This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.
Harvest Moon
A Shared Longing
The Styrofoam cup half full of coffee from the commissary vending machine had only been on the duty desk for less than five minutes while Sari Fogarty made her rounds, inspecting the massive and mighty machines that ran the Gray Knight Gin just south of Walls, Mississippi. Yet by the time she got back, a disgusting film of cotton dust had settled onto the coffee that she had filled with sugar and powdered creamer.
It was already nearly 10 o'clock at night and Sari had been on the job more than 16 hours. Double shifts weren't uncommon in October in this northwesternmost town in Mississippi where the cotton harvest - and cotton ginning - were going full tilt. But Sari was dragging and needed the caffein lift that this cup of java would give her to finish out her day sometime between 11 and midnight. She had planned to step outside onto the gin's service deck, into the clean, crisp fall air, and gulp down the sweet, rich concoction she had made.
"Shit," she muttered as she removed the face covering and goggles that occupational and safety regulations required her to wear inside the gin and the hair net she wore of her own accord. She slung the drink, covered with a gray sheen of airborne cotton dust the mask kept her from inhaling but had settled in only a few minutes onto her coffee, onto the gravel below.
Sari slumped into a chair on the deck a few feet from the conveyor belt that would carry the next bale of cleaned, compressed cotton fiber, separated from its hulls, seeds and foreign foliage matter, onto the storage area next to the shipping bay where they would be loaded onto flatbed trailers and trucked overnight to a cleaning, compressing and grading facility.
Strong men with powerful legs, arms and backs wrangled the bales off the belt, onto a forklift that would stack them neatly and efficiently so they could quickly be shipped out quickly just up the road to a plant in Memphis. Right now, that man was Carnell Boyce.
Oh, yeah. That boy could make Miss Kitty purr
, Sari mused to herself as she watched Carnell's biceps bulge and flex like a coiled python beneath his sweaty, faded maroon Mississippi State Baseball T-shirt as he manhandled bale after bale onto the forklift.
Miss Kitty was the pet name she gave her lady bits at her mother's suggestion years earlier and her mom heard her refer to the region as her "pussy." Good girls don't use that word, her mother told her. Nickname notwithstanding, she could feel it dampening in her panties as she leered at Carnell.
She and Carnell had known each other for years, since she enrolled in West Marshall High School. Carnell's family had lived in Marshall County but moved just across the county line into DeSoto his senior year, but the Marshall school district never found out about it. The two never hooked up - never even kissed - but had flirted with each other from time to time, starting in high school. Carnell, two years older but just one grade ahead of Sari, had married a girl who found out she was pregnant with his child midway through his senior year. He dropped out of school and out of sight for a while but got his general equivalency diploma a year later. The marriage lasted just long enough to spare the child the stigma of bastardy, and now Carnell was on the hook for just over $1,000 a month in child support to his ex. He worked long and hard hours to pay what the court said he owed, which amounted to more than half of his monthly take-home pay.
"What? You ain't never seen a man working?" Carnell said when he saw Sari gawking at him. Whether it was exhaustion, undisguised lust or a combination of the two, Sari's self-awareness failed to engage as she stared at him while he toiled on the bale floor under the rosy glow of the overhead sodium vapor lights.
"Not like that, I ain't," she replied.
"Like what?"
"Like shoving 500-pound bales around that concrete floor all day like they were nothing. Man's gonna break his back doing that from sun-up til late at night."
Carnell snorted. "Hell, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Got a young-un who don't live with me but the judge says I gotta to pay for. That'll motivate you."
Sari kept staring. Times like this made her crave a Marlboro Light that she would have kept in the breast pocket of her denim Grey Knight Gin shirt until she forced herself during the summer to give up smoking. Besides, lighting up on gin property anywhere near tons of flammable cotton was grounds for immediate firing. So she just kept staring.
"How old's the young-un now?" Sari asked.
"Jason just turned four. I would show you pictures but ... well," he said, motioning to the next bale trundling toward him on the belt.
"He stay with his mama?"
"I get him on days off, weekends and the like. Take him fishin', to his tee-ball games, to the McDonald's over in Southaven so he can play in that little playground with the ball pit and I get him some ice cream when he's all played out," he said. "Trouble is ... this time of year, ain't many days off. It's the cotton harvest."
Sari nodded in agreement. "Yessir. I know that's right."
"Ain't you got something to do here other than sit in that chair and stare at me?"
"Yeah. It's about time for my next-to-last round of running numbers on the dryer, the stick machine, the extractor and the gin stand." With that, she put her mask and goggles back in place, lifted her tired frame off the chair, grabbed her Microsoft Surface tablet on which she would record the machines' metrics and trudged back inside to the constant hum of the massive machines.
As she walked away, Carnell looked on appreciatively at how her bottom filled out the otherwise baggy, androgynous khakis that were standard issue at Gray Knight for people with jobs like hers.
Oh yeah
, he thought to himself,
I could do that girl some good
