Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (40 page)

Patricia and I were alone in the Harding House for two and a half months. And at least once a week a stranger would walk in looking for this Mexican or that–no one ever knocked. After a few weeks of that, I started locking the doors at night. Then they would sit in their cars and honk until someone came out.

“It’s a Mexican house,” said Chooey. He was on the phone from Mexico. “That’s how it is. They’re always open, and we just walk in.”

Two weeks later I forgot to lock the door, and in the middle of the night we woke to voices in the dining room.

I called out, “Who’s there?”

A man’s voice said something in Spanish. Then a woman asked, “Is Chooey here?”

“He won’t be back till the end of the week. Check back then.”

After a quick Spanish conversation, she said, “This is Martin. He lives here.”

For the past five years Martin had a room downstairs next to the dining room. Florescent stars were on the ceiling and a mirrored ball hung from the middle of it. Velvet paintings of nude women were on the walls with postcards of the Holy Mother and Jesus next to the door. He had black lights, a strobe light and a huge stereo system.

Martin had a wife and children in Mexico. He also had an American girlfriend, one who–sexually–was very vocal. And that night they made up for the time he’d been home.

Two days later, Chooey arrived with his brother Jose and longtime friend Pedro. Chooey had been a legal migrant for years. But his brother and Pedro had to sneak into the country. The people who smuggled them in were called “Coyotes.” It cost two thousand dollars apiece. That included the documents necessary to work here.

“They’ve all got papers.” Chris Watt said, “Green card, social security card, the whole bit. You can’t tell the fakes from the real ones. Hey, it’s a bargain for the Social Security Administration.”

I asked, “How’s that?”

“We deduct the taxes from their wages and send it in. But they aren’t citizens. So there’s no beneficiary. That’s a pretty sweet deal for Social Security. I’d like to know how much they bring in off bogus accounts every year. I bet it’s illegal immigrants that keep Social Security afloat.”

By March 1
^st
, six Mexicans had moved in. Among them was Chooey, his brother Jose and Pedro. We had become fond of Chooey before he left for Mexico, and I guess he must have spoken well of us to Jose and Pedro.
Right away they seemed eager to be our friends. Jose spoke a little English, and Pedro was learning. When Pedro spoke, he was so animated that if I just watched him, I usually got the idea. He was a lanky, comical character.

In Northwest New York, the end of February and early March was pruning time in the orchards. It took lots of hands, chain saws and loppers to prune more than 40,000 apple trees. That’s why the boys were back. They were out in the orchard shortly after sunrise, and usually home just before sunset. In the middle of the day, right at noon, they came in for lunch. It was always a big event, with homemade tortillas, rice, beans and some kind of meat with lots of peppers. All washed down with a few bottles of Bud Lite.

During the preparation and consumption of the meal, Martin’s sound system would rattle the windows to the tempo of Mexican tubas. It was always a festive affair with lots of chatter, laughter and practical jokes. Often they invited us to join them–sometimes we did.

It was that way in the evening, too. Food, frolic and fun. But not on March 19
^th
.

Upstairs we had a TV attached to an antenna that picked up a few Rochester and Buffalo channels. Downstairs, theirs was connected to a satellite dish tuned to Mexican stations. And from March 19
^th
and the next few days, all of us were glued to our televisions watching America invade Iraq. They saw it on Mexican TV and we, on American.

During those days, the weather was too bad for them to work in the orchard. On those days, meals continued to be made in the kitchen, but without the music or carrying on. And the beer still flowed, but it was all consumed in front of the TV.

“Why are they doing this?”

When Chooey was sober, his English was impeccable. But when he was drunk, like the night of March 20
^th
, he could be hard to understand. I asked, “What do you mean?”

“I don’t get it.” He was sitting on our floor, leaned against the wall with a Bud Lite in his hand. “Why is Bush doing this? Why is he bombing all those people?”

“Well–”

He interrupted me. “Those Iraqis didn’t knock down the buildings in New York. So why does he want to bomb ’em?”

Chooey took a swig from his bottle as I said, “They say it’s because Sadam has weapons of mass destruction.”

“So what? Bush has got ’em too. Nobody’s bombing him.”

Except for taking care of the petting-zoo animals, the boys took over our outside chores. That allowed us to concentrate on fixing the house. The hardest room was the kitchen. We replaced the ceiling, floor, and all but one wall. Patricia used ten cans of oven cleaner to un-crud the radiator. When I scrubbed behind it, the plaster fell down to reveal old red brick. It was part of the exterior wall from the original 1832 house.

