Under the Same Sky (5 page)

Mom came in then and looked Manuel over. She dabbed some of the white stuff on his blotches, and gave him some to take back to the trailer to use on Luisa later. Then she gave him a box of syringes. “From now on, one of these stays in the glove compartment of each truck,” she said. To Luisa she said, “Is this the first time you've had a reaction like this?”

Luisa nodded.

“I don't want to scare you, but the next one could be even worse. You should carry a syringe with you whenever you can.” Then, gently but seriously, she added, “And from now on, when you go through the hedgerows you'll have to be extra careful, okay?”

Luisa looked down. She was embarrassed, I could tell, though Mom hadn't meant to make her feel bad. It was a fact of life that sometimes we had to pee when we were working, and we just went behind the rows of bushes between fields. That was what Luisa had been doing when she stirred up the hornets' nest.

Manuel stepped up and took her gently by the arm to leave. “I work tomorrow, no problem,” Luisa repeated to Mom.

“Let's wait and see how you feel,” Mom answered.

After thanking Mom about a hundred times, Manuel and Luisa left.

Naturally, Luisa's accident was the main topic of conversation at the dinner table that night. While everyone talked about how scary it must have been, and how lucky Luisa was that Mom was there and knew what to do, I mulled over something that had been on my mind ever since I'd known Luisa was going to be okay.

All of us on the crew had been upset by Luisa's accident, but Manuel had acted really crazy. I kept seeing him throw himself over Luisa's fallen body, and remembered how desperately he'd questioned me about how she was doing. I recalled, too, the black stare he'd given me that morning when he found me looking at her.

When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked, “Is Luisa Manuel's girlfriend or something?”

Everyone at the table looked at me as if my head had turned into a cabbage or something.

“
What?
” I demanded.

“She's his
cousin
, pea-brain,” LuAnn said. “You've worked with them for two whole days and you never figured that out?” She shook her head.

Feeling obligated to defend myself, I said in a tone as snotty as hers, “For your information,
pea-brain
, that's exactly what we were doing:
working
. We weren't out there comparing family trees.”

“Stop it right now, you two,” said Mom. To LuAnn she said, “Joe wouldn't necessarily know they were cousins.” To me she said, “Manuel feels very responsible for Luisa, because she's young, and a girl, and so far from home.”

I'd been meaning to ask about that. “How come she's the only girl here, anyway?”

Mom shrugged and said, “Her family needs the money she's earning.”

“Doesn't she have parents?” I asked. “Don't they have jobs?”

“Well, yes,” Mom answered. “But they're back in Mexico. They can't make much there.”

“She misses them,” Meg piped up. “She told me.”

“I'm sure she does, honey,” said Mom. To me she said, “When Manuel was getting the crew together, he told Luisa's family about us, that we would treat Luisa well. So here she is.”

LuAnn had been itching to say something. She wasn't about to let me off the hook for being dense. “Mom, Manuel and his family have been coming here for—what?—ten years or something?”

“Eleven,” Dad answered.

“Eleven years,” LuAnn repeated, with a significant look in my direction. “So wouldn't you think Joe would at least have a clue—”

Mom cut her off with a sharp glance.

“But
Luisa's
never been here before, right?” I pointed out. “So how was I supposed to know she was Manuel's cousin?”

“You're right, Joe,” said Mom. “This is Luisa's first time with us. Victor started with us when Manuel was only five.”

Risking another outburst of ridicule, I asked, “Who's Victor?”

LuAnn sighed loudly, and Mom gave her a warning glance. “Victor is Manuel's father,” she answered. “He used to be crew boss.”

“So where is he?”

“He's in Mexico, too. He hurt his back picking apples on another job after he left here last year. María—that's his wife, Manuel's mother—had to stay home to take care of him.” Mom looked troubled. “It's been tough for them. Victor's injury is serious, and he has no health insurance. He may never work again.”

Mom stood up and began clearing the table as she talked. “We didn't know all this until Manuel showed up at the beginning of the season and asked your father if he could take his father's place as crew boss.”

“I didn't even have to think it over,” Dad said. “Manuel has been working since he was a little boy. I knew he'd do a good job, and he needs the extra money, now that he's supporting the whole family. There are two little brothers and a sister back in Mexico.”

