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
shell 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," Dick 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," Dick 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 Japanese 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 Dick 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 cushiony 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, refreshing 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
passed 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 shiny 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 Dick 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.
[Illustration: 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 scrapbook?" 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.
Jimmie scowled at the sermon, but he went in and got his books,
and the two boys sat up against the shack wall till dark, Jimmie
telling stories to match the pictures. It was a week before they
could repeat that pleasant hour. Next day both were ill with the
fever that was sweeping the hop camp.
Next time the nurses came they had medicines and suggestions for
Grandma. They liked her, and looked smilingly at the clock and
approvingly at Carrie and at the covered garbage can and at the
food draped with mosquito netting.
"We're going to have to enforce those rules," they told Grandma.
"There wouldn't be half the sickness if everyone minded as you
do."
That evening people from all parts of the camp gathered to
discuss the renewed orders: Italians, Mexicans, Americans,
Indians.
"They says to my mother," a little Indian girl confided to
Rose-Ellen, "'You no cover up your grub, we throw him out!'" She
laughed into her hands as if it were a great joke.
"They do nothing but talk," said Angelina.
Next day the camp had a surprise. Along came the nurses and men
with badges to help them. Into shack after shack they went,
inspecting the food supplies. Rose-Ellen, staying home with sick
Jimmie, watched a nurse trot out of the Serafini shack, carrying
long loaves of bread and loops of sausage, alive with flies,
while Mrs. Serafini shouted wrathfully after her. Into the
garbage pail popped the bread and sausage and back to the shack
trotted the nurse for more.
That night the camp buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, with
threats of what the pickers would do to "them fresh nurses."
Grandpa, resting on his doorsill, said, "You just keep cool.
They got the law on their side; we couldn't do a thing. Besides,
if you'll hold your horses long enough to see this out, you may
find they're doing you a big kindness."
The people went on grumbling, but they covered their food, since
they must do so or lose it. And they had to admit that there was
much less sickness from that time on.
"Foolishness!" Mrs. Serafini persisted, unwilling to give in.
Yet Rose-Ellen, playing with Baby Pepe, discovered that her hot
old swaddlings had been taken off at last. Perhaps Mrs. Serafini
was learning something from the nurses after all.
"If you could show me the rest of my aflabet, Rose-Ellen," Jimmie
begged, "I could teach Pedro."
"But, goodness!" Rose-Ellen exclaimed. "You never would let us
teach you anything, Jimmie. What's happened to you?"
"Well, it's different. I got to keep ahead of Pedro," he
explained, and every night he learned a new lesson.
[Illustration: Rose-Ellen teaching Jimmie]
Of all the family, though, Jimmie was the only contented one.
Most of the trouble centered round Dick. He was fourteen now,
and not only his voice, but his way, was changing. Through the
day he picked hops, but when evening came, he was off and away.
"He's like the Irishman's flea," Grandma scolded, "and that gang
he's running with are young scalawags."
"Dick hasn't a lick of sense," Daddy agreed worriedly. "I'll have
to tan him, if he keeps on lighting out every night. That gang
set fire to a hop rack last week. They'll be getting into real
trouble."
"Dick thinks he's a man, now he's earning his share of the
living," Grandpa reminded them. "When I was his age I had chores
to keep me busy, and when you were his age you had gym, and the Y
swimming pool. Here there's nothing for the kids in the evening
except mischief."
"Well, then," Grandma suggested, "why don't we pull up stakes and
leave?"
"They don't like you to leave till harvest's over," Daddy said.
"But it would be great to get into apples in Washington, for
instance. We'll have to get the boss to cash our pay tickets
first."
There came the trouble. The tickets would be cashed when harvest
was done, not before. Grandma sagged when she heard. "I ain't
sick," she said, "but I'm played out. If we could get where it
was cooler and cleaner. . . ."
"Well, we haven't such a lot of pay checks left." Grandpa looked
at her anxiously. "Looks like, with prices at the company store
so high, if we stayed another month we'd owe them instead of
them owing us. We might cash our tickets in groceries and hop
along."
"Hop along is right," agreed Daddy. "Those tires were a poor buy.
We haven't money for tires and gas both."
"We'll go as fast as we can, and maybe we can get there before
the tires bust," said Grandpa, trying to be gay.
Jimmie didn't try. "I liked it here," he mumbled. "I bet Pedro'll
cry if we go away. He can print his first name now, but how's he
ever going to learn 'Serafini'?"