Around the first of July, when the Elbertas were coloring up enough so they could be shipped green, Aubrey Bell stopped by the bridge to talk to father.
“What you paying this year?” father asked.
“Don’t know. Last year we paid two bits an hour. We can’t now.”
“You’ll make more leaving the peaches on the trees,” father said.
“What you going to do?”
“We’ll get along,” father said, pointing to where we were sitting on the porch with mother stringing capri figs on wires. “I got all the help I need. All I got to do is feed ’em.”
“You’re lucky,” Aubrey said.
“Try it some time,” father said. “I’ll trade you the whole lot for a pair of mules.”
“You won’t trade me for a mule,” my sister Rose said.
“I couldn’t get a mule for you,” father said. “Who’d want you?”
“If we pay fifteen cents an hour, we can make a go of it,” Aubrey said. “I figure I can make a hundred and fifty bucks off my Elbertas if I pay that.”
“They won’t take it,” father said.
“Let ’em starve then.” Aubrey started his Ford and went away along the dusty, rutted road.
We heard no more about it for a week or so. Then father went in to town for some flour and rice and beans and talked for a long time to John Good. At dinner that night he told mother all the farmers had got together and decided to pay fifteen cents an hour to the pickers and a cent a box to the cutters.
“You’d make ten cents a day,” he told Rose.
“Not that much,” my brother Joe said. “Maybe eight.”
Rose threw a book at him and he grabbed her and they rolled over on the porch, almost upsetting the coal oil lamp.
“Stop it. I’ll lick you both,” mother said.
“That’s an awful little bit,” father said. “I’d hate to work for that.”
“I work for less,” mother said.
“Want to quit?”
“Sure,” mother said, but when we saw her face we knew she didn’t mean it.
“I’m sorry for the farmers,” father said. “But it’s their own fault. They bought a lot of junk when things were good. They put in electric lights and drove round in cars they couldn’t pay for. I guess they’ll always be like that though. I’m sorry for those tramps too. That isn’t such a nice way to live, camped in the center of town on the dirty ground with everybody looking at your washing hanging on the line, knowing how many holes there are in your undershirt, seeing you eat your dinner every night.”
“They don’t mind,” mother said.
“Some of them do. The new ones. There’s people camped in the grove who never was outside a city before. They’re going to make trouble, John says. Says some of them are Reds.”
“What’s Reds?” my sister Nell asked.
“Russians,” father said.
“But why Reds? Why not blues or pinks or yellows?” Nell asked.
“Call them anything you like,” father said. “I think it’s a lot of talk anyway. They don’t look bad to me. Only kind of pitiful and white-faced like they didn’t have enough to eat. I wanted to take the grub over and give it to them.”
“That would have been fine,” mother said. “Then you could have felt sorry for us.”
I took the wagon in to Clovis next day to have the blacksmith set the tires. I hung round the shop for a while, helping him with the forge, watching him as he spun the steel hoop on the anvil and hit it with his hammer while the sparks flew all around him and dropped in the inch-thick coat of coal dust on the floor. Then I went out into the sun and walked down the main street to John Good’s store.
A lot of farmers were hanging about outside, talking. After I listened for a time I found they were having trouble getting pickers. Some of the fruit tramps were willing to work for anything and they had gone out to the farms; but the rest said they’d rather starve than pick peaches for fifteen cents an hour.
Jake Cole came back from the grove pretty soon. “There’s a big guy over there who thinks he’s running things,” Jake said. “He’s getting the tramps all together and telling them not to work. He says they should get a living wage.”
“He’s a damn Communist,” Hal Bradley said.
There was a little hunchback in the crowd named Emory Whitfield who lived about a mile from our place. He got pretty excited and began waving his arms and swearing. “Those damn Rooshians,” he said, “they ought to go back to their own country. Who in hell do they think they are anyway?” When he talked he kept bobbing his head, and the hump on his back looked like something loose stuck inside of his blue work shirt. He hadn’t shaved for a long time and around his lips his red whiskers were brown from tobacco juice.
“He don’t look like a Rooshian to me,” Jake said. “He’s as white as I am.”
“You ain’t so white,” Hal said. “Maybe you would be if you went in the ditch once in a while.”
“You can’t tell about Communists by their looks,” a farmer I didn’t know said. “It’s the way they talk you can tell by.”
“Well, he’s always talking about a living wage,” Jake said.
“Then he’s a Red. They always talk like that,” the farmer said.
“Let’s all go over and talk to him,” Hal said. “Maybe if we put it up to him that we got to live too he’ll be reasonable.”
“Maybe he won’t. I already told him,” Jake said.
“It won’t do no hurt,” Hal said.
“Let’s run him out of town,” the hunchback said. “We been treating them too good, giving them a place to live and all. I been saying for years we shouldn’t let them live in the grove. Look how dirty they keep it.”
When I thought about the hunchback’s ranch and how dirty the house and yard and outhouses were, I snickered, but no one paid any attention to me. They went across the road and I followed, the hot dust burning my bare feet. I ran across quickly and stood in the shade as close as I could get to the tent where the big man they called a Communist lived. He was sitting on a lug box, cutting a chain out of a piece of white pine with a thin-bladed knife, but when he saw all the farmers he stood up. He was a big man with broad shoulders, bigger even than father, and through the faded blue shirt you could see the muscles on his arms like big lumps. His hair was as pale colored as straw and around his neck and ears it was ragged. Probably his wife cut his hair as mother did mine, with a pair of dull scissors.
Some of the other tramps left their tents and came over and stood behind the big man, and you could see he was different from them because his clothes were clean and his face and hands were clean and when he talked he spoke good English.
“Well, how about it?” Hal asked. “Jake here says you boys won’t work for less than two bits an hour.”
“That’s right,” the big man said.
“We can’t pay that,” Hal said and you could see he was trying to be nice about it. “We don’t make much off our farms. Hardly enough to pay the taxes. We can just get by if we pay fifteen cents.”
“Would you work for that?” the big man asked.
“If I was hungry I would,” Hal said.
“We aren’t that hungry,” the big man said.
Emory Whitfield pushed up to the front and waved his fist. “You will be before we get through with you,” he said.
“Shut up, Emory,” Hal said. “Let me do the talking. It won’t do no good to get tough about it.”
The big man smiled at Hal. “You seem reasonable. Now put yourself in our place. We have to eat too. I feel that it would be better not to work at all than to slave in this hot sun for nothing.”