Excerpt: Chesaleen

Chesaleen was in the garden when I walked up. It was cold and a little windy, so she had a rag around her head flying westward like a flag and her dead daddy's carhart jacket on. I knew it was his because his name was still on the front of it in a circle like he worked at the gas station. Chesaleen's daddy never worked at a gas station. He never had a job in his life. I knew she hadn't seen me yet, so I crouched low behind some elderberries and weeds and waited to see what she’d do. Chiggers was killin me.

She was picking tomatoes and putting them into grocery bags. Some of them tomatoes was green and I thought she might be about to fry some up. Since I'd run out of the house before supper, just thinking about some fried tomatoes made my mouth dry and wanting.

Then she started to sing. I never heard Chesaleen do nothing but say coarse words and laugh too loud, but now she was singing in that way people do when they don't think no one's listening. But I was listening. She was singing shall we gather at the river like she was a black or something and when she got to the chorus she quit bending over the tomatoes and dropped the sack where she was just to lift her hands to her head and throw off that rag. Underneath her hair was kinda flat and greasy, but she shook it out with her fingers and kept singing to the sky. After she was done she picked up the rag and retied it on her head, looked at the tomatoes enough to give up, then took her old sack into the house.

I didn't move a muscle until the screened door quit bouncing. I could hear pots moving around and knew the door was open, though, so I sat right where I was in the elderberries waiting for her to either come out again and shake her hair or pick up the last of the too ripe tomatoes. They was an easy twenty or so that wanted picking before the birds made a mess.

Them ain't good for nothing but sandwiches anyways.