Across the Fruited Plain Part 11

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hearing about Jesus]

But it was the boy who sat breathless till the story was done.

Then he scrubbed a ragged sleeve across eyes and nose and spoke in a choked, angry voice. "I wish I'd been there. I bet them guys wouldn't-wouldn't got so fresh with--with him. But listen, Lady!" His dark eyes were fiercely questioning. "Why ain't n.o.body told us? It sure seems like we ought to been told before."

All the way home Jimmie sat silent. As the car stopped, he got his voice. "Miss Pink'ton, did he mean, honest, he didn't know about G.o.d and Jesus?"

Miss Pinkerton nodded. "He--he didn't know he had a Heavenly Father."

"And no Gramma either," Jimmie mumbled. "Gee."

8: THE HOPYARDS

Through February, March, and part of April, the Beecham family picked peas in the Imperial Valley.

"Peas!" Rose-Ellen exploded the word on their last night in the "jungle" camp. "I don't believe there are enough folks in the world to cat all the peas we've picked."

"And they aren't done with when they're picked, even," added Daddy. "Most of them will be canned; and other folks have to sh.e.l.l and sort them and put them into cans and then cook them and seal and label the cans."

"What an awful lot of work everything makes," d.i.c.k exclaimed.

"It was different in my Gramma's time." Grandma pursed her lips as she set a white patch in a blue overall knee. "Then each family grew and canned and made almost everything it used."

"Now everybody's linked up with everybody else," agreed Grandpa, cobbling a shoe with his little kit. "We use' to get along in winter with turnips and cabbage and such, and fruit the womenfolks canned. Of course it's pretty nice to have garden vegetables and fruit fresh the year round, but. . . ."

Grandma squinted suddenly over her spectacles. "For the land's sakes! I never thought of it, but it's turned the country upside down and made a million people into 'rubber tramps'--this having to have fresh green stuff in winter."

"The owners couldn't handle their crops without the million workers coming in just when they're ready to harvest," Daddy continued the tale. . . .

"But they haven't anything for us to do the rest of the time; and how they do hate the sight of us 'rubber tramps,' the minute we've finished doing their work for them," d.i.c.k ended.

Next morning they started up the coast to pick lettuce. The country was beautiful. Rounded hills, soft looking and of the brightest green, ran down toward the sea, with really white sheep pastured on them. Grandpa said it put him in mind of heaven.

Grandma said it would be heaven-on-earth to live there, if only you had a decent little house and a garden. The desert places were as beautiful, abloom with many-colored wildflowers; and there were fields of artichokes and other vegetables, with Chinese and j.a.panese tending them. Those clean green rows stretched on endlessly.

"They make me feel funny," Rose-Ellen complained, "like seeing too many folks and too many stars."

"They've got so many vegetables they dump them into the sea, because if they put them all on the market, the price would go down. But there's not enough so that those that pick them get what they need to eat," said Grandpa. "Sometimes too much is not enough."

The lettuce camp housed part of its workers in a huge old barn.

The Beechams had three stalls and used their tent for curtains.

They cooked out in the barnyard, so it was fortunate that it was the dry season. From May to August the men and d.i.c.k picked, trimmed, packed lettuce; but during most of that time the barn-apartment was in quarantine. All the children who had not had scarlet fever came down with it.

It was even hotter than midsummer Philadelphia, and the air was sticky, and black with flies besides, and sickening with odor.

Grandma's cus.h.i.+ony pinkness entirely disappeared; she was more the color of a paper-bag, Rose-Ellen thought.

"But land knows," Grandma said, "what I'd have done if the Lord hadn't tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. What with no Center near here and only the public health nurse looking in once in a while, it was lucky the young-ones didn't have the fever bad."

In August they were all well and peeled. Grandma heated tub after tub of water and scrubbed them, hair and all, with yellow laundry soap, and washed their clothes and put the automobile-seat beds into the hot sun. Then they went on up the coast, steering for the hopyards northeast of San Francisco.

It seemed too bad to hurry through San Francisco without really seeing it--that beautiful city crowded steeply by the sea. But the Reo had had to have a new gas-line and a battery, and little money was left to show for the long, sizzling months of work. It was best to stay clear of cities.

