The Cotton Sweeper

I stopped alongside the highway, where a man appeared to be raking or sweeping between rows in a small cotton patch about half the size of a football field.  He saw me pull the car over to the side of the road and watched as I approached him.  We spoke.  He had a heavy accent, German I think, but I could understand him.

He was upset about the same people who were chasing me, though neither of us knew just who they were.  His two sons soon joined us in the field; they behaved as if they were highly suspicious of me and my motives for stopping. As I was about to leave, the man asked me to wait so he could give me a business card.  He went to his truck, sitting on the far side of the field, and returned with a small circular zippered pouch.  He unzipped it and produced his business card; a fragile green leaf with hand printing on both sides. It was tattered, but it had enough body so I could hold it without it bending.  I could not read the writing very well, but I thought I would be able to see it under a magnifying glass, later. I walked back toward my car and, just as I got to it, the leaf blew out of my hand.  I looked and looked for it, but it was impossible to find among all the other leaves.

Later, I returned with someone to help me find the business card.  But this time, we were looking inside a warehouse, with a large room on one side and a small series of hallways and smaller rooms on the other.  As we searched the floor, littered with leaves, a man came in pushing a four-wheel flat cart. Three men, their arms and legs bound with rope and their mouths gagged with cloth, were on the cart; they were the cotton sweeper and his sons.  We watched the man push his cart of human cargo into a room, then heard a gunshot, then another, then another.  A moment later, the man who had been pushing the cart came out of the room and looked toward my search companion and me, motioning to us to come to him.

And then I saw the business card on the floor, just inches from my foot.  My mind was racing; should I pick it up?  I was unsure what the man wanted of me, but I knew I needed the card if I had any hope of leaving the building.

And, no, I still haven’t read the book about dreams.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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