In the mid-1930s, Mainwaring abandoned mainstream stories, with which he had had only limited success, in favor of mysteries. From 1936 to 1946, writing as Geoffrey Homes, he published a dozen first-rate novels set primarily in the valleys and foothills of north-central California and distinguished by fine dialogue and some of the most evocative descriptive writing to be found anywhere in the genre. He created three series detectives: newspaperman Robin Bishop, whose second case, The Doctor Died at Dusk (1936), concerns Central Valley labor strife; unconventional private eye Humphrey Campbell and his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan; and Mexican cop Jose Manuel Madero. The last and best Homes novel, Build My Gallows High (1946), a taut, hard-edged nonseries thriller, so firmly established Mainwaring in Hollywood (he had begun writing B movies in 1942) that he produced no more fiction during the last three decades of his life. It was filmed in 1947, from Mainwaring’s screenplay, as Out of the Past — one of the half-dozen best noir crime films.
B. P.
Fruit Tramp
(1934)
In July the fruit tramps came to Clovis. They put up tents in the eucalyptus grove along the track, and at night you could see them sitting around their little fires.
The Elbertas would be ripening when they drove in battered Fords and Chevrolets along the highway to the hills. Within a week a community would spring up in the grove to stay there until the last peach was in the sweat box and the last raisin had been hauled to the packing shed.
Every year or so, there was talk of turning the grove into a park, but no one did anything about it. Once in a while the townspeople sent Old Tim, the constable, over to make the fruit tramps clean up around the tents that looked like dirty bits of fungus growing against the tree trunks. Tim would hang about for a while talking to the children and telling the women to hang their washing so it could not be seen from the road.
“Them underdrawers now,” he would say. “They don’t look so good from John Good’s store. Better get ’em out of sight.” He would grumble a little and then go back to his chair on the porch of his office and sit there for the rest of the day, half asleep, his big hat pulled down over his eyes to keep out the glare of the sun, sucking at his dead pipe and shouting to the people he knew.
Farmers who needed help went to the grove and hired a family, children and all, paying the men so much a day to pick the fruit and the women and children a few cents a box for cutting peaches. Usually one of the little girls stayed at the camp to cook supper and have it ready when the family came back at dusk, and during the day in the fruit season you could see them bending over the pots or washing clothes or making miniature cities out of syrup cans and spools when they had nothing else to do.
For a while, during the War and right after it, fruit prices were good and the tramps made plenty of money. Six dollars a day the men were paid, and the women received as high as four or five cents a box. It wasn’t bad being a fruit tramp then.
But people in the cities stopped eating so many peaches and raisins. Prices went way down. The mortgage companies came, took the Lincolns and Cadillacs out of the barns, loaded the furniture the farmers had bought in good times into moving vans and drove away, and the banks foreclosed on the land and took over some of the farms.
Still the fruit tramps came every year when the Elbertas were turning yellow in the shiny leaves. Not so many came, but the grove was pretty well filled with men and women and children who drove along the highway leading to the hills and pitched their camps in the shade of the trees planted there by a man named Cole fifty years before.
When times were bad it wasn’t easy to make a living picking peaches and grapes, cutting the peaches in half, laying them in orderly rows on the trays. It was hard, unpleasant work. Out in the orchards the heat waves rose, and when you knelt on the earth to pick the fruit up the sand burned through your overalls. The cutting sheds offered little shelter from the sun, and the fuzz from the peaches crept up the women’s arms and down the necks of their dresses. They stood all day on the packed earth of the shed, picking the fruit up with their nimble fingers, jabbing the knife point into the soft flesh and, with a twist, halving the fruit.
The filled trays piled up, and before the stack was thirty high the shorter women and the little girls had to stand on boxes so they could reach. Usually the farmer’s youngest son rustled for the cutters, taking the empty boxes away, putting full ones in front of the women, pushing the cars loaded with trays of fruit into the sulphur houses which stood back of the sheds.
When the wind blew from the sulphur houses, the sheds were filled with yellow, choking smoke. In the early morning everyone would be cheerful and the girls would giggle when the rustler pushed against them and the women would shout at the men who drove up in the vineyard trucks. In the afternoon though everyone would be tired and cross and the rustler would growl at the women to hurry. By that time their skins would be covered with peach fuzz and would itch and burn and where they scratched themselves with sticky fingers a rash would break out.
Our family was so big that we didn’t have to hire any fruit tramps, but did the work ourselves. Sometimes when the crop was poor we went over to the Jap’s and helped him out. Other farmers thought father was lucky because he had so many children to do his work. He used to say, “Well, let them try to feed you for a while and then they’ll know who’s lucky.” Once he offered to trade ranches with John Cadwallader, who had one son. “I’ll take your boy. You take my mess of kids,” father said. “I’ll hire me some tramps to do the work. They feed themselves.”
When things got bad we didn’t feel it like the other farmers, or maybe it was because we hadn’t been used to anything much. It always took all the money father made to feed us, so we never bought a car or new furniture, and father said he couldn’t afford a mortgage.
The summer when prices were lowest didn’t affect us as it did the others. We were in a position to sit back and watch when the trouble with the fruit tramps started.
It was hot that year. There had been little rain and when June came the mountain tops were bare of snow. From the valley you could see little patches near the ragged crest of the ridge, like bits of paper scattered through the trees. The canals were dry and the river was so low we didn’t dare go swimming because they said we’d get typhoid fever. All night the engines throbbed, pulling the water from the deep cool sands, spilling it into the ditches, and sometimes late at night we would go over to the Jap’s and lie naked in the little pool near the pump, letting the cold water cover us. We had no pumping plant of our own, so the Jap gave us water when we needed it because we always helped him get his crop in when ours was poor.
The fruit tramps came again that year, more of them than ever. There were new faces in the grove. People who didn’t know what a raisin was put up tents and looked round for work. They came from farther away, from Los Angeles and San Francisco where things were bad too and work was hard to find. It was a cheap way to spend a summer, camped in a grove of eucalyptus trees rent free, and I suppose they figured the fruit had to be picked so the farmers would pay them to do it.