Free Mungus: Book 1 by Chad Leito Page B

sat two Beardsley men.  They each had thick shoulders and I saw that one of them was young with all black hair and the other one had gone completely gray and white.  Also in front of their cabin were two faces that I recognized from the Greco ship-Nathan and Heather Harmon.  Nathan was Miss Mary’s son.  He and his wife, Heather, would often come down and eat lunch with Miss Mary and the children at the orphanage.  They had had a baby just before they left the Greco ship and it was all Miss Mary talked about for weeks.  I didn’t see the baby anywhere and I guessed that it was still sleeping inside of the cabin.
                  The breakfast wheelbarrow made its way down to us on squeaky, rubber wheels.  When it got to us, the Salyer pushing it said, “enjoy,” and sloshed two ladles of the gray food into bowls for us.
                  “What is it?” I asked.
                  “Grits,” the Salyer smiled with yellow teeth.
                  Saul and I sat back down in front of our cabin and examined our breakfast.  Flies buzzed around my food and I swatted them away.  The stuff didn’t look edible, but it smelled good enough.  We didn’t have utensils so we looked around at the other people and saw that they were drinking their breakfast right from the bowl.  After seeing that we didn’t have another option, Saul and I tipped up our bowls and began to eat our grits.  They didn’t taste as bad as they looked.  They were bland, but I was hungry and ate every last drop.
                  Heather Harmon sat just a few feet away from me, staring blankly into the sun.  She looked even skinnier than before she had gotten pregnant and wrinkles and cracks in her skin made it seem as though she had aged 5 years since the last time I saw her.
                  “That’s bad for your eyes, you know?” I said to her.
                  “I know.”  She didn’t move her gaze and continued to bask her corneas in the light of the sun.
                  “So what do we do now?  What’s after breakfast?”  I smiled and tried to sound as friendly as possible.
                  She remained monotone as she stared into the sun with her arms wrapped around her knees.  “We pick cotton.”
                  “For how long?” I asked.
                  She looked at me and let out a little laugh. “Forever.”

              She continued to stare at me.  Her eyes looked dull.  I imagined that after gazing into the sun that long that my face had to be covered by black dots in her field of vision.  Her look was unnerving, so to cheer her up I asked, “How’s the baby?”
                  She looked back into the sunlight and as I waited for an answer I saw that tears began to run down her cheek.  ‘What could have happened,’ I thought.  It must have been something terrible.  I felt awful, like I wanted to shrink to a size so small that I wouldn’t be noticed and walk away.
    One of the Salyer guards began ringing a big bell that made a sharp pitch over the land.  Every servant got up from where they were sitting with their bowls in their hands and went over and dropped them back into the wheelbarrow and then they separated into groups.  Di was standing over by the first cabin, loading some dip into his mouth.  “Where do we go?” I asked him.
                  “Little Salyer, go find Hank.  Big guy, you’re with me.”
                  Di led Saul over to a group of gathered Beardsley workers.  Saul turned and waved at me; I waved back, then I scurried off to find Hank.  Hank was standing in front of a big group of workers as well.  There were a little over twenty in the group, including Verne and the black haired Beardsley in the cabin beside me.  All of the workers were holding long, empty sacks.  I saw that a whip was curled