In a Glass House Read Online Free PDF Page A

corner, a square of wet earth still intact around the plant’s roots.
    “It should look exactly like that when you’re finished. If you let the dirt come off the roots the plant will be dead in half an hour.”
    With a swift circular motion of his hands he levelled the ridges of dirt that flanked the furrow so that finally the plant sat firmly embedded in the earth.
    “Don’t leave it at the bottom of a valley – just a little down, the way I did it, and fill up the space between each plant as you go. Understand?”
    “
Sì
.”
    He went through the process again a few times, using a short stick to measure out the distance between each plant. His hands moved swiftly, each plant finding its place with the same smooth precision. Still on his haunches he watched me as I tried to imitate him, Gelsomina and her sisters, already at work in the rows next to me, stopping to watch as well. But I couldn’t getthe wooden sleeves to tear apart neatly as Tsi’Alfredo’s had, with each failure Tsi’Alfredo reaching over impatiently to finish the job himself, grimacing at my awkwardness.
    “Like that. No one taught you how to work back in Valle del Sole, eh?”
    But when he saw that I couldn’t get it right he sent me up to the barn for a bucket and then set me following behind the women to collect the wooden sleeves they left discarded in their rows as they planted.
    “Oh, Vittò! Look at the way he’s dragging that bucket, you’d think he had all the sins of the world inside it!”
    “You never saw fields like this back in Italy, eh, so flat? You can plough a field like this in the morning, and plant it in the afternoon. Not like there.”
    “What does he know about it? When did the children have to go out and work in the fields the way they do here? At harvest, maybe, that’s all. But here men, women, children, it’s all the same – if it’s not the fields it’s the greenhouses, if it’s not the greenhouses it’s the factory.”
    We worked for what seemed a long time. Tsi’Alfredo’s truck came and went, carrying more loads of plants. I made piles of wooden sleeves at intervals along the edge of the laneway that flanked the field, trying to measure the time by the spaces between them. But then Tsi’Alfredo saw what I was doing.
    “You don’t have to make so many small piles like that, what were you thinking?”
    We ate lunch at the edge of the field. It was warm now in the noon sun, though the air had a crispness like the spring air in Valle del Sole. Tsi’Alfredo had brought water and wine, a few loaves of bread, some meat and some cheese. The women sat on the ground or on overturned plant trays; the men leaned againstTsi’Alfredo’s truck or sat on its tailgate. Gelsomina sat away from me, with the women, seemed not to want to be seen as one of the children. One of the men cut slices of cheese and meat with a jackknife he pulled from his pocket, offering the slices around to the rest of us on the knife’s blackened tip.
    “And Mario?” one of the men said to Tsi’Alfredo.
    “Nothing.”
    “
Mbeh
, maybe he just took a little trip,” one of the women said. “To clear his head.”
    “
Sì
, a trip, what are you saying?” someone else said. “And his fields not planted yet at the end of May.”
    “Anyway he would have had to leave the factory, sooner or later. With the farm and no one else to look after it –”
    “He would have left when he wanted to,” Tsi’Alfredo said, red-faced. “Those damned foremen there, when it’s one of their own they look the other way, but one of ours, for every little thing –”
    Later, when we were working again, I overheard some of the women talking.
    “Someone told me they let him go because he fell asleep.”
    “Ah,
sì
, fell asleep, does that sound like Mario? Now if you told me he broke someone’s skull –”
    Tsi’Alfredo kept carrying trays of plants, and by mid-afternoon the men setting them out had reached the line of trees that marked the