This I Know

by Eldonna Edwards

  “One: No Sundays.”

  I figured on that one.

  “Two: You tithe ten percent in the offering plate.”

  I forgot about that, but I should have seen it coming.

  “And three . . .”

  He takes another bite without finishing his sentence. Waiting is agony. Finally, he clears his throat.

  “Three: Stay away from the migrant workers. I don’t want you talking to them, not that they can speak English anyway. They’re dirty and they like white girls. Stay away from them, you hear?”

  I resist the urge to start singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” a Sunday school song with a chorus that goes, “Red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves them in his sight.” It’s the first time I realized that they left out brown.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” is all I say before clearing my plate.

  * * *

  At 6 a.m. Monday morning I slip into a pair of cutoffs, a sleeveless T-shirt, and my old tennies. I tie a red bandanna over my hair and tiptoe downstairs as quietly as I can. I grab the lunch I packed last night and head out the door with a banana to eat on the way. I hop on my bike, passing a group of white-coated workers walking toward the processing plant. By the time I reach the Coopmans’ driveway, the back of the flatbed is already full of people, most of them migrant workers. I recognize Doug Lewis and his sister Sally.

  I set down my bike and climb up next to them.

  “Hi, Grace,” they say.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Doug says something else just as the truck starts up, so I can’t hear him. Sally pulls thin strands of long, dark hair out from behind her ears self-consciously, but they poke through anyway. She looks at me and I smile at her as we bump along the driveway. The migrant workers say nothing, not one word. Our truck travels up Fourth Avenue and out Bing Street to the two-track dirt path leading to the orchards. When we reach the top of the hill the truck jerks to a stop. Doug hands me a bucket from a stack on the side of the truck.

  “Grab a harness, Grace. There’s never enough to go around so it’s first come, first serve.”

  I lift a burlap strap with buckles and hooks hanging off it from the pile and jump down from the end of the truck. Mr. Coopman points to a row and I follow Doug and Sally down a path between two lines of trees.

  “Look for a full one,” Doug says. “The trick is to find a tree with lots of clumps of cherries. Otherwise you’ll spend most of your day moving the ladder.”

  I watch him strap on his harness and hook his bucket on the front of it. I do the same with mine, but the pail hits my knees.

  “Here,” he says. “You need to adjust it.” He yanks on the back and the bucket slides up. I start to follow him to the tree he’s chosen. “No more than two to a tree. Sorry, Grace. You can work the one next to us if you want.”

  Doug and Sally begin plucking cherries from the bottom branches and dropping them into their buckets. The tree next to the one Doug has chosen is sparse with a few cherries hanging in scattered clumps. I venture farther down the row until I find a tree bursting with fruit and earning potential. Not to mention eating potential. This has got to be the best job ever.

  Every time I fill a bucket I carry it to the end of the row. One of the supervisors dumps it in a huge crate, then punches a card with my name on it. At the end of the week we’ll give the card to Mr. Coopman to tally up. It takes me about an hour to fill a bucket. This is because I have eaten nearly a quart and practiced spitting pits. I never knew cherries tasted so much better when you eat them straight off the tree. I do the math in my head and figure I can make about twenty-two dollars a week. That’s more money than I’ve ever had at one time.

  After dumping my third bucket at the truck, I climb the tree to get to the cherries near the top. Most everyone else uses a ladder, but I feel safer in the branches. From up here I can see the lake, nearly the whole town of Cherry Hill, and the railroad tracks running through the middle of it. Below me the migrant workers call out to one another. Their language comes out in a rush of syllables. I like the musical sound of it.

  I’m leaning out to the edge of a branch with my bucket nearly full, when a horn blares, nearly startling me out of the tree. Next thing I know, everybody floods out of the orchard and walks toward the truck because the Coopmans provide lemonade to go with your lunch.

  I sit down under a tree with Doug and Sally and pull out my egg salad sandwich.

