“But if I do pick the patch—if I get through early enough—can I go?”
In his mind’s eye Pervus saw the tomato patch, more scarlet than green, so thick hung the fruit upon the bushes. He smiled. “Yes. You pick them tomatoes and you can go. But no throwing into the baskets and getting ’em all softed up.”
Secretly Selina resolved to help him, but she knew that this could not be until afternoon. The berry patches were fully three miles from the DeJong farm. Dirk would have to finish by three o’clock, at the latest, to get there. Selina had her morning full with the housework.
He was in the patch before six; fell to work, feverishly. He picked, heaped the fruit into hillocks. The scarlet patches glowed, blood-red, in the sun. The child worked like a machine, with an economy of gesture calculated to the fraction of an inch. He picked, stooped, heaped the mounds in the sultry heat of the August morning. The sweat stood out on his forehead, darkened his blond hair, slid down his cheeks that were pink, then red, then tinged with a purplish tone beneath the summer tan. When dinner time came he gulped a dozen alarming mouthfuls and was out again in the broiling noonday glare. Selina left her dinner dishes unwashed on the table to help him, but Pervus intervened. “The boy’s got to do it alone,” he insisted.
“He’ll never do it, Pervus. He’s only eight.”
“Time I was eight——”
He actually had cleared the patch by three. He went to the well and took a huge draught of water; drank two great dippersful, lipping it down thirstily, like a colt. It was cool and delicious beyond belief. Then he sloshed a third and a fourth dipperful over his hot head and neck, took an empty lard pail for berries and was off down the dusty road and across the fields, running fleetly in spite of the quivering heat waves that seemed to dance between fiery heaven and parched earth. Selina stood in the kitchen doorway a moment, watching him. He looked very small and determined.
He found Geertje and Jozina, surfeited with fruit, berry stained and bramble torn, lolling languidly in Kuyper’s woods. He began to pick the plump blue balls but he ate them listlessly, though thriftily, because that was what he had come for and his father was Dutch. When Geertje and Jozina prepared to leave not an hour after he had come he was ready to go, yet curiously loath to move. His lard pail was half filled. He trotted home laboriously through the late afternoon, feeling giddy and sick, with horrid pains in his head. That night he tossed in delirium, begged not to be made lie down, came perilously near to death.
Selina’s heart was an engine pumping terror, hate, agony through her veins. Hate for her husband who had done this to the boy.
“You did it! You did it! He’s a baby and you made him work like a man. If anything happens to him! If anything happens to him!——”