Topping was a new job. With a long hooked knife the beet was lifted and laid across the arm, and then, with a slash or two, freed of its top. The children followed, gathering the beets into great piles for Mr. Lukes's wagon to collect.
Vicente and Joe did not make piles; they topped; and Joe boasted that he was faster than his father as he slashed away with the topping knife.
"It looks like you'd cut yourself, holding it on your knee like you do!" Grandma cried as she watched him one day.
"Not me!" bragged Joe. "Other kids does." The beet tops fell away under his flashing knife.
From the beet-dump the beets were taken to the sugar factory a few miles away, where they were made into shining white beet sugar. ("And that's another thing I never even guessed!" thought Rose-Ellen. "What hard work it takes to fill our sugar bowls!")
Sometimes at night now a skim of ice formed on the water bucket in the chicken-house. Goldenrod and asters were puffs of white; the harvest moon shone big and red at the skyline, across miles of rolling farmland; crickets fiddled sleepily and long-tailed magpies chattered. One clear, frosty night Grandpa said, "Hark! the ducks are flying south. Maybe we best follow."
[THE BOY WHO DIDN'T KNOW GOD]
Handbills blew around the adobe village, announcing that five hundred cotton-pickers were wanted at once in Arizona. The Reo, full of Beechams and trailing Carrie, headed south.
The surprisingly large grocery bill had been paid, a few clothes bought, Daddy's ulcerated tooth pulled, and the Reo's patched tires replaced with better used ones. The result was that the Beecham pocketbooks were as flat as pancakes.
"Yet we've worked like horses," Daddy said heavily. "And, worse than that, we've let Gramma and the kids work as I never thought Beechams would."