Slim - Third and Final

While milking my water breaks for as much time as I could, I noticed Slim’s worn-out body. His shoulder blades stuck out at sharp angles, and one looked like it might have been broken at some time. To my surprise, he had tan lines. His face and forearms were kiwi-black, but when he took off his shirt, one could see that his natural color was milk-chocolate brown. It never occurred to me that black people tanned, but then why wouldn’t they, I realized. Slim had numerous black marks on his chest and back of various size and length – scars from various farming injuries, I supposed. From the pores of Slim’s shirtless torso, I could smell sweat, cigarette smoke, alcohol and tobacco juice. The combined effect reminded me of the taste of an unlit pipe.

At the end of the workday, around six o’clock or so, Slim steered the tractor the two miles through woods and fields to the country store. Slim was operating off the crop advance given him by the landlord and he flashed a big wad of cash while proudly purchasing a new bottle of Richards’s Wild Irish Rose and a six pack of Miller High Life for Chuck and me to split, which we finished long before we got back to Slim’s.

The first day seemed to take forever, but Chuck and I managed to survive it. We learned a lot and improved as the day progressed, but we were worn out, dirty, sore and bleeding from our hands. We took showers and after dinner, we went straight to bed out in the pop-up camper trailer that Chuck’s mom had set up as our temporary labor camp. She didn’t want to hear us up all night carrying on for a month, she said. That first night she had nothing to fear. We were out by nine o’clock.

The week progressed, each day seemed slightly less hellish than the previous. We accomplished more but felt slightly less tired every day. Each dawn was beautiful, dewy and cool with yellow and red streaks of clouds obscuring and framing the rising sun. But by mid-morning, the heat and humidity became oppressive. We learned to soak our t-shirts in cold water and wear them on our heads, cascading down our backs like some kind of Egyptian headdress.

We were paid each Friday, with the calculating and settling of our $2.50 per hour performed in the dirt of the barn when only Slim, Chuck and I were present. Unspoken was that Slim’s relatives were being paid less. Chuck and I watched carefully, as Slim made frequent math errors. Those in his favor were quickly pointed out while those in our favor were not.

Chuck and I spent our first payday of roughly $100 each on two ounces of Columbian weed and tickets to the upcoming Yes concert.

Now we added pot smoking to our work routine and it apparently was not as effective at maintaining energy as Richards’ Wild Irish Rose. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Now we were worn out, careless and lazy from the first swing of the hatchet in the morning to the last trailer load of sticks to be hung in the evening. Our performance dropped noticeably, and Slim ceased to be so cheerful when he spoke to us. He no longer playfully offered a tap from his wine. His relatives changed from ignoring us to casting us disgusted sidelong glances.

Nights were spent in the camp trailer with all the flaps up and a breeze blowing through, smoking spliff after spliff until we began to hallucinate, seeing creatures crawling through the rows of un-harvested tobacco and moving in and out of the distant woods.

Mornings, we would roll out of bed, skip the community breakfast at Slim’s and show up to the fields fifteen or twenty minutes late, bleary eyed and listless. As the harvest progressed, Chuck and I became slower and slower at our work, frequently cutting a swath of tobacco and then not getting it on sticks and into the barn before it began to wilt.

Slim stopped buying us six-packs at day’s end, nor would the man at the counter sell it directly to us. Paydays were no longer a friendly affair. Slim counted everything three times or until he got the same answer twice. There were no more accounting errors in our favor. We stopped eating lunch at Slim’s, as we no longer felt welcome.

Elvis Pressley died on the night of the Yes concert and the band played an unlikely tribute, singing ‘Crying in the Chapel’ with Donovan, the opening act. We drank too much and smoked too much and didn’t get back to Chuck’s house until one a.m. The next morning, we were an hour late to the fields and received the cold shoulder in response. That Friday, Slim said he didn’t need us anymore, that he and his family could manage the rest of the work without us. We were fine with that. We were tired of working outdoors - just tired of working, really. We had hundreds of dollars to spend on beer and pot and we felt like getting on with that before the summer was over and we had to get back to school.

The next summer, I picked up Chuck at his house and headed out with a case of beer for a night of partying. As we drove by Slim’s place, I asked Chuck if we were chopping tobacco again this year.

“No, man, he died over the winter.”

I couldn’t believe it. “What about his family? Won’t they be doing the harvest? “ I asked.

“Nope. They got kicked out when he died. The owner brought in another family.”

I thought for a minute. “What did he die of?”

“What did he die of?” Chuck looked at me like I had two heads. “Who knows, could have been anything – drinking too much, smoking too much, heart attack, cancer…I don’t think they do many autopsies on the black people around here.”

“Yeah, I guess he was pretty old,” I said. The idea that no one cared why Slim died seemed a little more acceptable, knowing that he was on in years.

“Old?” Chuck gave me that incredulous look again. “He was forty-five!”

I thought about that. He was so much younger than he looked. I realized that the woman in the kitchen was probably his wife, not his daughter, and those children were probably his kids, not grandkids as I had assumed.

Suddenly, I felt crappy for everything I’d done the previous summer. I felt bad for being a slack-ass middle-class white boy that had rarely worked for anything in life. I felt bad for the poor job I’d done and for the extra few dollars I took from Slim through my lies of omission. Not that my actions would have been any better if Slim was indeed sixty-five rather than forty-five.

“Wow, that’s too bad,” I said, looking back at Slim’s house in my rear-view mirror.
“I know,” Chuck said. “We could’ve used the money.”

Chuck offered me a beer. “Hey man, wanna tap?”