The Sacramento Delta region was the strangest the Beechams had ever seen. The broad river, refres.h.i.+ng after months without real rivers, was higher than the fields. Beside the river ran the highway. The Beechams looked down at pear orchards, tule marshes and ranch houses. Everything was so lushly wet that moss grew green even on tree trunks and roofs. Like Holland, Daddy said, it had dikes to keep the water out.

One day they stopped at a fish cannery between highway and river and asked for work. The Reo was having to have her tires patched twice a day, and slow leaks were blown up every time the car stopped for gasoline. The family needed money.

Peering into the cannery, they saw men and women working in a strong-smelling steam, cleaning and cutting up the fish that pa.s.sed them on an endless belt, making it ready for others to pack in cans. At the feet of some of the women stood boxes with babies in them; and other babies were slung in cloths on their mothers' backs.

There was no work for the Beechams, and they climbed into the Reo once more and stared down on the other side of the road, where the foreman had told them his packers lived. Even from that distance it was plain that this was a Chinese village, not American at all.

"The little babies were so sweet, with their s.h.i.+ny black eyes.

But, my gracious, they don't get any sun or air at all!"

Rose-Ellen squeezed Sally thankfully. Even though the baby was underweight and had violet shadows under her blue eyes, she looked healthier than most babies they saw.

The hops were queer and interesting, unlike any other crops Rose-Ellen had met with. The leaves were deep-lobed, shaped a little like woodbine, but rough to touch. The fruits resembled small spruce cones of pale yellow-green tissue paper. The vines were trained on wires strung along ten-foot poles; they formed aisles that were heavy with drowsy fragrance.

The picking baskets stood almost as high as Rose-Ellen's shoulder, and she and d.i.c.k were proud of filling one apiece, the first day they worked. These baskets held sixty pounds each--more when the weather was not so dry--and sixty pounds meant ninety cents. School had not started yet, so the children worked all day. Sometimes Rose-Ellen could not keep from crying, she was so tired. And when she cried, Grandma's mouth worked over her store teeth in the way that meant she felt bad.

"But we've got to get in under it, all of us," she scolded, to keep from crying herself. "We've got to earn what we can. I never see the beat of it. If we scrabble as hard as we can, we just only keep from sliding backwards."

Here in the hopyards the Beechams did not get their pay in money.

They were given tickets marked with the amount due them. These they could use for money at the company store.

"And the prices there are sky-high!" Grandma wrathfully told Grandpa, waving a pound of coffee before his eyes. "Thirty-five cents, and not the best grade, mind you! Pink salmon higher than red ought to be. Bread fifteen cents a loaf! Milk sky-high and Carrie plumb dry!"

The living quarters were bad, too: shacks, with free straw on the floor for beds, and mud deep in the dooryards where the campers emptied water. Over it all hung a sick smell of garbage and a cloud of flies.

It was no wonder that scores of children and some older people were sick. The public health nurses, when they came to visit the sick ones, warned the women to cover food and garbage, but most of the women laughed at the advice.

"Those doctor always tell us things," the Beechams' Italian neighbor, Mrs. Serafini, said lightly. She was dandling a sad baby while the sad baby sucked a disk of salami, heavy with spices. "And those nurse also are crazy. Back in asparagus I send-it my kids to the Center, and what you think? They take off Pepe's clothes! They say it is not healthy that she wear the swaddlings. I tell Angelina to say to them that my _madre_ before me was dressed so; but again they strip the poor angel."

"And what did you do then?" Rose-Ellen inquired.

"No more did I send-it my kids to the Center!" Mrs. Serafini cried dramatically.

"I'd think myself," Grandma observed dryly, "your baby might feel better in such hot weather if she was dressed more like Sally."

Mrs. Serafini eyed Sally's short crepe dress, worn over a single flour-sack undergarment. "We have-it our ways, you have-it yours," was all she would say.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mrs. Serafini]

While the elders talked, Jimmie had been staring at Pepe's next brother, Pedro. Seven years old, Pedro might have been, but he could move about only by sitting on the ground and hitching himself along. He was crippled much worse than Jimmie.

"I wonder, couldn't I show Pedro my sc.r.a.pbook?" he whispered, nudging Grandma.

"To be sure; and I always said if you'd think more about others, you wouldn't be so sorry for yourself," Grandma replied.