“Luisa has three little sisters and a brother at home,” Meg said. “That's why they need money. But it's sad. She had to leave school 'cause she's the oldest.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “How old is she?”

“The same as you,” LuAnn said. “Fourteen. And Manuel's sixteen, same as me.”

Whoa. I was trying to take that in when Meg looked from LuAnn to me and said, “They seem older than you guys.”

Which was exactly what I'd been thinking, but hadn't wanted to say.

“Some children have to grow up very fast,” Mom said.

Dad said, “You've got to admire a young man Manuel's age who's shouldering the kind of responsibility he's got.”

I couldn't imagine being two years older than I was and taking care of my whole family, including my parents. And even though, like most kids, I complained about having to go to school, I wouldn't want to be forced to quit and go to work, as Manuel and Luisa had had to do. I planned to go to college someday and never do farm work again.

And okay, Manuel was doing a big job for a sixteen-year-old kid. But I thought I had been fairly heroic myself that afternoon, spraying the hornets and driving Luisa to safety and all, yet nobody had said a word to me about it. I'd heard about how great Mom was with first aid, and how brave Luisa was, and how responsible and mature Manuel was, but I wasn't worth mentioning.

At least, that was what my family, especially my father, seemed to think.

Luisa came back to work the next day, as she'd said she would. She was still a little swollen and blotchy-looking, but not too bad, and she acted perfectly normal. At least, I was pretty sure she did. I was almost afraid to look at her with Manuel hovering around all the time.

The aches in my body hadn't gone away; they might even have been worse than when I started. I looked for visible signs of the new muscles I could feel so acutely, but my arms and legs looked the same as ever. The good news was that I'd recovered from the sunburn, and my embarrassing pink-and-white stripes were turning a respectable tan.

We finished planting the south field by noon. I was mighty glad to see that job come to an end. After lunch, I jounced out to the new field in the back of the truck with everybody else, not knowing what we were going to do next, just feeling happy that I didn't have to spend the afternoon behind the stinking, roaring tractor.

In a neighboring field were rows and rows of tiny cabbage plants that had grown from seeds Manuel and the others had put in while I was still in school. Now those long rows of plants were up, and they had to be hoed and weeded by hand. I thought,
Weeding…hoeing…How bad can it be?

An hour later I knew exactly how bad it could be. The crew spread out, each of us taking a row. The idea was to move down the row doing two things at once, thinning and weeding. Cabbage plants are set real close together to start with. Then you have to go back and thin them, so there's room for them to spread out and grow big.

It sounds simple but, believe me, it's not. While removing the extra cabbage plants, you're also uprooting any weeds that have begun to grow. You have to move down the row quickly, sizing up which cabbage plants to leave and which ones to hack down with your hoe, and at the same time attack the weeds. The idea is to leave behind the sturdiest, strongest-looking cabbage plants, eighteen inches apart, surrounded by nothing but freshly turned soil.

The others moved along in a group, working at about the same pace, except for Rafael, who was always slower than everybody else but me. Their rows looked perfect, almost as if machines had cultivated them, although there were no machines that could do this work. It had to be done by hand. And some people's hands, I quickly realized, were way more skilled at it than others'.

I watched Manuel from the corner of my eye. The motion of his hoe looked smooth and effortless. He talked and joked and laughed as he moved speedily down the row. When I tried to keep up the same pace, I found it difficult to control my hoe. The minute I stopped paying close attention or tried to hurry, I got all messed up. I'd take a wild swing and chop off everything, including the cabbage plant I meant to leave. Then I'd try to replant it, and when that didn't look as if it was going to work, I tried to hide the evidence by kicking dirt over the mangled body, which only made me fall farther behind. A couple times, I was sure I'd come close to chopping off my foot. Dad, or somebody, kept those hoes sharp.

After a while, I felt a fierce hatred for cabbage plants. I wished a plague of rootworms and beetles upon them all. I felt like whacking every plant on the planet. The only thing that kept me from trying was knowing that if Dad inspected the field, I'd be in for it. I didn't want Manuel to see my screwups, either. I didn't want him coming over to teach me his fabulous technique. I'd figure it out myself or die trying, which was starting to seem more likely.

