MY FIRST JOB

By Rita Nicholas

As we drove into the farmyard..,Mr. Rice and I... I was excited and scared all at

once. Excited at the prospect of having that lump sum of money and scared because

I did not know what was expected of me. It was my first job. I would be helping

Mrs. Rice in the kitchen for two weeks during harvest 

      Farms in North Dakota are not measured in acres, but rather in sections and quarters. Migrant farm workers, local high school boys, and sometimes Indians from Belcourt were hired to help take off the crops. Local high school girls got jobs helping the farmers wives.

      The Rices had three children. Two rambunctious boys- Paul age seven and Dale age five and one year old Mary. I would be bunking in the bedroom with Mary. This did not bother me. With four brothers and four sisters, I was used to sharing a bedroom.

      I woke the first morning just as dawn was breaking. I dressed and hurried to the kitchen. I was startled to find the five migrant farm workers and Mr. Rice were sitting around the kitchen table finishing their breakfast. Should I have been up helping to prepare breakfast I wondered? " Oh no," said Mrs. Rice reading my mind "I will cook breakfast, you just need to be here in time to clear the table and do the dishes." And so it began, a continual round of meals and dishes. Mid morning Mrs. Rice took sandwiches to the men in the field, then they came in for a hot meal at dinner time, a mid afternoon snack followed that And of course another hot meal for supper. I was amazed at how much the men could eat.

      While we were working in the kitchen, the men were harvesting the fields of wheat and barley. First came the shocking. A binder cut the grain, tied it into bundles and deposited it on the ground. The men stacked three or four bundles into pyramids to keep them dry. Later the shocks of grain were loaded on a truck and hauled to the threshing machine where the wheat was separated from the chaff In 1945, combines were not yet on the scene.

      One day I made a chocolate cake for the afternoon snack. I didn’t need a recipe, I knew it by heart. After all, when two girls at school were arguing about who could make the best cake, hadn’t Jerry Wavrin said "You are both wrong. Rita makes the best cakes "? Mrs. Rice took me out to the field with her that afternoon. The cake played to rave revues. Mrs. Rice just smiled and graciously accepted their praise. I waited for her to say that I had made the cake.

      She said nothing.

      I said nothing.

      Sleeping in the same bedroom with Mary, I couldn’t help but notice that her bedding was always wet. I mentioned this to Mrs. Rice. "Yes, yes I know " she said , but nothing changed .

By the end of the first week, I had red, itchy bumps on my body. Neither Mrs. Rice or I knew what they were from. I showed them to my mother when we went into town for Saturday night . Looking them over closely she said "I think they might be bedbug bites. Do they have bedbugs?" When we got back to the farm, I asked Mrs. Rice if they could have bedbugs. "Oh no," she assurred me "Maybe it is from something you are eating". By the end of the second week I was covered with red, itchy, weeping welts. Yes, they were from bedbugs.

      Friday of my second week the harvest was finished. Mr. And Mrs. Rice decided to take a holiday and go to Devils Lake. They would leave Saturday morning, stay overnight and come back Sunday. They would take the boys. I was to stay with Mary. One would think I would have had a feeling of abandonment. Alone , in charge of a one year old, nearest neighbor several miles away and no telephone. Strangely I did not. Almost as soon as their car disappeared from sight, I went to Mary’s room and removed all the dingy, urine soaked blankets from her crib. I took them outside to the wringer washing machine that sat in the dirt yard just outside the back porch. I washed them and hung them on the line to dry. Ahh, now I felt better.

      The following week (I was back home), my grandmother called. "I am riding to Devils Lake with Mrs. Johnson tomorrow," she said, "and I am taking you with me. You can buy some school clothes with that money you earned." Devils Lake was the big town of six thousand which was forty miles away (twenty of those were gravel road) where people from Edmore went to shop when they needed something more than just the basics. We were in Shermers Department Store and I was contemplating buying a small checked brown and white gingham blouse.

      "Yes, you buy that" my grandmother said " That’s a good blouse." I was doing the math. The blouse was four dollars. I had made twenty dollars for my for my two week’s work. It didn’t look like such a large sum now. But one did not argue with my grandmother. And she was right, it was a good blouse. I also bought a white cotton batiste blouse with a lace trimmed Peter Pan collar, a skirt and a jumper. With my new clothes in hand I was ready for school.

Ready to start the fifth grade.

I was ten years old.