of himself along with them, a word or a thought. It was a way to hook himself to the living world, the world that wasn’t chained down in a prison. I will be loose from here by and by, he said. He had a curious smile sometimes that the other convicts remarked on. One or two tried to beat it off of him but they weren’t successful. He didn’t know he had the smile until they made it clear. I guess I got some feeling even I don’t know about. And he believed this after a while. He would get caught up in the smells. The crotty smell of the dirt and the limber woody smell of the cotton plants, the sweet stink of bug poison, the smell of his own body and the smells that sailed over the fields, little pickets of smells, of turnips and spicy wild berries and once in a while the smell of some creature, blood even, as if down the way some ferret or quail had met its end. The prison world was one of elimination and spareness and he tried to press against this. Sometimes by holding his own wrist and just staring at the ground he thought he could get loose, or smelling his shit that he dropped behind a bush he could approach another world, but even his surging, side-stepping thoughts became thoughts of this world and his shit smelled of the field peas and sidemeat they fed him here. Still there were times, seconds like an ace in the hole, that stirred another existence in him, some ghost of times that had not been in this world but were familiar. He felt sometimes as if he was on the edge of something great. He liked to listen to the sound the wind made. Clouds like separate countries drifted from their absent worlds. He could smell Arabia or the Mongol steppes. He walked to the truck dragging his hoe to make signs in the dirt that might on their own mean something. He thought about the people he knew but this was hard on him and he tried not to do it. Cotton flowers were separately yellow or white as if there was a disagreement among them. The world was full of parts that barely fit and only fit for a little while. People turned aside, became memories or ghosts. In a split cotton boll the gray seeds lay twined in white fur. Everything would some day be far from here. He liked to taste the elements in the water he drank.