I built simple sturdy counters with lots of shelves. We coated the brick behind the radiator with several layers of polyurethane, so it could be washed. On the radiator I built a steel shelf to set pans on. And in the middle of the new ceiling, I replaced the dangling bulb with a suitable kitchen light fixture.

What made the kitchen the hardest room to fix wasn’t the amount of work, it was the conditions under which we had to do it. Throughout the renovation, the boys still had to use it. So every day at noon, we’d move the stove and table in from the dining room where they were stored while we worked. After lunch, they’d help me lug them back out. Then at the end of the day, when they came in from the orchard, we’d set it all back in the kitchen for the evening meal. Replacing the kitchen floor was a real challenge.

By the end of March, the kitchen was done, and everyone was happy with it. It was clean and had lots of counter space, so making meals was much easier. We could tell the boys were proud of it by the way they showed it off to visitors.

A couple of weeks later, Patricia and I took the farm van and had a night out on the town with a nice dinner and a couple of toddies at a local lounge. Afterwards, when we pulled into the farm, our headlights shined on a severed deer leg in the yard. My wife said, “Chooey told me they might go hunting in the orchard this evening.”

When I opened the van door, I saw half a dozen deer legs beside the back steps. “Looks like they got more than one.”

Patricia walked in the house ahead of me. I had just latched the storm door when I heard her gasp. “Damn them!”

She screamed as she stomped toward me. “I could kill all of ‘em!”

“What’s wrong?”

My wife was in front of me shaking as she pointed toward the kitchen. “Go look.”

When I pushed the door open, I found a horrendous scene of carnage. Blood, guts and piles of meat were everywhere. Our pretty white and brown kitchen was awash with red. The boys had done some serious butchering–and serious drinking. Besides the usual plethora of empty Bud Lites, a couple of tequila bottles were laying on the floor.

“I’m not cleaning this up!” Patricia stomped past me into the kitchen. “Can you believe this? After all that work, and now look at it! Where is everybody?”

The TV was on in the living room. I walked in and found two Mexicans I didn’t know passed out on the sofa. Everyone else was in their bedrooms with the doors closed.

Patricia said, “It’s probably best I don’t see them right now.” As we started up the stairs to our room she growled, “I’d hate to go to prison for strangling a Mexican.”

Usually the boys were up and out in the orchard before we went downstairs in the morning. We couldn’t work on the house while they were there, so we waited until they were gone. We had a coffee pot in our room, and I had just turned it on when Patricia said, “I really dread going down there.”

“I heard them moving around early this morning. I think they’re gone. Want me to go down and check?”

“Would you?” She sat up and swung her legs from under the covers. “I don’t want to run into any of them right now. Make sure they’re all gone before I go down.”

When I stepped into the kitchen, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was spotless. Last night I didn’t see how it would ever be clean again. But there it was, in the morning sunlight, just as pretty as the day we completed it.

“So how was your night out on the town?”

Chooey walked in from the dining room holding a cup of coffee. I turned toward him and said, “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“This kitchen. Last night when we came home it was–”

“A real mess, right? We shot two deer yesterday. By the time we got them butchered, we were too tired to clean it up.”

“It looks great now.”

Chooey poured fresh coffee into his cup. “I told the guys last night we had to clean this up before we do anything else. I don’t want Patricia to kill me.”

The boys always treated Patricia with the utmost respect. Besides turning off the Playboy Channel when she walked in the room, if she and one of them were headed for the bathroom at the same time, they always insisted she go first. If one saw her with a bag of trash, they’d take it from her and carry it out. Even when they were drunk, nobody ever got out of line with Patricia.

Beyond respect, the boys really liked my wife. Mainly because she took the time to listen to their personal problems–especially those of romance. Even if they spoke very little English, she always made the effort to communicate with them. Many times she came into our room, flopped down in the easy chair and said, “I’m not sure what that was all about, but I know it’s not good.”

When they got pictures or video from home, right away they’d bring them upstairs to show us. I was welcome to look, but they
really
wanted my wife to see them. And in May, when four of them decided they wanted to bleach their hair blond, they came to Patricia. “I feel like a fraternity mother.”

This fraternity was not easy to get into–it could be a life or death proposition. An example of that was when the Border Patrol found fourteen illegal immigrants suffocated in a trailer in Texas. At the time, our boys were expecting two guys to show up, and they had not been heard from in a week and a half. The Coyotes had them, but what they did with them nobody knew. They weren’t just workers, these were family and friends. What if they were in that trailer?