My back was already killing me. Blisters were forming on my palms and fingers. Manuel and the rest of the group were at the end of the row, having a drink of water and laughing at something. I was less than halfway down my row. I did my own little inspection, looking back at what I'd done. It wasn't pretty.

I was tempted to throw the hoe to the ground and stomp away. But where would I go? Home, to explain to Mom and Dad that I couldn't hack it, after all? To a phone to report my parents' cruel and unfair treatment of me? I was fourteen. So what? So was Luisa. This wasn't even against the law.

I kept hoeing.

When the day finally ended, all I could think about was eating a ton of food at dinner and falling asleep in front of the television set, and that's exactly what I did.

As the week went by, my hoeing technique gradually improved, and what Mom would call my “attitude” improved, also. It wasn't quite so hard to get out of bed in the morning, my muscles ached a little less every day, and I was beginning to feel more like part of the crew.

It turned out that three of the guys, Carlos, Jorge, and Gilberto, were also some kind of cousins to Manuel. Antonio, the old guy, was Jorge's father. That made him an uncle to Manuel and Luisa, I figured. David was a friend of the family, and Frank and Rafael came from the same village back in Mexico.

They all spoke some English. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was way better than my Spanish, and it was enough so we could talk and even joke around a little.

On Thursday during the morning break, I was leaning against the rear wheel of the truck, sipping a cup of coffee. I liked the idea of taking a “coffee break.” It sounded kind of cool, and it made me feel older, but I was still trying to figure out why everybody loved the stuff so much. The only way I could even pretend to like it was to disguise the taste as much as possible with lots of milk and sugar.

David slid down next to me on the ground with a sigh of contentment. He slurped from his own cup—black, no milk or sugar. Yuck. Watching him move so gracefully with just one arm, I decided to ask him to tell me the story. It made me feel kind of sick. He'd had an accident, the kind of thing that happened on farms all the time, the kind of thing Mom worried about every day.

Ten years before, he'd been loading a grain silo when his shirtsleeve got caught in the auger. Before anyone could turn the machine off, half his arm had been pulled in and cut off by the auger's blades.

When he finished the story, he crossed himself, saying, “
Gracias a Dios
, I was lucky.”

I nearly choked on my coffee at that. “
Lucky?
” I repeated.

He shrugged. “What if there had been no one there to turn off the engine?”

I shook my head in admiration. I wanted to tell him I thought it was amazing that he was still working and that he was so cheerful and all, but I would have felt embarrassed. Instead, I made a joke. “You work twice as hard as Mula over there, and he's got two arms!”

David exploded with laughter at that, and hollered something in Spanish to Rafael. Making an exaggerated expression of surprised innocence, Rafael answered, but whatever he said was greeted by hoots and jeers from the rest of the crew. In the end, Rafael gave in and laughed, too.

I hoped he wouldn't take my joke seriously or hold it against me, and he didn't seem to. Later that afternoon, I heard him call, “Hey, Little Boss!” It took me a second to realize he meant me. He waved me over to where he was standing and pointed to a big garter snake in the grass. After that, I was Little Boss, and I felt proud to have a nickname, too, just like one of the guys.

I would have liked to talk more to Luisa, but every time I tried, Manuel noticed and glared at me until I stopped. Other than that, I guess he treated me okay. He was kind of formal and polite when he spoke to me. It was starting to bug me, because he kidded around with everyone else. Maybe he was being careful because I was the boss's son. Maybe he wasn't supposed to let
any
boys talk to Luisa. Maybe he just didn't like me. I wished I knew.

I found myself watching him out of the corner of my eye as we worked. It amazed me the way the crew listened to him and did what he said. With the exception of Luisa, they were all older than he was, but they seemed to accept his authority without any resentment, even Antonio, who was a lot older. I wondered how Manuel did it, but I couldn't put my finger on the secret.

Anyway, without question, the best part of the week was payday. When we got back to the barn that Friday afternoon, Dad and Uncle Bud were there working on the busted sprayer.

“Hey there, Joe!” Uncle Bud called when he saw me.

I was always glad to see Uncle Bud. His wide, sunburned face was usually lit up with a toothy grin, and today was no exception. Unlike Dad, who took farm work pretty seriously, Uncle Bud seemed to let the worries about market prices, ornery weather, and broken-down machinery roll right off his back. Dad was always saying farming was the best way for a man to make a living, and I knew he believed it. But Uncle Bud actually acted as if he got a big kick out of every little thing he did.

