“Yes, well tomatoes are ripe, too, and that comes before huckleberries. There’s the whole patch to clean up this afternoon by four.”
Selina looked up, glanced at Pervus’s face, at the boy’s, said nothing. The look said, “He’s a child. Let him go, Pervus.”
Dirk flushed with disappointment. They were at breakfast. It was barely daybreak. He looked down at his plate, his lip quivered, his long lashes lay heavy on his cheeks. Pervus got up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age, Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all I had to do was pick a tomato patch clean.”
Dirk looked up then, quickly. “If I get it all picked can I go?”
“But if I do pick the patch—if I get through early enough—can I go?”
In his mind’s eye Pervus saw the tomato patch, more scarlet than green, so thick hung the fruit upon the bushes. He smiled. “Yes. You pick them tomatoes and you can go. But no throwing into the baskets and getting ’em all softed up.”
Secretly Selina resolved to help him, but she knew that this could not be until afternoon. The berry patches were fully three miles from the DeJong farm. Dirk would have to finish by three o’clock, at the latest, to get there. Selina had her morning full with the housework.
He was in the patch before six; fell to work, feverishly. He picked, heaped the fruit into hillocks. The scarlet patches glowed, blood-red, in the sun. The child worked like a machine, with an economy of gesture calculated to the fraction of an inch. He picked, stooped, heaped the mounds in the sultry heat of the August morning. The sweat stood out on his forehead, darkened his blond hair, slid down his cheeks that were pink, then red, then tinged with a purplish tone beneath the summer tan. When dinner time came he gulped a dozen alarming mouthfuls and was out again in the broiling noonday glare. Selina left her dinner dishes unwashed on the table to help him, but Pervus intervened. “The boy’s got to do it alone,” he insisted.
“He’ll never do it, Pervus. He’s only eight.”
He actually had cleared the patch by three. He went to the well and took a huge draught of water; drank two great dippersful, lipping it down thirstily, like a colt. It was cool and delicious beyond belief. Then he sloshed a third and a fourth dipperful over his hot head and neck, took an empty lard pail for berries and was off down the dusty road and across the fields, running fleetly in spite of the quivering heat waves that seemed to dance between fiery heaven and parched earth. Selina stood in the kitchen doorway a moment, watching him. He looked very small and determined.