  “How many so far?” Doug asks.

  “Four.” I take a bite of my sandwich, but I’m not very hungry. I may have eaten a few too many cherries.

  “That’s pretty good for your first day. I’m only one bucket ahead of you. I think you’re tied with Sally.”

  Sally nods as she goes back for a second glass of lemonade. She doesn’t talk much.

  “Say, you want to have a contest? See who can get the most buckets by the end of the week?”

  “What’s the winner get?” I ask.

  “How about an ice-cream cone from the Dairy Queen? Triple scoop.”

  “Dipped in chocolate?”

  “Deal!” he says.

  “Deal,” I say, even though the thought of eating anything else right now makes my stomach swirl.

  * * *

  By lunchtime on Wednesday I’m five buckets behind Doug. I hate the thought of giving up an hour’s work to him. Especially since he rubs it in every chance he gets.

  “Five and a half so far this morning,” he says as he shoves a handful of Fritos into his face.

  I get up and move farther down the row.

  “Hey, you’re not getting sore about losing, are you, Grace?”

  “No,” I call out behind me. “I just want to claim this other tree I saw earlier.”

  I lean back against the tree next to a family of migrant workers and unwrap my PJ sandwich. A Mexican woman with a baby in a sling on her back slathers a gooey mixture onto tortillas and hands them out to several children sitting patiently on a blanket. The older children watch the younger children while the parents and elder siblings work. Some of the babysitters are younger than the kids Joy sometimes babysits.

  One of the toddlers wanders closer to me and smiles. “Cabello rojo?” she says. I can tell it’s a question by the way her voice goes up at the end. I open my mind to find hers already open.

  “Would you like to touch it?” I ask it in English, holding a handful of my bushy red tresses out toward her. She toddles closer and I lean forward. She takes a couple more steps and gently runs her fingers through my hair. She squeals before running back toward the other children. The mother scolds the girl, but I shake my head and smile.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  She smiles back, throwing her hands up as if to say, “Kids!” She mumbles something and the next thing I know I’m surrounded by a slew of barefoot children, all taking turns touching my hair. They jump back at first, as if expecting red hair to be hot, then come back for another feel. I love being surrounded by so many beautiful children. I wonder if Mama felt this way with all of us scrambling for her attention.

  The woman calls out in Spanish and the children run back and lay down on blankets. She puts the smallest baby to her breast and sings softly. Despite the noisy trucks and forklifts, most of the children fall asleep within minutes. I rub my eyes and fight the urge to find a place on those blankets, but the sight of Doug heading back into the orchard forces me to my feet. This isn’t about ice cream anymore.

  When I finish the tree I started before lunch I move to the back of the orchard to look for another full one. I find a tree bursting with so many cherries that it’s more red than green. I charge up to it, claiming it as my own. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch a young Mexican man under the tree next to me work his fingers over a branch, cleaning the cherries off in one sweep. He catches me watching and grins. They like white girls. I quickly look away, but the urge to figure out how he picks so fast gets the best of me and I find myself studying the movements of his hands. He sets
his ladder against a branch closer to my tree and starts in on it. He’s holding his body away so I have a better view.

  “Would you like me to show you?” He says it in Spanish, but I hear him in English.

  “Sí,” I say, one of only two words I know in Spanish.

  He drops his hands and walks over to me. Putting his hands over and just above mine, he strips the cherries off at about half his normal speed. His fingers play over the branch like an angel plucking a harp.

  He backs up. “You try,” he says.

  I clean most of the cherries from the branch but get all the leaves with them. I pick them out of my bucket. We get yelled at for too many leaves.

  “No, no,” he says. “Feel. Pull only where there is light resistance. The cherries will come to you. The leaves want to stay behind.”

  I try again on a new branch. This time he puts his hands over mine and mingles our fingers together. I don’t feel scared at all. In fact, I like the way his hands feel over mine. They’re strong but small and delicate for a man’s hands. Much smaller than Daddy’s and gentle like rain as they flutter over the cherries.

