The tractor driver took a step forward, and looked at us, and sighed.
“I reckon it’s bloody typical, Small Albert, I really do.”
He looked at me with sadness and I felt my stomach twisting.
“You ladies are in a very vulnerable situation without papers, aren’t you? Certain people might take advantage of that.”
The wind blew through the fields. My throat was closed so tight I could not speak. The tractor driver coughed.
“It’s bloody typical of this government,” he said. “I don’t give a damn if you’re legal or illegal. But how can they release you without papers? Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is up to. Is that everything you’ve got?”
I held up my see-through plastic bag, and when the other girls saw me they held up theirs too. The tractor driver shook his head.
“Bloody typical, isn’t it Albert?”
“Wouldn’t know, Mr. Ayres.”
“This government doesn’t care about anyone. You’re not the first people we’ve seen, wandering through these fields like Martians. You don’t even know what planet you’re on, do you? Bloody government. Doesn’t care about you refugees, doesn’t care about the countryside, doesn’t care about farmers. All this bloody government cares about is foxes and townspeople.”
He looked up at the razor wire of the detention center behind us, then he looked at each of us girls in turn.
“You shouldn’t even be in this situation in the first place. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is, keeping girls like you locked up in a place like that. Isn’t that right Albert?”
Small Albert took off his woolen hat and scratched his head, and looked up at the detention center. He blew cigarette smoke out of his nose. He did not say anything.
Mr. Ayres looked at the four of us girls.
“So. What are we going to do with you? You want me to go back up there with you and tell them they’ve got to hold on to you till your caseworkers can be contacted?”
Yevette’s eyes went very wide when Mr. Ayres said this.
“No way mister. Me ain’t nivver goin back in that hell place no more. Not fo one minnit, kill me dead. Uh-uh.”
Mr. Ayres looked at me then.
“I’m thinking they might have let you out by mistake,” he said. “Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. Am I right?”
I shrugged. The sari girl and the girl with no name, they just looked at the rest of us to see what was going to happen.
“Have you girls got anywhere to go? Any relatives? People expecting you somewhere?”
I looked at the other girls, and then I looked back at him and shook my head no.
“Is there any way you can prove that you’re legal? I could be in trouble if I let you onto my land and then it turns out I’m harboring illegal immigrants. I have a wife and three children. This is a serious question I’m asking you.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Ayres. We will not go on your land. We will just go.”
Mr. Ayres nodded, and took off his flat cap, and looked at the inside of it, and turned it around and around in his hands. I watched his fingers twisting in the green cloth. His nails were thick and yellow. His fingers were dirty with earth.
A large black bird flapped over our heads and flew away in the direction where our taxi had disappeared. Mr. Ayres, he took a deep breath and he held up the inside of his cap for me to see. There was a name sewn in the lining of the hat. The name was written in handwriting on a white cloth label. The label was yellow from sweat.
“You read English? You see what that name label says?”
“It says AYRES, mister.”
“That’s right. Yes, that’s it. I am Ayres, and this is my hat, and this land you girls are standing on is Ayres Farm. I work this land but I don’t make the law for it, I just plow it spring and autumn and parallel with the contours. Do you suppose that gives me the right to say if these women can stay on it, Small Albert?”
The wind was the only sound for a while. Small Albert spat on the ground.
“Well Mr. Ayres, I ain’t a lawyer. I’m a cow-and-pig man at the end of the day, ain’t I?”
Mr. Ayres laughed.
“You ladies can stay,” he said.
Then there was sobbing from behind me. It was the girl with no name. She held on to her bag of documents and she cried, and the girl with the yellow sari put her arms around her. She sang to her in a quiet voice, the way we would sing to a baby who was woken in the night by the sound of distant guns and who must be soothed without being further excited. I do not know if you have a word for this kind of singing.
Albert took the cigarette from his mouth. He pinched it out between his thumb and forefinger. He rolled it into a little ball and dropped it into the pocket of his overalls. He spat on the ground again, and he put his woolen hat back on.
“What’s she blubbin for?”
Yevette shrugged.
“Mebbe de girl jus ain’t used to kindness.”
Albert thought about this. Then he nodded, slowly.
“I could put em in the pickers’ barn, Mr. Ayres?”
“Thanks Albert. Yes, take them there and get them settled in. I’ll get my wife to dig out what they need.”
He turned to us girls.
“We have a dormitory where our seasonal laborers sleep. It’s empty at the moment. It’s only needed around harvest and lambing. You can stay there a week, no longer. After that, you’re not my problem.”
I smiled at Mr. Ayres, but Mr. Ayres waved away my smile with his hand. Maybe this is the way you would wave away a bee before it came too close. The four of us girls, we followed Albert across the fields. We walked in a single line. Albert walked in front in his wool hat and blue overalls. He was carrying a large ball of bright orange plastic rope. Then it was Yevette in her purple A-line dress and flip-flops, then me, and I was wearing the blue jeans and the Hawaiian shirt. Behind me there was the girl with no name, and she was still weeping, and then there was the girl in the yellow sari, who was still singing to her. The cows and the sheep moved aside to watch us as we walked across their fields. You could see them thinking, Here are some strange new creatures that Small Albert is leading.
He took us to a long building beside a stream. The building had low brick walls, as high as my shoulder, but it had a high metal roof that rose in an arch from the walls, so that the building was like a tunnel. The metal roof was not painted. There were no windows in the walls but there were plastic skylights in the roof. The building stood in a dirt field where pigs and hens were scratching at the ground. When we appeared, the pigs stayed where they were and stared at us. The hens moved away with a nervous walk, looking behind them to make sure we were not following.
The hens were ready to run if they needed to. They picked up each foot with a jerky movement and when they put the foot back down you could see the claws trembling. They moved closer to one another and made a muttering sound. The pitch of the noise rose each time one of us girls took a step closer, and it fell each time the hens put the distance back between them and us. It made me very unhappy to watch those hens. The way they moved and the noise they made, this is exactly how it was when Nkiruka and me finally left our village back home.
We joined a group of women and girls and we ran off into the jungle one morning and we walked until it was dark and then we lay down to sleep beside the path. We did not dare to make a fire. In the night we heard gunshots. We heard men screaming like pigs when they are waiting in the cage to have their throats cut. There was a full moon that night and if the moon had opened its mouth and started screaming I would not have been more terrified. Nkiruka held me tight. There were babies in our group and some of them woke up and had to have songs sung to them before they would settle. In the morning there was a tall, evil line of smoke rising over the fields where our village was. It was black smoke and it curled and boiled as it rose up into the blue sky. Some of the very young children in our group asked what the smoke was from, and the women smiled and told them, It is just the smoke from a volcano, little ones. It is nothing to worry about. And I watched the way the smiles left their faces when they turned away from their children’s eyes and stared back into the blue sky filling with black.