The Most They Ever Had Read Online Free PDF

red-dirt fields of the foothills, tearing through the fields, leaving the cotton dirty and half picked, ripped into scrap. Pickers of flesh and blood, seasonal workers who picked to make a little extra cash, were obsolete. The future ran on diesel, and it didn’t even pick clean.
    ___
    Floria was one of the best, the fastest. Her hands moved in a rhythm, one reaching for one open boll as the other, in a smooth mechanical motion, eased another boll into the sack. She could pick three hundred pounds in just one day in a time when some people were glad to pick one hundred, and her cotton was clean, without twigs and brittle leaf. When you sighted down a row she had picked it was green-black, empty, without a scrap of white.
    Her mind, when she picked, was free of daydreams.
    “I thought of the money,” she said.
    She did not think about washing machines and new bedroom suites and kitchen tables. She thought about that little bit extra, a boy’s shirt, or boots, or a notebook. She liked to crochet when she was sitting down, because otherwise it was just wasted time, and as she picked she would calculate how much yarn she might buy, and what she might make with it.
    “A dollar,” she said, “was a whole lot.”
    She concentrated on stripping every stalk clean, on filling her sack the fullest in the least amount of steps—one boll, a million times.
    “I thought about making all I could.”
    But no matter how careful you were, it would always stick you. She would reach for a soft, white boll of cotton only to feel the bur, a needle-like sticker on the nut-like shell, lance her fingers or slip under the quick of her fingernails.
    “They would break off under the skin,” she said.
    You seldom quit long enough to dig them out. Some of the old women would carry a sewing needle stuck in their bonnets, or a big safety pin on the collar of their dresses, and at the noon break or at quttin’ time they would gently try to lift them out.
    “It’d fester if you didn’t,” Floria said.
    It could be burning hot in the afternoon, but picking time came as the summer was dying, and in the gloom of the early mornings a cold dew soaked the fields.
    “You worked wet, up to your neck,” she said, “and cold.”
    The dew made the bolls slick, and made her sure, deft fingers clumsy. “My hands would bleed,” she said.
    The pickers gathered discarded guano sacks at the side of the field and piled and burned them. “It was the only way we could warm our hands,” she said.
    Snakes, Copperheads and rattlers, hid in the stalks. The wasps and yellow jackets came out of holes in the red dirt, and the old women would daub a little wet snuff on the sting, to ease it. The cotton stank of poison. The mill workers could even smell it in the bales.
    But sometimes the cotton was so tall it seemed as if she barely had to bend over to fill a sack, and she and her friends would find a watermelon vine, a gift, in the field, and they would break it open right there and eat it with their hands.
    The farmers paid a sliding scale, from a handful of change in the worst of times—in the Depression, the people worked for what they could get—to two dollars for one hundred pounds in the 1950s and early 1960s. To ease the tug of the sack, some workers daydreamed about a better life, not some great wealth on earth but something finer, everlasting. Old women sang about it as they dragged their sacks across the clay.
    I heard an old, old story
How the Savior came from Glory
How he gave his life on Calvary
To save a wretch like me
    Flora did not sing as she worked, but she listened. The songs swirled around her and over her, with a sweetness that cut the dust and kept the devil of self-pity and laziness underground.
    Oh victory in Jesus,
My Savior forever
He sought me, and bought me
With His redeeming Blood
    Some people prayed as they picked. Beatrice McCurley, a big woman who would get so full of the spirit in church that she would shake the hair pins from her