We were slowing down in Whittier, I guess a little before eight in the morning, when I noticed a bunch of men standing around on the sidewalk. They were in jeans and looked like Mexicans, but I knew they were guys hoping for work. I still had thirty or forty cents’ worth of ticket, but at the next stop I got out and went legging it back to the mob. I guess there were twenty or thirty of them, all talking Spanish, but I found out they’d come down from L.A. for lemon-picking, on a call from a state bureau. Pretty soon a door opened and we all went inside an office, where a tall guy with a hatchet face began talking in some kind of Spanish. I pushed up front but he kept passing me by, and the Mexicans had all been given cards with numbers, and were back outside, waiting for a truck to pick them up, before he turned to me. “What’s your name?”
“Jack Dillon.”
“You American?”
“Native.”
“What do you want?”
“Work.”
“This is lemons. You want that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Got to eat.”
“What else have you tried?”
“Fixing flats, washing cars, parking jalopies, sacking wheat, shoveling guano, blacksmithing drills, panhandling, and stealing. I’ve tried everything there is, from East to West, and North to South and back again, and if there’s a living in any one of them, I don’t know which one it is. If lemons are what I’ve got to pick, then I mean to get at it, but what you’ve got to do with what I’ve tried, I don’t exactly know.”
“You tried the CCC?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“They wouldn’t have me.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got to be certified. I won’t go home.”
“What other reason?”
“Commies.”
“Then O.K. Let’s talk. To me, an American’s as good as a wetback, who is a Mexican that we don’t know how he got here and we’re much too polite to ask, but if he happened accidentally on purpose to do it by swimming the Rio Grande River, his hindside would be a little wet.”
“One would think so.”
“Just the same, I don’t recommend this job to you.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You can’t stand it.”
“How do you know what I can stand?”
“All I know is what I found out from twenty years in the business and watching about eighteen hundred other Americans go down there and topple over in the heat and quit before lunchtime. A Mexican, he was born to heat, and before you or I or Columbo ever got here he was working in an Aztec chain gang with a tump line over his head and a whip over his back so a nice lemon grove 110 in the shade practically looks to him like a political job. If you want it, it’s yours, and here’s your identification. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Thanks. Sorry I blew my top.”
“That’s O.K. God knows what you’ll blow next.”
We rode down in a truck, all of us jammed so close together standing on each other’s feet I hated to think what would happen if we hit something. Two or three miles out of town we turned in between two concrete pillars and began running between miles and miles of orange groves and lemon groves and grapefruit groves, with concrete water pipes all around. Some of the fruit was in bloom, and some of it was ripe and some half ripe, there didn’t seem to be any rule about it. Then we came to the ranch houses, the main office and store and mess hall and commissary and bunkhouse and garage and employees’ houses, all painted white with green trim and looking like a dairy would look in the East, or maybe a horse farm in Kentucky. We piled out and went in the office and turned in our cards and got rings and nippers and chalk. The rings are made of heavy wire bent with a ring to measure lemons and a little one for a handle. The lemons are bigger than the ring, then O.K., cut them even if they’re green. In the packing house they’ll grade for storage and don’t have to be sold right away, as happens with tree-ripened fruit. If they go through the ring, let them hang. The nippers were for cutting. The chalk was to mark your number on your boxes. That stuff they issue to you when you come in and take up when you go. On lunch boxes, you were supposed to bring your own, and Mr. Holtz, the super, seemed annoyed that I didn’t have any, though it seemed to help that I had a canteen. He asked me some questions, and then, after he sent the others off to work in the truck, took me over to the company store, fixed me up with a box, and said I’d better take something to eat with me, or I might get a little weak before night. I took a can of beans, and he was surprised I could pay and he didn’t have to write me an order. Then he took me to the bunkhouse, assigned me a bunk, and said I’d do better if I shed all my clothes except the khakis, undershirt, and hat. I changed, and while he wasn’t looking smelled the blankets. They smelled like hay, and were clean. I made up my mind that short of falling dead I’d have that bunk. We went to the trees in his car, and on the way passed the jalopies of the fruit tramps, with tents put up beside them, that stunk so bad I was glad when we were by. Now they’re called Okies and Arkies and Louies, as they’ve been written up and it has been discovered what wonderful characters they’ve got, but then they were just fruit tramps, whole families of men, women, and children that travel around, and pick fruit and fight and stink. “Just what is the system here, Mr. Holtz? I mean, where do I eat, where do I bathe, how does it work? I’m a little new, and I’d like to know.”
