In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

by Jerry Apps

  “It's just awful,” she said between quiet sobs. “Just awful. I waited two years for Karl to come home, never went out, never even went to a movie, and when he came home I didn't know him. He was a different man. Not the Karl who climbed on the train and went off to war. War is hard on people. Very hard. I feel so sorry for him.”

  “Feeling sorry for him doesn't help,” Preacher said.

  “Still do, though. I still do.”

  The sound of a car door slamming stopped all activity in the pickle factory.

  “Looks like we got a visitor,” Agnes said. She quickly put away the cards and nickels while Blackie and Quarter Mile took apart their makeshift poker table. Preacher joined the others in the main room.

  Andy was working in the basement of the factory and had heard the car door slam.

  “Hello, Mr. Johnson,” he said as he walked out the basement door toward his boss.

  “Just call me J.W.,” the district manager said in an unusually friendly manner. “Just call me J.W. You ready for Jake's trucks when they come in? Should be here in a half hour or so.” Johnson was puffing on his pipe, which was almost always in his mouth.

  Andy didn't know what to make of J. W. Johnson. One minute he was growling at him; the next, he was all buddy-buddy and chatty. Andy had met a few people like this before, and he knew to be wary of them.

  “Come on up and meet the rest of the crew,” Andy said. Together they climbed the steps to the main floor of the pickle factory. “Folks, this is J. W. Johnson, the district manager for H. H. Harlow, and my boss. Let's see, yesterday you met Quarter Mile Sweet and Blackie Antonelli.”

  “Hi, boys,” Johnson said. Blackie expected some comment about his long hair but didn't hear it.

  “This is Pastor Arthur Ketchum,” Andy said. “He's working part-time for us, which means every day but Sunday.”

  “Always pleased to meet a man of the cloth,” Johnson said, shaking the preacher's hand.

  “And this is Agnes Swarsinski; she's been around here longer than I have. Nobody can spot a bad cucumber faster than Agnes.”

  “Glad to meet you, Agnes,” Johnson made a little bow as he took her hand. “Good to have somebody on the sorter who knows how to pick out the bad cukes.”

  Andy and Johnson walked across the floor to the little office, where Helen was busy at her desk, thumbing through the thick book of directions for salting cucumbers.

  “Helen, meet J. W. Johnson, our district manager.”

  “How do you do, sir,” Helen said. Her eyes were still a little red. She stood up to shake Johnson's hand.

  “Hear you're a wizard at figuring salt,” Johnson said.

  “I do my best,” she answered.

  “H. H. Harlow needs pretty little gals like you to brighten up the place. Glad you're part of the team. But what's a pretty gal like you doing figuring salt? Shouldn't you be home baking cookies?”

  Andy rolled his eyes and escorted Johnson out of the office.

  “See you got in a few cukes already,” Johnson said.

  “Yup, Patterson family out east of town has a half acre.”

  “Kind of a bother, ain't it, fussing with such a little amount?”

  “It's not a bother. Not a bother at all. Kind of like meeting all the people and their kids when they come by.”

  “All this is gonna change,” J. W. Johnson said. “It's all gonna...”

  A big red truck heavily loaded with sacks of cucumbers slowly moved down the drive toward the pickle factory, and Johnson did not finish his thought.

  7

  Isaac and Jake

  After driving home from the grist mill and unloading the cow feed in the feed room in the barn, Isaac went in the house, and he and Mary ate dinner. Their noon meal was always their biggest. Isaac couldn't understand why city folks wanted to call the noon meal lunch; for him lunch was something you ate after you finished playing cards at a neighbor's house or in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when relatives came calling.

  After dinner Isaac moved over the wooden rocking chair by the cook stove, which burned wood on one side and had four gas burners on the other. He picked up the Milwaukee Sentinel, something he did after both the noon and evening meals. By day's end he had read the paper quite thoroughly. During football season he especially enjoyed reading about the Green Bay Packers—a person had to keep track of the Packers or he'd be left out of a goodly part of the fall conversation at the grist mill, the cheese factory, the Link Lake Tap, or about anywhere else a bunch of farmers got together. Something about a small-town team up against the likes of New York and Baltimore and all those other big-city football teams caught his attention. Unfortunately, the 1954 Packers had stunk up the field with a 4-8 record—only the Baltimore Colts, with 3-9, were worse. “Coach Blackbourn's got to go,” Isaac said aloud after reading an article previewing the 1955 season.

  He also followed the Milwaukee Braves closely, and now he checked the baseball scores. The Braves’ new heavy hitter, Henry Aaron, who had joined the club in 1954, was batting over .300, and their pitcher, Warren Spahn, was one shifty thrower.

  Isaac read about their U.S. senator from Appleton, Joe McCarthy, who had his wings clipped by the Senate last year after he'd ranted about Communists being sprinkled throughout the government, Hollywood, and just about everywhere, to the point that Isaac wondered if half his neighbors might be Communists and just weren't telling anybody. The once-popular Wisconsin politician had become an embarrassment.

  He looked at the car ads, especially the new Ford Thunderbird, and thought he should stop at Link Lake Motors and at least have a look at one of these sleek new vehicles. He knew he'd never own one, though, because $2,995 was a pile of money to spend on a car, especially when his milk fetched only $3.50 for a hundred pounds. His fourteen cows, in total, gave about 450 pounds of milk a day during the summer, less in winter, so his milk checks for an entire year came to only about $4,000, and that had to cover all of his expenses.

  He read about a new theme park, “Disneyland,” that had just opened out in California. Sounded like a bigger version of the carnival that came to the Ames County Fair.

  Before Isaac got to the editorials, which he usually turned to last, his chin had dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. Accustomed to this everynoon occurrence, Mary took the crumpled paper from his lap and continued clearing the table.

