“Probably not,” Joe said.
The tobacco stalks were now taller than most men, their leaves longer than Joe’s arm. He didn’t allow Tomas to run in the tobacco patch any longer for fear he could lose him. The croppers—mostly older boys—arrived one morning and picked the leaves from the ripest stalks. The leaves were piled on wooden sleds and then the sleds were unhitched from the mules and hitched to tractors. The tractors were driven to the curing barn on the western edge of the plantation, a task left to the youngest boys. Joe stepped out on the porch of the main house one morning, and a boy no older than six puttered past him on a tractor, a sledful of leaves piled high behind him. The boy gave Joe a big smile and a wave and kept puttering along.
Outside the curing barn, the leaves were pulled from the sleds and placed on stringing benches under the shade trees. The stringing benches had racks affixed to them. The stringers and the handers—all the baseball boys with the surgical tape on their fingers—would place a stick in the rack and begin tying the leaves to the sticks with twine until the leaf bunches hung from one end of the tobacco stick to the other. They did this from six in the morning until eight at night; there was no baseball those weeks. The twine had to be pulled tight while retaining pressure on the stick, so cord burns to the hands and the fingers were common. Hence, Ciggy pointed out, the surgical tape.
“Soon as this is done, patrón? All this ’bacco hung, one end of the barn to the other? We sit for five days while it cures. Only man has a job is the man tending the fire in the barn and the men checking it don’t get too moist or too dry in there. The boys? They get to play the baseball.” He put a quick hand on Joe’s arm. “If that’s okay with you.”
Joe stood outside the barn, watching those boys string tobacco. Even with the rack, they had to raise and extend their arms to tie off the leaves—raise and extend them for pretty much fourteen hours straight. He gave Ciggy a foul look. “Of course it’s okay. Christ, that fucking work is unbearable.”
“I did it for six years.”
“How?”
“I don’t like starving. You like starving?”
Joe rolled his eyes.
“Mmm hmm. Another man,” Ciggy said, “don’t like starving. Only thing the whole world agrees on—starving is no fun.”
The next morning, Joe found Ciggy in the curing barn, making sure the hangers spaced the leaves properly. Joe told him to pull himself away, and they crossed the fields and walked down the eastern ridge and stopped at the worst field Joe owned. It was rocky, it was blocked from the sun by hills and outcrops all day, and the worms and weeds loved it.
Joe asked if Herodes, their best driver, worked much during curing.
“He’s still working the harvest,” Ciggy said, “but not like the boys.”
“Good,” Joe said. “Have him plow this field.”
“Ain’t nothing going to grow here,” Ciggy said.
“No shit,” Joe said.
“So why plow it?”
“Because it’s easier to build a baseball field on level ground, don’t you think?”
The same day they constructed the pitcher’s mound, Joe was walking with Tomas past the barn when he saw one of the workers, Perez, beating his son, just clouting his head like the boy was a dog he’d caught eating his supper. Kid couldn’t have been any older than eight. Joe said, “Hey,” and started toward them, but Ciggy stepped in front of him.
Perez and Perez’s son looked at him, confused, and Perez hit his son in the head again and then in the ass several times.
“Is that necessary?” Joe said to Ciggy.
Tomas, oblivious, squirmed for Ciggy, to whom he’d taken a shine lately.
Ciggy took Tomas from Joe and held him high above him as Tomas giggled and Ciggy said, “You think Perez likes to hit his boy? Think he woke up, said I want to be a bad guy, make sure the boy grows up to hate me? No, no, no, patrón. He woke up saying I got to put food on the table, I got to keep them warm, keep them dry, fix that roof leak, kill the rats in their bedroom, show them the right path, show my wife I love her, have five fucking minutes for myself, and sleep for four hours before I got to get up and go back into the fields. And when I leave for the fields, I can hear the littlest ones crying—‘Papa, I’m hungry. Papa, there’s no milk. Papa, I feel sick.’ And he comes back day after day to that, goes out day after day to that, and then you give his son a job, patrón, and it’s like you saved his life. Because maybe you did. But then his son fails at this job? Cono. That son gets beat. Better beat than hungry.”
“What did the boy fail at?”
“He was supposed to watch the curing fire. He fell asleep. Could have burned the whole crop.” He handed Tomas back to Joe. “Could have burned himself.”
Joe looked at the father and son now. Perez had his arm around the boy, the boy nodding, the father speaking in low tones and kissing the side of the boy’s head several times, the lesson delivered. The boy didn’t seem to soften under the kisses, though. So the father pushed his head away and they both went back to work.
The baseball field was completed the day the tobacco was moved from the barn to the pack house. Preparing the leaves for market was a job left mostly to the women, who walked up the hill to the plantation in the morning as hard-faced and hard-fisted as the men. While they sorted and graded the tobacco, Joe gathered the boys in the field and gave them the gloves and fresh balls and Louisville sluggers that had arrived two days before. He laid out three base pads and home plate.
It was as if he’d shown them how to fly.
In the early evenings, he’d take Tomas to watch the games. Sometimes Graciela would join them, but her presence often proved to be too distracting for a couple of the boys entering early adolescence.
Tomas, one of those kids who never sat still, was rapt in the presence of the game. He sat quietly, hands clasped between his knees, watching something he couldn’t possibly understand yet, but which worked on him the way music and warm water did.
Joe said to Graciela one night, “Outside of us, there’s no hope in that town but baseball. They love it.”
“That’s good then, yes?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Shit on America all you want, honey, but we export some good things.”
She gave him a flash of wry brown eyes. “But you charge for it.”
Who didn’t? What made the world run, if not free trade? We give to you, and you give something back in return.
Joe loved his wife, but she still seemed unable to accept that her own country, while undoubtedly beholden to his, was far better off for the transaction. Before the United States had pulled their asses out of the fire, Spain had left them languishing in a cesspool of malaria and bad roads and nonexistent medical care. Machado hadn’t improved on the model. But now, with General Batista, they had a surging infrastructure. They had indoor plumbing and electricity in a third of the country and half of Havana. They had good schools and a few decent hospitals. They had a longer life expectancy. They had dentists.
Yes, the United States exported some of its goodwill at the point of a gun. But all the great countries who’d advanced civilization throughout history had done the same.
And when you considered Ybor City, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she? They’d built hospitals with blood money. Pulled women and children off the streets with rum profits.
Good deeds, since the dawn of time, had often followed bad money.
And now, in baseball-crazy Cuba, in a region where they would have been playing it with sticks and bare hands, they had gloves so new the leather creaked and bats as blond as peeled apples. And every evening, when the work was done and the rest of the green stems had been removed from the leaves, and the crop had been sheeted and packed, and the air smelled of the remoistened tobacco and tar, he sat on a chair beside Ciggy and watched the shadows lengthen in the field, and they discussed where they’d buy the seed for the outfield grass so it would no longer be a scrabble of dirt and loose stone out there. Ciggy had heard rumors of a league near these parts, and Joe asked him to keep looking into it, particularly for the fall when the farm duties would be at their lightest.