So he explained about the mess hall and how I could cook my own stuff, with the pots there in the kitchen, and about the bathhouse and the rest of it. Now, a ranch has a cook and the pickers board with him, but at that time they were on their own, with three or four splitting it up in a cooking team. “And what do I get for all this?”
“The pay is ten cents a box, if you work by the box, or thirty cents an hour, if you want it that way, plus four cents a box.”
“Which pays best?”
“By the box, if you can pick.”
“Any great trick to it?”
“Well, it’s pretty hard, for a beginner, and there’s quite a few tricks to it. If I were you, to start, I’d try the hourly rate. We don’t expect too much, the first day or two, and if you don’t last, at least you have something in your pocket when you leave.”
“Do many Americans last?”
“Except for the fruit tramps, practically none.”
I’ve played football games till I thought I’d drop, I’ve hung on to freights till my hands were numb, I’ve taken my share on the chin. But for that kind of stuff, that day picking lemons, on the Green Hills Ranch, Whittier, California, topped anything I ever saw or hope to see. You stand on a stepladder that you move from tree to tree, with a pouch slung under one arm, your ring in one hand, your nippers in the other, and pick fruit. Where you first feel it is your back, from the reaching and being off balance all the time. Next you get it in your arms. In boxing, you have to shoot your punches straight instead of swinging them, or the other guy will lay all over your wrists with his elbows and make you arm-weary. That’s how it is reaching for those lemons. They’re off to one side, they’re over your head, they’re under your knees, they’re any place but straight in front, easy to your hands, so you can size them and cut them and pouch them without any work. At last you get it in the legs, from the strain, heavy aching pains that start back of your thighs and creep down past your knees and into your heels. Long before lunch I was so far gone I thought I’d pass out, and wondered how the women pickers, the fruit tramps’ wives, could stand it like they did. Then pretty soon a guy passed out, right on top of his ladder. First he was leaning over backwards, reaching for fruit, and then he was leaning too far. It crossed my mind, why didn’t he throw out his leg, to catch himself? Then he hit, flat. A girl screamed and scrambled down her ladder. Then she fell. Then a dozen people were around them yelling for a truck. It backed up and took them aboard. Then it was lunchtime and I opened my beans, but by the time I got my back straightened up so I could eat somebody said:
Ole.
How the afternoon went I can’t tell you, except now and then I’d get a box full, and carry it to the end of the row, and start back, and a Mexican would yell something at me in Spanish, and I’d go back and mark my number on it, in chalk. After a while, off in the trees, I kept hearing a motor, where somebody was trying to start it, and it would cough and die. Then there’d be an argument in Spanish and another whine from the starter and another cough. At last I couldn’t stand it any more and went over there. I thought it was the fuel pump, and sure enough, wrapped around it was a wad of rag they’d used to wipe it off with, just frazzed threads but enough to foul it. I pulled them out, had them start it, and it went. I went back to my ladder. At least that was one less thing to go crazy about.
At last it came time to quit. I rode back with a couple dozen Mexicans, went in the store, bought some canned stuff and Nescafe, and went to the mess-hall kitchen. I heated it up, whatever it was, and ate it. Then I went to the bathhouse and showered. Then I went to the bunkhouse, took off my clothes, and at last stretched out on my bunk. I had it all to myself, as I’d had the kitchen, because the Mexicans were all outside, laughing and smoking and talking, and hadn’t even thought about eating yet, let alone sleeping. I had my mind on one thing, and that was sleep. Inside me were twitches, jerks, and hysteria, all trying to break loose, but I fought them back, and was just getting quiet when three Mexicans came in with Holtz and began jabbering in Spanish. Then they came over. Holtz said: “What’s this about that spray?”
“What spray?”
“That you fixed.”
“I thought it was a fire boat.”
“What ailed it?”
“Fuel pump. Tell them next time they wipe it off use something that won’t fall apart in a bunch of ravelings like an old flour bag.”
