“What do you mean nothing?” the hunchback yelled. “Ain’t we willing to pay you fifteen cents an hour and your women folks a cent a box for cutting?”
“You’re too kind.” The big man wasn’t smiling any more. “We won’t do it, so there’s no use talking about it.”
“By God! let’s run ’em out of town,” the hunchback said.
Hal grabbed Whitfield’s arm and told him to shut up. “You think it over,” he said to the big man. “We can’t pay no more and it ain’t because we don’t want to. We got to live too.”
“I know,” the big man said.
The crowd went back to the store. I was going to hang around but then I looked at the clock and remembered about the wagon. I hurried back to the blacksmith shop, hitched up the team, and drove on home. When I told father about the trouble at the grove he said I’d better keep away from the fruit tramps or I’d get hurt.
They didn’t give in and the farmers didn’t give in, so the Elbertas ripened on the trees, fell on the clods and rotted in the sun. Before the packing sheds, the empty refrigerator cars stood waiting and the crews of women who were to pack the peaches for shipment to the east were laid off. Four families got tired of going hungry and went to work on the Miller ranch. Because the other tramps were mad at them for not holding out, they moved their tents into the willows along Dry Creek.
There had been a couple of fist fights in Clovis already, and some of the tramps were threatening to dump out the fruit that lay on trays in Miller’s drying yard down by the river, or so the farmers said. A barn half filled with hay on the Thompson ranch caught fire and burned, and people round us blamed the tramps, though father was sure the Thompson boys had been smoking in the hay loft.
Some of the farmers wanted trouble but the rest were pretty upset about the whole business, feeling sorry for themselves and for the strikers. It wasn’t nice to go by the grove and see the women and kids sitting around looking like they needed something to eat. Four or five women in the town got groceries together and took them over to the camp. The big man thanked them and said they didn’t need charity, but when he wasn’t looking some of the others took the things the women brought. That’s what we heard from the farmers who stopped in at dusk to sit on the tank house steps and talk to father.
I saw the big man again two weeks after the strike started. Father and I were spreading trays in the drying yard on the sand, which was burning hot even though the sun was gone. After a while we knocked off to get a drink, and as I brought the cool water from the well I saw him coming through the orchard, carrying a shotgun.
Joe, standing on the porch with his face pressed against the screen, told father to look and pointed at the big man. “He’s going to dump our peaches out,” Joe whispered.
“Hush,” father said and when the man came across the yard, offered him the dipper filled with water.
The big man leaned his gun against the stairs and took the dipper.
“Any luck?” father asked.
The big man shook his head. “Thought I might get a rabbit. Didn’t see a single one.”
“We don’t eat rabbits round here this time of year,” father said. “They have sores on their necks.”
“They’d be better than nothing, at that.”
Father held out his hand. “My name’s Bigelow.”
“Mine’s Martin.”
“You don’t live around here.”
“No. I’m camped in the grove. One of the strikers.”
Joe had come out of the porch and stood near the pump. “Are you a Red?” he asked.
“Joe.” Father frowned at him.
“Do I look like it, son?” the big man asked and when father started to apologize, he laughed. “I know what they’ve been saying about us. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
Father rolled a cigarette and gave the papers and tobacco to Martin. “Sit on the steps a while.”
Martin sat down, poured the tobacco in a paper, made a cigarette.
“I’m neutral in this business,” father said. “I got so many kids I don’t hire any help. Couldn’t if I wanted to.”
“Do you blame us for holding out?”
“They can’t pay more.”
“Perhaps not. But it seems wrong to me to work for such a little bit. They’re taking advantage of our poverty.”
“You’ve never been a farmer, have you?”
“No. This is my first fling at it. Until now I worked in cities.”
“You don’t see things the way we do then,” father said.
“I guess not. I only know I won’t work for fifteen cents an hour, and as long as I can control the others, they won’t either.”
Father didn’t say anything more until mother told us supper was ready. “You might as well have supper with us, Mr. Martin.”
Martin stood up. “No thanks. They’re waiting for me in the grove.”
Mother came through the back door. “Please stay. I’ll fix some things for you to take home.”
“Thanks,” the big man said. “I couldn’t do that.” And he went away from us, down the lane to the bridge toward town. I watched him until his big form was out of sight.
Saturday morning, three weeks after the strike started, Jake Cole came over to borrow our hay wagon. One of his eyes was black and there was a bruise on his jaw.
“Celebrating?” father asked.
Jake shook his head. He was pretty serious. “We had a big fight in town last night. A bunch of us, maybe ten, went over to see if we couldn’t knock some sense into those guys.”
“Didn’t have much luck, did you?”
“We will,” Jake said.
“Let them alone,” father told him. “You’ll just get into trouble and your fruit will rot anyway.”
“We’re going to fix them to-night,” Jake said. “Last night we told ’em. I told that big guy, I said, ‘By God, either you pick our fruit for what we’ll pay you or get out of our town.’ ”
Father looked up from hooking the traces. “That sort of stuff gets you nowhere, Jake.”
“You talk like you was stringing along with them.” Jake sounded angry.
“Be yourself, Jake. I don’t want to see you get into trouble.”
“All the boys are going to be there. You better show up too.”
“Not me.”
“You getting yellow? Want us to think that?”
“I don’t care what you think,” father said. “Go haul your hay and cool off. If I didn’t know you so well I’d kick your pants for you.”
Jake drove off in our wagon. Father saw me standing around watching and told me to get the hell out in the fields and go to work. I took a shovel and ran out to where Joe was cutting a ditch across the lower end of the patch of Lovells. It would be three weeks yet before they were ripe, and father thought one last soaking would make them a lot bigger.
After supper father hitched the team to the buckboard and climbed to the seat. Joe and I asked if we could go along, but he said no, he had some business to attend to, and the best place for us was home. After he was out of sight we told mother we were going over to the Jap’s to swim and lit out on the short cut to Clovis.
We ran for a way, then Joe got out of breath and we lay down in a row of vines and looked at the moon coming up over the hills. It was pretty dark because there was only a piece of moon like a sickle you have just shined up on the grindstone hanging right back of Kings River canyon. The wind was soft and cool to our faces and it moved the arms of the grapevines a little, making a soft whispering sound as though it was trying to tell us something. Joe tugged at my arm. “Let’s hurry,” he said.