  “Close your eyes,” he says. “Let your fingers decide when to pull.”

  I squeeze my eyes closed. He lifts his hands away and I let my fingers work along the branch, hearing only the dull thud of the cherries hitting my nearly full bucket. I open my eyes to find the branch cleaned of cherries and only one leaf in my bucket.

  The man grins and pats me on the shoulder. “Bueno!” he says.

  “Manuel?” a voice calls from the other end of the row.

  “Sí!” he calls back. “Aquí!”

  “Gracias, Manuel,” I say. The only other word I know in Spanish.

  “Have a good day, señorita.” He tips his straw hat, before jogging up the row.

  By the end of the day I’m only two buckets behind Doug and by the end of the week I’ve passed him by six.

  “You must have cheated,” he says when I show him my punch card. “You had that Mexican guy helping you.”

  “I picked every cherry myself,” I say. Doug knows I don’t lie.

  “Oh, all right. I guess there are worse things than getting beat by a girl.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Like marrying an ugly one.”

  We laugh together in the way you do when you’re so tired you could cry.

  19

  Daddy steps down from the pulpit and stands behind a table at the front of the sanctuary. A white cloth covers the table under shiny silver domes that hold the tiny communion glasses and little squares of bread. Daddy nods at the deacons. They walk down either side of the middle row of pews, passing the plate and the tray of tiny glasses while Daddy reads a passage from the Bible. The glasses have grape juice in them because drinking alcohol is a sin. Serving actual wine is another reason Daddy thinks the Catholics are wrong.

  Only people who have been baptized get to take part in the ritual. Mama holds a little glass in one hand and a square of bread in the other. I didn’t think she’d get out of bed this morning, let alone come to church, but she surprised us all. Maybe the new medicine is working. Hope and Joy each get the bread and juice, too. I once asked Daddy if the bread was really Jesus’s body and the juice his blood. He said no, it’s only symbolic. I was relieved to hear that. Once everyone is served, Daddy reads the next verse. “Take, eat: This is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

  Daddy pops the bread into his mouth first, then everyone else does the same. Joy turns to me and opens her mouth as she takes the bread, rolling her eyes like it’s chocolate fudge instead of stale bread. She chews slowly, then sticks out her tongue just to get my goat. I do my best to ignore her, but she knows I’m jealous.

  “After the same manner also He took the cup, saying: ‘This is my blood, drink it in remembrance of me.’”

  Everyone with a glass throws back their juice, then sets the tiny glass in a rack that hangs on the back of the pew in front of them. Clink, clunk, clink, clunk, rings all across the church.

  “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you honor the Lord’s death until his return.”

  Momma dabs at her lips with a hankie as Daddy walks down the aisle, praying, holding his Bible over his head. When he reaches our pew, Mama steps out and joins him at the back of the church to help greet parishioners after the service. Chastity and I set to collecting the glasses and putting them back in the silver container, which is our job. When we’ve collected them all we carry them down to the kitchen and leave them for the church ladies to wash later.

  “Let’s go home,” Chastity says. “I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I say. “I’m going to rinse these out so it will be easier for them to clean.”

  When I turn my back to her she runs off. I wait until her shoes clap clap clap across the tile floor to the carpeted stairs before lifting the lid from the bread. I dump the leftovers in an empty bread bag. I take the cover off the other serving piece that holds the tiny glasses. Each one sets in its own hole. Most of them are empty, but four or five unused ones are still full. I peek through the serving window to make sure nobody’s there before plucking one of the full ones and drinking it. Welch’s tastes way better than the watered-down off-brand that Daddy buys for home. I drink one more. Then the other three. I open the fridge and find the half-empty bottle of Welch’s concord grape juice on the rack and guzzle the whole thing. Just as I set it on the counter I hear him in the doorway.

  “Come to my office,” Daddy says.