“Your father told me you were out with the crew,” Uncle Bud said, standing up to greet me with a pat on the back. “How's it feel to be a working man?”

“Pretty good,” I said, smiling back at him. “Especially since it's payday.”

Uncle Bud whooped as if I'd said something hilarious. “You got that right, Joe,” he said. Then he fake-whispered, “You think your daddy's gonna pay me for all my work on this sprayer?” He laughed again, in answer to his own question. With a wink in my direction, he added, “He doesn't know it yet, but he's helping me get in my hay tomorrow.”

I grinned and nodded. That was the way it was. The uncles and Dad all helped one another out.

“Oh, by the way,” Uncle Bud continued, “I left something in the house for you from your Aunt Kay. She said to tell you she's sorry we had to miss your birthday. I told her I didn't think you'd say no to a gift just because it was a little late in coming.”

“Tell her thanks,” I said. “And thanks to you, too.”

Dad stood up then, taking a bunch of white envelopes out of his back pocket. He went out and handed them around to the crew, who were standing by the truck talking. I kind of hoped that when Dad gave me mine he'd clap his hand on my shoulder and say,
Nice work, son
or
Don't thank me. You earned it, Joe
.

Yeah, right.

Before I'd even taken the envelope from his hand, he'd turned away to talk to Manuel about the trouble they were having with the sprayer. Of course, Manuel went right over as if he knew exactly what to do.

But even that couldn't ruin the pleasure of ripping open my first pay envelope and pulling out the check made out to Joseph O. Pedersen in the amount of two hundred seventy-eight dollars and thirty-nine cents! I couldn't stop staring at it. It was the most money I'd ever held in my hand in my life, and it was mine. I'd earned it. Right at that moment, I almost
could
imagine being the head of a household and supporting a family. I was a breadwinner, man! It was a very cool feeling.

I looked up to see Jorge watching me with a wide grin. “You win lottery, Little Boss?”

“Not exactly,” I said, smiling back. “But payday
—es muy bueno!
” It was my first attempt at speaking any Spanish, and I hoped I was saying, “Payday is very good.”

“
¡Sí, es excelente!
” he replied.

I had no trouble understanding—or agreeing with—that. He added something else, which I didn't catch. It made me wish I could communicate a little better. I remembered I'd had a Spanish dictionary back in third grade, and I decided to see if I could find it. It would be fun to sprinkle some Spanish words casually into my conversation while we were working. Maybe I could make Luisa smile. Maybe even Manuel. That would be something.

I followed the driveway toward the house, sneaking peeks in the envelope as I walked. Mom and the girls were in the kitchen, and they all gathered around to look at my check. Mom, of course, had already seen it: she'd written it. But she oohed and aahed along with Meg. LuAnn was way too cool to ooh and aah, but I could tell she was impressed and even a little envious.

There was another envelope on the counter with my name on the front. I recognized Aunt Kay's thin, backslanted handwriting. Inside the card was a twenty-dollar bill.

Meg exclaimed, “Joe, you're rich!”

It almost felt true. But not rich enough for the Streaker, I reminded myself.

“I helped the crew to open up bank accounts, Joe, so they can save their money to take back to Mexico,” Mom said. “Would you like me to do the same for you?”

I thought about it. I hated the idea of giving up the check and letting it disappear into a bank. What if they lost it or something? That was stupid, probably; everybody used banks. It was most likely the safest thing to do.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Thanks.”

She showed me how to endorse the check—sign my name—on the back, and write “for deposit only” so nobody could cash it before it went into my account. My account. I liked the sound of it.

Uncle Arnie must have shown up at the barn after I left, because he and Uncle Bud and Dad all came through the door then. They stood around in the kitchen, talking and drinking beer, while Mom was fixing dinner.

Uncle Arnie was married to Dad's other sister, Mary. Mary and Kay looked so much alike they might have been twins, but Bud and Arnie were total opposites in the looks department. Where Bud was tall and red-faced and red-haired and kind of chubby, Arnie was small and wiry, with dark hair and deeply tanned skin. He was mostly a dairy farmer, instead of having crops, the way Dad and Bud did. He was quieter than Bud, but when he let loose with one of his loud, raucous laughs, you couldn't help but laugh along with him.

