Cinderella in Overalls - By Carol Grace Page 0,1

as the auctioneer directed the buyers’ attention to the giant tractor standing in the field behind him, just where her father had left it after he plowed the field for the last time.

“What do I hear for Old Yellow?” the man called out, and Catherine’s heart sank. How many times had she sat next to her father on Old Yellow until she was old enough to drive the tractor herself? The metal treads were shiny from years of wear. Even from where she sat she could see the rust spots on the sides. Maybe no one would buy it.

“Don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” Donny said under his breath, and Catherine had to agree. The tractor was one of a kind, and she loved that machine. How she longed to climb up and take the wheel again and smell the rich, damp earth and watch the plow behind her scatter the clumps of dirt.

Someone did buy it, of course, but she didn’t turn around to see who it was. Her eyes were fastened on the next item—the flatbed truck. Next to her Donny smiled.

“Now that brings back memories, doesn’t it? I remember seeing you hauling fertilizer from the feed and fuel in town. Everybody said your daddy was crazy to let you drive it.”

“My father wasn’t crazy,” she explained softly. “He wanted me to know how to run a farm. Driving a truck or a tractor was part of the education.” The rest she’d gotten at the university, the part about hybrids and grain futures. She’d been ready. As prepared as anyone could be to run a farm. But she couldn’t fight the drought and the disease, and she couldn’t sit by any longer and watch the disintegration of her past and future.

She swallowed hard and stood up, turned and walked past friends and strangers without seeing them, her chin held high and her eyes dry. Let them stare, let them whisper. She could imagine what they were saying. “Poor Catherine... nothing left... where will she go? What will she do?”

She walked faster as the auctioneer’s voice rose to a crescendo. “Going, going, gone,” he called as she rounded the empty barn. He could have been talking to her as well as the flatbed. They were both going, but where? She only knew she had to get as far away from Tranquility as she could.

Catherine leaned against the front fence and gave in to the pent-up emotions she had suppressed all morning. Her eyes blinded with tears, she heard the voice echo through the air once more. “Going, going, gone.”

Chapter One

The diesel truck bounced up and down on the rocky dirt road, and Catherine Logan gripped the edge of the passenger seat to keep from hitting her head on the roof. Behind her in the long flatbed, where she usually sat, a dozen Mamara Indian women were wedged between burlap sacks bulging with lettuce, parsley and mangoes. She was proud of the harvest, proud of what they’d accomplished with no machinery, and proud of the Aruacan women who worked so hard for so little. So little that at the end of a grueling market day they ended up with no more than a few pesos to show for it. The money the women earned went right through their hands and into the pockets of the workers they depended on to bring the crops to market. Catherine smoothed her layered skirts and turned to face the driver.

“Tomas,” she shouted over the roar of the diesel engine, “can’t you lower your price for us? These are poor women who can’t afford your fees.”

Hunched over the wheel, he spoke without looking at her. “And what about me?” he asked. “Do I not have to make a living, too? Do you know the price of a truck these days?”

Catherine shook her head. She had no idea of the price of a truck in Aruaca. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer for eighteen months and she knew the prices of potatoes and bread and shoes, but not trucks. She tapped the driver on the shoulder. “How much,” she asked, “for a truck like this?”

“Too much,” he replied with a glance over his shoulder, “for them. But for a rich American like you...” He shrugged. “Maybe not.”

She grimaced. Despite the fact that she lived in a small house as the other farmers did, dressed like the women in a fringed shawl and wore her hair in a long braid, there were still some local people