(The following is a deleted excerpt from a novel I am currently writing, the tone and texture, even the writing style, too distinct a contrast from the rest of the book. It's one of those pieces you just love but know has no place in the text you are currently dedicated to. While it could use more polish, in order not to obsess over it and finish the novel, I offer it here, untouched, that it may be enjoyed, maybe even have a life of its own. As for the novel...anyone know any good publishers? Comments are not only welcome, but encouraged.)

Jude was nineteen years old. Like many men in the county he hadn’t finished school. He’d gone long enough to read and write and then worked when and where he could to support himself. He didn’t remember his father at all, and his mother was a hard woman who turned him out on his sixteenth birthday. She meant no harm by it. It’s just what folks did in those days.

There wasn’t a war going on, so that hell of a salvation wouldn’t be there for Jude. Instead he found farm work, what he could, when he could. Spring, summer and fall he worked long hard days, usually being paid a meal and a small wage. Winters he’d live off of whatever he saved, then come spring find work wherever he could and start all over again.

That year, he found himself in Grayson County, North Carolina. It was bean country and they were just beginning to grow fields and fields of burley tobacco, at that time a high cash crop that would eventually suck most of the nutrients out of the land, cause the bean crops to dwindle and the government and the medical community, rightly so, would kill out the tobacco industry there as well by the mid eighties.

But that year Jude would spend most of the seasons working for a Mennonite family in the bean fields and the burley they had. The beans were hard enough, but the tobacco was back breaking work. From sun up to sundown, Jude found himself bent over in the hot sun with a hoe, a shovel or just picking beans.

It was fall. The beans were long gone and the tobacco was being cut from the fields and being readied to hang in the barns. Jude had proved to be a dependable hard worker and the family that had hired him asked him to stay through sale time. They couldn’t afford to pay him much, but they offered to keep feeding him and would let him sleep in the grading shed. When the tobacco crop was all tied and ready for sale, in lue of payment they would allow him and the other man they had asked to stay, clean up the “trash”, sell it and keep the money.

That was a good deal for Jude and he accepted. Jude knew that the tobacco trash brought the most money. Burley was speared onto a stick and hung in barns until it cured. When the fall frosts came, the ice crystals would form on the browned leaves and when the sun came up it would make them pliable. The sticks were then taken down and pulled from the stalks and separated into five different grades, each used for a different type of product, and kept separate for sale.

The trash was the muddy leaves and the stuff that was swept