He wasn't laughing right then, though. Everybody looked pretty serious. I listened to find out why.

“I ran into Tom Matthews today,” Arnie was saying. Mr. Matthews was another farmer, who lived maybe a mile or so down the road. “He needs more workers now that he bought up the old Dey farm, and he's applied to build some new housing.”

Uncle Bud and Dad nodded, as if they knew about it, and Dad said, “I heard he's running into opposition from some of the neighbors.”

Mom looked up. “I hope we don't have the kind of trouble we had after the Williamson incident,” she said. “I'd hate for all that to get stirred up again.”

“Me, too,” Uncle Arnie agreed, “but Tom said the zoning board meeting got kind of ugly.”

“What do you mean, ugly?” I asked.

Uncle Arnie hesitated, looking from me to Mom, as if he wasn't sure whether or not to continue.

Mom sighed and said, “Joe's working with the crew now. He might as well be aware of the kinds of things that go on.”

“Well, Joe,” said Uncle Arnie, “you know how people can be. Some of the neighbors showed up at the meeting to say they didn't want more housing for Mexicans—or any other migrants, for that matter—built around here.”

“How come?”

Uncle Arnie shrugged and made a face. “They say it would bring down their property values.”

I thought about that. It sounded stupid to me. Where were the workers supposed to live, in town somewhere? That didn't make any sense.

“It's pure nonsense,” said Uncle Bud. “What they really mean is they just plain don't like having Mexicans around, but they can't stand up in a public meeting and say that.”

“What happened in Williamson?” I asked. “I don't remember anything.”

“Some drunken fool took a blind shot through the wall at a migrant camp and killed one of the workers in his sleep,” Mom answered. “After that, for a couple weeks, there were incidents of harassment all over this area—fights, nasty letters to the editor, that kind of thing. It died down after a while. But our workers were very nervous that summer. Remember, Jim?”

Dad nodded, his expression grim.

Uncle Bud, always ready to look at the cheerful side of a situation, said, “Well, let's hope people have wised up a little since then.”

I nodded. It was hard to picture something like that happening these days, especially in boring old Stanley, New York, where nothing
ever
happened.

Uncle Bud set down his empty beer bottle on the counter, thanked Mom, and said, “Well, I've got to be getting home. Kay'll have supper on the table.”

Uncle Arnie said he had to leave, too. Then he said, “Oops. I almost forgot again.” He went outside and returned with a wrapped present, which he handed to me with a sheepish expression. “Your Aunt Mary told me to give you this on your birthday, but somehow it never made it out of the truck.”

I opened the long, thin box, which held a $20 gift certificate to the pizza parlor.

After Uncle Arnie had left, I went up to my room to wait until dinner was ready. I looked around for my Spanish dictionary and phrase book, and finally found it in a box under the bed. It was in with a set of miniature Peter Rabbit books, some G.I. Joes, a bunch of little plastic soldiers, and a stuffed kangaroo that I used to drag everywhere I went when I was little. It was a pretty weird combination of stuff.

I looked through the book. A lot of the words came right back to me once I saw them written down with their meanings.

Buenas tardes, Señorita Luisa
, I practiced.
¿Cómo está?

Muy bien, gracias
.

Mucho gusto en conocerle
.

El gusto es mío
.

I sighed. It was pretty formal-sounding Spanish. No one on the crew talked like that. I pictured myself going up to Luisa and saying, “I am very glad to know you” or “The pleasure is mine.” She'd think I was nuts. The guys would probably fall out of the truck laughing.

I looked up something else.
Tu eres bonita. Tu eres muy bella
.

Forget it. I'd never in a million years be able to look a girl in the face and tell her she was pretty, no matter
what
language I used.

I imagined myself telling her not to worry, that I'd make sure no dumb rednecks would harass her or the crew while
I
was around, and had to laugh at how ridiculous it sounded.

To take my mind off Luisa, I counted my money in my head. Two hundred seventy-eight from my paycheck, plus the fifty bucks Mom and Dad gave me for my birthday, plus the twenty from Uncle Bud and Aunt Kay, minus ten for the movies and pizza, plus ten for my allowance equaled…three hundred forty-eight dollars!