A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

a girl in New Liskeard.

      The field supervisor was Mr. Corey, an older man with a leathery face and a raspy voice. Overseer Jagninski had hired him from the Guelph Prison Farm, where Mr. Corey had worked for twenty years, ever since the bank had fore-closed on him and appropriated his family’s land. They said his wife left him for a daguerreotype operator in Toronto, taking their son with her. Mr. Corey didn’t speak much, but he was nice enough to those of us who worked hard.

      I didn’t know a thing about farming, but I learned fast. I’d missed planting season, but I was put to work with the others tending the fields or looking after the animals through the summer until the harvest. When it came time to pull in the crops, the most satisfying were the onions, potatoes, and cabbage, because they were weighty and it felt like you’d really grown something.

      Even though the work was exhausting, I was glad to be outdoors. It would’ve been entirely bearable had there not been a couple of fellows who decided that I was an easy mark. They were the sort who had bitterness and cruelty sewn up inside of them, who were overstuffed with it. I knew, when occasionally they lapsed into periods of mercy, that nastiness would soon push out through the seams. The guards rarely did anything, and out there in the fields, Mr. Corey’s attention was pulled in too many directions.

      The worst offender was Red Humphries, a guy even uglier than me, only he didn’t recognize it. He had no deformities, but his face was pocked and puffy and his ears stuck out farther than mine. He had a pear-shaped body on which the hard work in the fields had no effect whatsoever, but he was about six foot two and, because of his sheer bulk, I wasn’t anxious to tangle with him. His red hair was shaved close (like all of us), revealing a lumpy skull, which I suspected came from being dropped on his head a few too many times.