“Kell,” said Kell between gritted teeth as he sat up and curled his fingers around the edge of his cot. Which, come to think of it, had been comfortable enough to make him feel like he’d slept on a cloud. “My name is Kell.”
“Fine, Kell,” said Wayne with a wave of both arms, as if Kell’s insistence on being called by this name was outrageous, but Wayne was going to go along with it just to keep the peace. “Breakfast.” He leaned down to smack Kell’s thigh and then left the tent, whistling tunelessly.
Kell was still getting dressed when the breakfast bell rang so, in order not to be late, he pulled on his slip-on sneakers, which seemed skimpy and small next to his scratchy new blue jeans and snap button shirt, which hung off his shoulders and flopped around his wrists.
He was the last in line at the mess tent for the breakfast buffet and, feeling all out of sorts amidst the cheery good morning hellos and steaming cups of coffee and the jostle for some amazing-smelling bacon, he hunched his shoulders forward and took a seat at the very end of the long table where everybody else was sitting.
After breakfast, which had been delicious but rushed, Gabe called him over.
“Where are your new boots?” he asked, looking Kell up and down. “Go put ‘em on, and if there aren’t gloves in either of your boxes, let me know and I’ll get you some. You’ll get your own hat this week, but here’s one to wear in the meantime.”
“What—?” Kell took the hat and put it on his head, feeling awkward and pleased at the same time.
It was a cowboy hat that Gabe had given him, a little sweat-smudged along the hat band, grimy along its straw edges, but it was a real cowboy hat. Making a little face as if he disliked the idea of wearing it, he straightened it on his head, and raised his chin for inspection, smiling on the inside in spite of himself.
“Nice,” said Gabe. “That shirt’s a little big, but I think you’ll grow into it. Now, go get your stuff and meet us in the parking lot, right over there.”
Gabe pointed, and then he went striding off, all business. Kell rushed to his tent and laced on the heavy, yellow boots, pleased with the denseness around his ankles and, grabbing the pair of leather work-gloves from the box, half-shoved beneath his cot the night before, he raced back to the parking lot where Gabe and Wayne and Blaze were piling into a silver four-door truck that was hauling a long, flatbed trailer.
“Why isn’t Royce’s team helping?” asked Wayne as he settled himself in the front passenger seat, the window down, his gloved hand tapping the side of the truck.
“Royce’s team is clearing a path through the willow bushes on the other side of the lake this week,” said Gabe, giving Kell a smile in greeting as Kell clambered into the back passenger seat next to Blaze, who gave Kell a chin-jerk as hello, his straw hat in his lap, his leather gloves tucked into his belt. “We need to haul some hay so the horses in the pasture don’t have reason to overgraze.”
After that, it was all go, go, go. Gabe drove the truck and trailer through the compound and up a little dirt road, through the small town that Kell remembered from the day before, then headed north along a two-lane blacktopped road. Though it felt strange to be out and about, not behind bars or inside of a razor-wire topped fence, the breeze through the open windows was fresh and smelled good, the blue sky endless, stretching wide from horizon to horizon.
Inside of ten minutes, Gabe pulled off the road, and Wayne hopped out to open a sagging barbed wire gate, beyond which, beneath the warm sunshine, was an endless field of row after row of fresh, green hay bales.
“This is us,” said Gabe as Wayne hopped back in. “We’ll start at the far end and start loading bales. Two on the ground, throwing ’em up, and two on the flatbed, arranging. Then we’ll take a break. Before we switch. Any questions?”
Everybody was shaking their heads, so Kell shook his head, and got out when Gabe pulled up the truck and turned it around at the far end of the field. The stubbled land spread out before him, seemingly forever, sloping away with miles of hay bales, all waiting to be loaded.
At first, it was easy. He was on the ground with Blaze, grabbing the sturdy twine around each hay bale with gloved hands, then throwing the bale up on top of the flatbed, where Gabe or Wayne would grab it and arrange it at the far end, tidy and in rows.
But then the hay bales were farther from the flatbed and soon Kell’s shoulders strained, his arms shaking with the weight underneath the sun, which instead of being soft gold, blazed with unforgiving light. His armpits were soaked, his gloves kept slipping off, and his new boots felt like two blocks of lead.
It didn’t get any better. After Gabe drove a little way into the field, with Wayne smirking as he hopped on the flatbed for the little jaunt, Blaze and Kell following behind, Kell was up on the flatbed, grabbing hay bales as they were thrown to him, with him and Blaze stacking them high at the far end, beginning new rows as needed.
“You okay?” Wayne asked when they stopped for a break, Gabe passing around bottles of ice cold water that gave Kell brain freeze with the first sip.
“Sure,” said Kell, shrugging. Everybody else was hot and sweaty too, but they weren’t complaining. Even Wayne wasn’t complaining or hassling Kell. He just focused on the work, red-faced beneath his straw cowboy hat.
But he wasn’t okay. The short break he got as Gabe drove the load of hay bales back to the valley was too short, and then they had to unload all the bales, stack them, and cover the stack with canvas. That was the morning gone and Kell could barely eat his lunch, his arms were so tired, and he was so hot.
He made himself eat at least a little, and he drank a lot of iced tea. He didn’t look around, not even wondering, however vaguely, where Marston was. Everybody else was in the mess tent, including Royce and his team, rowdy guys with green leaves in their hair, which they plucked and threw at each other, laughing boisterously the whole time.
The afternoon was the same. Kell worked as hard as he could, but his head was pounding as he hauled and threw and carried and lifted. At one point, Gabe made them take a longer break, and they all stretched out beneath the flatbed for a quick snooze, the smell of dry dirt and sundered grasses filling Kell’s nose and lungs, a cloud of gold flecks floating in the air as his eyes fell closed as he lay in the shade.
Too soon, Blaze was shaking him awake, and too soon, he was at it again. It was only the gray draw of clouds along the horizon that stopped the work. Gabe said something about not being out in an open field in case of lightning strikes, but maybe he felt sorry for them all as well.
When they arrived back in the valley, Royce’s team was there to help unload and stack, and after dinner, Kell was too tired to call Bede.
He could only stumble to the facilities where he peed and rinsed his head beneath the faucet. Once back at his tent, he hauled himself to bed, ignoring Wayne’s oddly cheerful chatter and falling asleep beneath the bright overhead light as the crickets churned beyond the tent’s opening and the darkness seemed to loom.
“That’s a coyote howling,” Wayne was saying as Kell fell asleep.
This went on for two more long, hot days, with Kell trembling with exhaustion from head to foot each day by the time Gabe decided the dark, rumbling clouds were close enough for danger and called a halt. It was on Thursday, after dinner, that he looked at Kell, up and down in that way he had, judging everything about Kell.
“When d’you last take a shower, Kell?” he asked. “You know where the showers are, right?”
