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 with the back of his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age, Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all I had to do was pick a tomato patch clean.”

Dirk looked up then, quickly. “If I get it all picked can I go?”

“It’s a day’s job.”

“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