  He motions for me to follow him. My heart is in my chest. I wait for him to move behind his desk filled with books, papers, and a picture of Mama from before they had kids. A huge map of the Middle East is pinned to the wall behind his desk. It’s marked with the journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land. A second smaller map shows the apostle Paul’s missionary journeys. We’re mostly not allowed in here so right away I know I’m in a heap of trouble.

  Daddy points to the steel folding chair in front of his desk. “Sit down.”

  “Daddy, I was thirsty . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. I was just . . . nothing.”

  He points to the chair again. The metal feels cold against my bare legs when I sit.

  “Grace, have you been feeding that old drunken hobo?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. The truth, Grace. Sheriff Conner and I had a little talk.”

  “I was, Daddy, but not anymore. He left last spring.”

  “Right about the same time as that poor Anderson girl disappeared. Do you have any idea the danger you put yourself in?”

  “But Lyle didn’t have anything to do with that! He’s a good person. I heard her grandma sent her to a special school for blind kids.”

  “Lyle Miller? Creeps like that get away with murder because they convince little girls that they’re sweet as honey. You should know better.”

  He opens a drawer and tosses an envelope into my lap. I hang my head, fingering the crisp paper.

  “Open it.”

  I tear open the envelope and immediately recognize the camp insignia for Camp Blessing. “Bible camp? The last week of summer? Daddy, no!”

  “This retreat is a chance for you to let the Lord work through you and recommit your life to Christ.”

  There it is, his true feelings, right here in the open like a big ugly rock. I’m an embarrassment to Daddy and this family. All I’ve ever wanted is for him to be proud of me, to smile down on me with that sweet grin he saves for Joy when she gets another A or for Chastity when she curtsies for company and for Hope when she rattles off a slew of Scripture verses. I could get all As, dress like a beauty queen, and memorize the entire New Testament and it wouldn’t matter. I don’t know why I keep aiming to prove myself worthy of his approval, but I can’t seem to stop trying. Maybe I’m just stubborn like Aunt Pearl says. She once told me I’d cut a hole in the wall before adm
itting it wasn’t a door after I ran into it.

  “But I am committed. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “I’ll believe it when your actions match your words. Now go help your sister get dinner on the table.”

  I run out of the office and smack dab into Harold Weaver, knocking a stack of hymnals out of his arms. I immediately start crying.

  “Whoa, what’s the hurry?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m such a klutz!”

  He draws me close in a hug. “It’s okay, honey. It was an accident. Don’t cry.”

  When I pull away and start to pick up the song books he shoos me away. “I’ve got it. You go on home.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, before running out the front doors of the church.

  * * *

  The following Saturday morning I find the old brown suitcase on the basement shelf above rows and rows of canned green and yellow string beans that Mama and Hope put up before Marilyn was born. I blow a layer of dust off the top and drag it upstairs to my room. Years of musty storage hits me in the face when I throw the suitcase on my bed and unsnap the tarnished latches. Borrowing a bottle of Chastity’s Jean Naté spray cologne, I baptize the suitcase thoroughly, hoping the citrus scent will hide its smelly secrets.

  It takes me less than fifteen minutes to fill the suitcase with dresses, shorts, tops, and one pair of patent leather shoes. In the back pocket goes my bathing suit, white cotton underwear, socks, and the bra that Aunt Pearl sent me for my birthday that I still don’t fill out. I stuff my diary into a zippered compartment on the inside of the suitcase along with my favorite pen, one that writes in three different colors depending upon which part of the cap you push. I love to write in green. It feels like words growing out of the paper.

  Maybe going away won’t be so bad, even if it’s for a week of Bible camp. Maybe when I get back Mama will be better. Maybe without having me around to remind her of Isaac will lessen her pain. It won’t lessen mine. Not having Mama as part of our family is like having the thread slip from the needle. She pulled us all into this world and we need her to keep us sewn together.