I knew you wouldn’t let me ride my bike the eight and a half miles out into the country, so I told you I was doing yard work for a church garden on the city outskirts. According to the flyer outside the local YMCA, the job paid nine dollars an hour, which was almost two dollars above minimum wage at the time. And because I was still too young to be legally employed, I was paid under the table, in cash.

It was the summer of 2003, which meant Bush had already declared war on Iraq, citing weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, when the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” played on every radio station but especially on PWR 98.6, and you could hear the song from nearly every car on the block if you slept with the windows open, its beats punctuated by the sound of beer bottles bursting on the basketball court across the street, the crackheads lobbing the empties up in the sky, just to see how the streetlights make broken things seem touched by magic, glass sprinkled like glitter on the pavement come morning. It was the summer Tiger Woods would go on to receive the PGA Player of the Year for the fifth time in a row and the Marlins would upset the Yankees (not that I cared or understood), it was two years before Facebook and four before the first iPhone, Steve Jobs was still alive, and your nightmares had just started getting worse, and I’d find you at the kitchen table at some god-awful hour, butt naked, sweating, and counting your tips in order to buy “a secret bunker” just in case, you said, a terrorist attack happened in Hartford. It was the year the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sent its last signal to NASA before losing contact forever 7.6 billion miles from Earth.

I got up at six in the morning five days a week and rode my bike the full hour it took to get to the farm, crossing the Connecticut River, past the suburbs with their suicidally pristine lawns, then into the sticks. As I approached the property, the fields unfolded all around me on both sides, the telephone wires slacked with the weight of crows dotted along the lines, the sporadic white almond trees in full bloom, irrigation ditches where more than a dozen rabbits would drown by summer’s end, their corpses stinking the hot air. Verdant swaths of tobacco, some high as my shoulders, stretched so far that the trees standing at the farm’s edge looked more like shrubs. In the middle of it all were three huge unpainted barns, all lined in a row.

I rode up the dirt drive toward the first barn and walked my bike through the opened door. As I adjusted to the cool dark, I saw a row of men sitting along the wall, their dark faces moving over paper plates of runny eggs, talking amongst themselves in Spanish. One of them, seeing me, waved me over, saying something I couldn’t catch. When I told him I didn’t speak Spanish, he seemed surprised. Then a flare of recognition flicked over him and he lit up. “Ah!” He pointed at me and nodded. “Chinito. ?Chinito!” I decided, it being my first day, not to correct him. I gave him a thumbs-up. “Sí,” I said, smiling, “Chinito.”

His name was Manny, he said, and gestured toward a table where a large sheet pan of sunny-side-up eggs sat over a butane heater beside a glass pot of room-temperature coffee. I settled among the men, eating in silence. Not counting myself, there were twenty-two other workers, most of them undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America save for one, Nico, who was from the Dominican Republic. There was also Rick, a white guy in his twenties from Colchester, who, it was said, was on the sex offender list and tobacco was the only steady job he could get. Most were seasonal workers and followed various crops across the country as they ripened for harvest. At this farm, the men slept in an encampment comprising four trailers set a few yards beyond the tree line at the edge of the property, hidden from the road.

The barn rafters, where the picked tobacco was to be hung to dry, were now empty. By September’s end, each barn would house almost two tons of tobacco, two times over. In between bites of runny eggs, I examined the structure. To encourage faster drying, every other wood panel on the barn’s siding was raised up, creating rib-like slits, allowing air flow, where the day’s heat now ran its hot breath across my neck, carrying with it the sweet-bitter scent of tobacco and the iron of red dirt. The men too smelled of the fields. Before their boots met the soil, their bodies, even after morning showers, exuded the salt and sunbaked underscent from the previous day’s work. Soon the same smell would permeate my own pores.

A forest-green Ford Bronco pulled into the drive. The men rose in unison and tossed their plates and cups into the wastebasket. They put on their gloves, some poured water on rags and stuffed them under their caps.

Mr. Buford walked in. A tall, lanky white man of about seventy, he wore a Red Sox cap pulled low over a pair of aviators and a cheddar cheese grin. Hands on his hips, he reminded me of that maniac sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, the one who got his brains blown out by one of his own privates for being an asshole. But Buford was cheery enough, charming even, if only a bit forced with it. He grinned, his one gold tooth sparking between his lips, and said, “How’s my United Nations this morning? ?Bueno?”

I walked up to him and introduced myself. I shook his hand, which was rough and chapped, which surprised me. He patted me on the shoulder and said I’ll do fine as long as I just follow Manny, my crew leader.

The men and I piled in the back of three pickups and we drove out to the first field, where the crop was tallest, their heavy heads just starting to tilt. We were followed by two tractors, on which the plants would be loaded. By the time we got there, there was already a crew of ten men crouched over the first five rows of tobacco. That was the cut team. Armed with machetes sharpened in the day’s first light, they would set out a hundred yards ahead of us and chop down the stalks in quick slashing sweeps. Sometimes, when we worked fast enough, we’d catch up to them, the sound of their blades louder and louder, until you could hear their lungs working as they cut, the stalks falling in bright green splashes around their hunched backs. You could hear the water inside the stems as the steel broke open the membranes, the ground darkening as the plants bled out.

I was on the spear crew, where the shorter workers were. Our task was to pick up the fallen crop, their leaves already shriveled in the sun. We split into teams of three harvesters each, two pickers and one piercer. As a piercer, all you had to do was stand by the spearing horse (a cart with a removable spear attached to it) and run the plants through the spear until the plank filled up. Then you’d remove the spear tip, and one of the pickers would carry the full plank to an idling tractor, where a loader would rack the plank. The piercer would then take another plank from a holster, attach the steel spear tip, and continue filling the new rack.

When the tractor was at capacity, it would be driven back to the barns, where dozens of men, usually the tallest ones, would pass the racks, one by one, to each other up the rafters to dry. Since you could fall from as high as forty feet, the barn was the most dangerous place to work. There were stories the men told, from other farms, how the sound won’t leave their ears, the thud of a body—someone humming or talking of the weather or complaining of a woman, the price of gas in Modesto, then the abrupt silence, the leaves shifting where the voice had been.

That first day, I stupidly refused the pair of gloves offered by Manny. They were too big and ran nearly to my elbows. By five o’clock, my hands were so thick and black with sap, dirt, pebbles, and splinters, they resembled the bottom of a pan of burned rice. The crows floated over the field’s wrinkled air as we worked the hours bare, their shadows swooping over the land like things falling from the sky. The jackrabbits dipped in and out of the rows, and once in a while a machete would come down on one and you could hear, even through the clink of blades, the shrill yelp of a thing leaving the earth we stood on.

But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.

Manny, brow furrowed, his mustache almost grey from dried sweat, nodded as I cupped my hands into a blossom to indicate your name, Rose.

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