“You understand machinery?”
“Little bit.”
“You want a job? A regular job?”
“Yeah. What is it?”
“Tower man on that spray. Tower man is foreman of the gang, three men and yourself. These boys, they kind of went for the way you helped them out. If you want to try it, it’s sixty cents an hour, start tomorrow morning.”
“If you’ve got water, oil, and gas, I’ll make it go.”
“Then O.K. And one other thing.”
“Which is?”
“You stuck. That impressed me.”
I slept for a month. On the food, it turned out I didn’t have to cook it, as tower man was a company job, and I could board with Mrs. Emory, wife of the irrigation boss, who had one of the cottages beyond the ravine, two or three hundred yards from the fruit tramps’ camp. She was expecting another addition to the family, so she was glad to make some extra cash, and fixed my lunch box and let me eat the other meals with the family. When I came in from work I’d shower, dress, and go to supper. Then I’d go back to the bunkhouse and go to bed. By that time the Mexicans would be hooking it up with phonograph, radio, guitar, or whatever they had. They’re the noisiest breed of man on earth, but I slept through it like I was doped. Then after a while I didn’t sleep so long. I’d wake up around four or five, with everything dark out there, or maybe the moon still shining, and the birds warbling in the trees, like they do all night in California, and begin to think.
I’d think about my father, and try to remember what he’d done for me, and forget the other things, so I wouldn’t feel so bitter. I’d think about my aunts, and how silly they were, and want to laugh and want to cry. I’d think about my mother, the one time I saw her, and about Miss Eleanor, and how proud she’d been of me for beating up the organist. It seemed funny anybody’d ever been proud of me. I thought about Easton, and she seemed a million miles away. I thought about Margaret, and the miserable way I’d treated her. I thought about Helen, and that was just a stab through my heart. And down under it all I kept thinking about this thing I’d lost, that Buck had given his life for, and kept wondering if I’d ever get it back.
T
HE FRIDAY BEFORE LABOR
Day I got paid, quite a lot for a ranch hand, as I’d made extra by working three or four Sundays getting Holtz’s trucks in shape, and that night I went in to Whittier and got stuff I needed, shirts and things like that. Next day they didn’t work, and I lay around and read magazines. Then after lunch I thought if I didn’t go somewhere I’d go nuts and around one o’clock I started out. I hitched a ride to 101, and a couple of hundred yards from our entrance was a bus stop. I walked down there and stood around watching people buy fruit from a little stand off to one side. Pretty soon here came a guy with a box of tomatoes, staggering toward a coupe that was standing there. He was a big guy, burned brown as terra-cotta pipe, with kind of a twinkle in his eye, like carrying tomatoes wasn’t exactly in his line, but he’d do the best he could with it as long as he had them. He had trouble with the door, and I yanked it open and slipped inside and took his box and shoved it up on the ledge behind the seat so it wouldn’t fall but at the same time he’d have plenty of room. “Well, thanks, that helps a lot.”
“Kind of left-handed, loading stuff in a car.”
“Give you a lift, maybe?”
“Well—depends on which way you’re going.” It depended on which way I was going too, but that was something I hadn’t got around to yet. But I heard my mouth tell him: “I’m headed for the border.”
“Oh—Tia Juana?”
“I believe they call it that.”
“In that case, if you want to ride with me over to 101, I think you’d do better on the busses than here. I mean, over there, there are more of them. You got to get to San Diego first anyhow, and the through cars all go down the coast, or anyway most of them do. And in Long Beach you’ll have more luck.”
“Isn’t this 101?”
“The other’s alternate.”
“You got two?”
“California. We do it big.”
He grinned and I laughed and he climbed in and we started. As we rode he talked. He’d been over to Whittier, he said, to arrange with the photographer to be at his church the next night, to take pictures of the surprise party they were giving the rector in celebration of his tenth anniversary. He didn’t hide it any he was annoyed with the rest of them for not postponing it a week on account of the Labor Day week end. “I have charge of the music, you see, and what they don’t realize is that all summer I’ve been running with pick-up singers, kids and visiting firemen and whoever I could find, while our regular choir members are away to the mountains or some place and nobody due back till next week. The trouble I’ve had to round them up I’d hate to tell you.”