In a Glass House Read Online Free PDF

end of the field. They went back with the tractor and trailer to collect the empty trays left behind by the planters, driving up to the barn to unload each time the trailer was full. But Tsi’Alfredo had gone away again in his truck, and hadn’t returned by the time the men caught up to where we were planting.
    “And now?” one of the men said. “What do we do,
senza boss
?”
    He gave the word “
boss
” an extra energy, as if making a joke.
    “
Mbeh
, when
lu boss
is away,” another said, “you stretch out under a tree and have a nice sleep.”
    But this time when they came back from the barn from unloading, the tractor was pulling a narrow trailer that I’d seen before buried in weeds at the edge of the pond. The trailer was stacked high with long silver pipes that the men began to set out in rows along the field, each pipe ending with a tall T that looked like the head and neck of a strange bird. While they were working, Tsi’Alfredo came back in his truck and stopped to help them, and before nightfall they had again reached to where we were planting.
    It had begun to turn cold. The men got down on their knees to help plant, doubling up in rows that had already been started; but Tsi’Alfredo drove back down the lane in his truck, Gino following on the tractor. Some minutes later an engine echoed to life from the direction of the barn, sputtered and died, then started again, building this time to a steady roar and then faltering suddenly like a bus grinding up a hill. A hissing sound rose up from the pipes laid out along the field, and then gradually the heads on the T’s started to twirl until finally long jets of water had begun to shoot out from them, filling the air all along the field with splaying arcs that glinted like silver in the dying light.
    By the time we stopped work it was truly dark. Tsi’Alfredo and Gino had come back, their clothes drenched from walking up and down the rows of pipes to check them. About a third of the field still remained to be planted.
    “So, Alfrè,” one of the men said. “What’ll it be in the morning, church or the fields? It’s the same to me, either way I’ll be on my knees.”
    “We can finish up ourselves.”
    Gelsomina and I went back to Tsi’Alfredo’s for the night. I rode with Gino on the back of the truck – he didn’t seem to mind the wind, sitting in the brunt of it on one of the wheel humps, his scruffy hair blown back and his damp clothes billowing and cracking like laundry. But I had huddled up against the cab with the cold, my muscles aching as if from fever. I nodded off for a moment, imagined that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, reliving the dreamy roll and swell of the storm we’d passed through. Then a sudden jolt of the truck woke me. Gino was grinning.
    “Tired, eh?” he said, shouting to be heard above the wind. But his voice had no sympathy in it.
    At Tsi’Alfredo’s I heard the baby crying from some upstairs room.
    “She’s been acting like the devil all day,” Tsia Maria said. “I spoke to Letizia down the road and she said it’s the milk, you can’t use it here, you have to buy a special powder or something. What do I know about it?”
    We had a large supper but though I’d been hungry all day the first few bites seemed to fill me now. Afterwards we were sent directly to bed, Gino and I sharing a narrow cot in a small room off the kitchen. Gino fell asleep almost at once, but for a long time I lay in awkward wakefulness, pinned between Gino’s broad undershirted back and the wall. I could hear Tsi’Alfredo and Tsia Maria talking in the kitchen.
    “Maybe you should call the police,” Tsia Maria said.
    “Don’t talk nonsense, what are the police going to do?”
    “
Mbeh
, who knows where he’s gotten to? Maybe he’s lying in some ditch with his head broken.”
    “
Grazie
,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “And what are you going to tell the police when they ask you why he’s gone?”
    “Tell them