On the morning of her first day of tenth grade, Sophia Clark lay in a damp nightshirt, cowering at the sound of roof rats eating through the plaster walls of the farmhouse’s kitchen. Through the tiny window, she could see that it was still purple outside, and although she wanted to stall a bit, she could hear Ma Deary’s nagging voice,If you want to eat, then you got to work.The sole rooster in the barn began to crow like he was being paid to warn farmers within a five-mile radius that the sun was coming. Although hiscock-a-doodlewas the constant start to her mornings, today his cawing plucked against her temple.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark room, she touched her forearms, inflamed with welts that had sprouted like blades of wheat. Her throat felt parched, but when she reached for the mug of water she had placed on the milk crate beside her bed, she discovered that it had been tipped over by the wild flailing of her limbs through the night.
Sophia rose carefully to avoid hitting her head on the low ceiling. Her bedroom was so small she couldn’t even cuss a cat without getting fur in her mouth. It really wasn’t a bedroom. More like a spacemeant for storage adjacent to the kitchen. Ma Deary had forced her into the tiny space so her night screams would stop waking the rest of the house.
Stepping out of her faded nightshirt and into threadbare overalls, Sophia fastened them at her shoulders with safety pins. Then she used the rubber band on her wrist to tie back her ginger hair. As she opened the door to the kitchen, she stomped her feet to scare the rats into their hiding place.
Sophia moved to the sink and turned on the faucet. The basin was tarnished with rusted copper streaks. The pipes shook, then sputtered out brown water. After about fifteen seconds, the water ran clear, and she dipped her mug and drank. From the front bedroom drifted the hard snorts of Ma Deary, which somehow harmonized with the soft snores of the Old Man. Sophia gritted her teeth.
She shuffled across the scuffed plank floors to the back of the house, where her twin brothers, Karl and Lu, were curled head to toe on a mattress that smelled of piss no matter how many times Sophia sprinkled it with baking soda.
“Boys. Time to get up,” she coaxed, but when neither moved, she pulled the blanket, pocked with moth holes, down to their waists.
Karl tugged the covers back over his thick head and mumbled, “Five more minutes.”
Sophia tapped his back. “Can’t, bud. Today is the first day of fifth grade, remember?”
“We gotta do chores on the first day a school?” Lu sat up, rubbing his hazel eyes. “No fair.”
“You know the men aren’t here to help, and we gotta take care of the chickens and the cows before we head off to school. Now move it.” Sophia shoved the blanket to their ankles to show she meant business. Both boys groaned, and she understood why. They were dog-tired.
The summer had been hard as shoe leather on all of them. In the past, Ma Deary’s brother, Uncle Wayon, had hired recently releasedconvicts in conjunction with a government program to do some of the more strenuous work on the farm. But this past spring, Unc had spent all of his time in D.C. chasing tail—Ma Deary’s words, not Sophia’s—and had forgotten to reapply for the program before the May 15 deadline. So all fifty acres had fallen on Sophia and her brothers. While their classmates had enjoyed lazy lake swims, the kids had worked their tails off.
They spent each day with their backs crouched, hauling heavy buckets of produce, grinding tubs of feed, dragging sprinklers across the massive fields, feeding the animals, and fighting with faulty machinery under the merciless sun. In the evenings, they heaved debris until their shoulder blades screamed, and shoveled animal manure until what little they had in their stomachs threatened to come back up. Before bed, they scrubbed every surface clean, and disinfected the farm tools and equipment until their heads were dizzy from the smell of Peridox, a concentrated cleaner which prevented bacteria, viruses, and the outbreak of disease.
For the past three months, Sophia and her brothers had labored twelve-hour days, and now that school was starting, she wasn’t sure how they would manage it all.
“Hurry, boys.” She flicked on the light. “Time’s a-wastin’.”
When she was satisfied that the twins were slipping into their sweatpants, Sophia went through to the kitchen and pushed open the screen back door. A cool breeze caressed her cheeks, and the burst of crisp air awakened all her senses.
Her older brother, Walter, sat on the porch in a corroded metal rocking chair, chewing on a piece of straw. “Morning.” He tipped his wide-brimmed panama hat to her.
“How’d you sleep?” Sophia dropped in the seat beside him while reaching for her mud-caked boots.
“Nothing like breathing in all that fresh open air.” He smiled, showing off the gap between his two front teeth. Walter’s skin was sotanned that his nose was peeling. When it was hot like it had been, Walter preferred to sleep in a hammock outside rather than on the sagging sofa in the living room of their two-bedroom house. “You?”
Sophia shook her head and pulled her shirtsleeves down over the red marks on her arms, but she knew that Walter had already seen them.
“The dream again?” He wrinkled his brows with concern, but she changed the subject.
“Any word from Unc? He knows today is the first day of school, right?”
“He’ll be by soon.” Walter stretched his long legs out in front of him and then stood.
“If you don’t see those boys in the next five minutes—”
“I’ll wrangle them and send them your way.”
Sophia mumbled her thanks as her boots sank into the soft earth. She could smell the morning dew and could already hear the dawn chorus of hens summoning her to the coop. As she rolled back the barn door, the stench of chicken feces and ammonia greeted her. “Buck-buck-buck-badaack,”clucked the hens.
“Morning to you too.” Sophia sneezed while picking up one of several white pails stacked next to the pallet of hay.
Along each side of the barn walls were wooden raised coops stacked in rows of three and four. Each contained individual nesting boxes for the nearly five hundred hens that Sophia was responsible for. Some of the boxes cradled brown eggs abandoned by the hens, already out foraging the barn for food.
Sophia collected the eggs off the floor, from the empty nests and the dark corners where some hens liked to lay them, and put them atop the hay she’d collected earlier. There were always a few broody hens who honored their motherly instincts and refused to move from their nests, and she gently scooped them up and out of her way to secure the eggs. As she gathered eggs from nest to nest, rotating full pailsfor empty ones, Sophia tried to let the squawks of the hens drown out the talking picture that had been playing through her head all morning, but the noise just kept getting louder.
Sophia had never told Ma Deary or the Old Man about her school counselor, Mrs. Brown, pulling her from the school’s breakfast line to meet the white woman in the pillbox hat.