  In a half hour or so, Isaac's eyes snapped open. “Think I'll pick the cucumbers this afternoon,” he said as he got up from the rocking chair. He pulled on his straw hat and headed outside.

  He searched for an old five-gallon pail he'd tucked away in the pump house, tossed it and a few gunnysacks in the back of the pickup, and bounced up the rutted field road to the cucumber patch. He parked in the shade of the white pine windbreak and started picking in the first row.

  He moved slowly down the row, trying to pick every cucumber that was at least an inch long. His picking style was to straddle the row, with the pail to the side. That way he could use both hands to move the vines and pull the spiny cucumbers loose. When he was a kid, he'd learned that when you had to do something over and over again—like milking cows by hand, hoeing, or picking potatoes or cucumbers—if you got into a rhythm the work became natural and easy. The better the rhythm, the easier the job. It was hard to explain to someone what a work rhythm was all about because it was more than making your hands and your legs and your head work together—that was part of it to be sure, but not all.

  Developing a rhythm for what some people might call boring work took the boring part out of it and elevated it to something that was hard to describe, but you knew it when it was happening. You knew when you had developed a rhythm for the work: you could feel it deep within you, and it felt good.

  Sometimes Isaac wanted to tell people that even with all the changes going on in farming, he still liked to do things the old way, like picking cucumbers by hand. He liked to be close to the land. Picking cucumbers made him feel a part of something bigge
r than himself, something difficult to explain to people. Isaac thought about his neighbor, Jake Stewart, and his thirty acres of cucumbers. You can't be close to the land when you farm a thousand acres and grow thirty acres of cucumbers, Isaac thought.

  At the end of the first row, Isaac stood up, stretched out his back, and glanced over to the house. He hadn't seen Jake Stewart's big Buick drive into his yard. Jake was lumbering toward the pickle patch, leaning forward as was his way of walking.

  “Howdy, Jake,” Isaac said as his old friend got closer.

  “Ain't you a little old to be pickin’ cukes?” Jake said by way of greeting.

  “Still kind of like doin’ it,” Isaac said. “Honest work.”

  “I keep tellin’ ya, you oughta expand your operation, say put in ten acres, maybe fifteen acres, and get some Mexicans to do the pickin’. Helluva lot easier to have Mexicans out there sweatin’ than you doin’ it. You know I got myself thirty acres of cukes now; them vines stretch out as far as you can see.”

  “I've seen your pickle fields, Jake. Look purty good.”

  “Yup, Mexicans are out there right now. Sight to see, all of them scattered all up and down the field. Little ones, big ones, young ones, old ones. Men, women, kids. They're all out there. Even got a pregnant woman out there pickin’. Everybody in the family ’cept a toddler. Little tyke is out there too, sittin’ in the shade and diggin’ in the dirt.

  “Bet you got a bunch of money stuck in those pickle fields.”

  “Yeah, I do. But the Harlow people have been helpful. Specially that J. W. Johnson fella. He's been out to the place at least a half-dozen times, checkin’ up on things, makin’ sure everything is going in the right direction. Got good help from the university in Madison, too. Sent out one of their cucumber men. All the guy does is study cucumbers. Pretty cushy job, but he had some good ideas about how much fertilizer I should be using, stuff like that.”

  “Hope it works out for you, Jake.” Isaac took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He'd heard all this before, but he was trying to be patient with his old friend.

  “It's the only way, Isaac. You either get big or you get out. Harlow Company says that. University people say that. These little pickle patches—no offense, Isaac—are a thing of the past. They're history.”

  “Let's hope not, Jake.”

  “You are one bullheaded old bastard, Isaac,” Jake said, smiling. “You got yourself stuck in yesterday. You'll sit here in the past, and the world is gonna march right past you, run right over you.”

  “Maybe so, Jake. Maybe so.” Isaac wished he could talk with his friend about the importance of the land, about how if you farmed a thousand acres it became impossible to take care of it right. “Jake, you ever hear the saying ‘the frog doesn't drink up the pond he lives in’?”

  “No, can't say that I have. But what's a frog pond got to do with the size of a pickle patch?” Jake was looking off in the distance as he spoke.

  “Everything,” Isaac said. “Just about everything.”

  “You goin’ senile on me, Isaac?” Jake turned to Isaac with a broad grin on his face.

  “When you got big debts, you expect the land to produce no matter what—and you start abusing it, using it up.”

  “You accusing me of abusing the land?” Jake asked. His smile was gone, and now he was bristling.

  “Just making a comment, that's all. If the shoe fits, wear it.”

  Both men stood quiet, staring down at the ground. Isaac wished he hadn't brought up the frog in the pond business. He had known Jake since they were both old enough to figure out who was who and what was what. They had gone through grade school and high school together. Their fathers had farmed as neighbors; so had their grandfathers. And they were still farming next to each other. But Jake had gotten caught up in the “you better get bigger” craze. Buy more land. Buy more tractors. Plant more corn. Plant more potatoes. And grow thirty acres of cucumbers. Whoever thought that anybody would grow thirty acres of cucumbers? One farmer with that many acres of cukes? It made no sense to Isaac.

  8

  Migrant Pickers

  Carlos Rodríguez guided his 1950 red Ford flatbed truck slowly down the trail that cut through one of Jake Stewart's big cucumber fields. Carlos, who had just turned forty-five, was stocky, and had a thick black mustache and a ready smile. Carlos had been born in Brownsville, Texas, and grew up traveling north each summer with his family and then returning to Texas for the winter. So he knew the migrant life.

  After he married, he continued coming north each summer to work in the cucumber fields. Mostly he enjoyed the life, seeing different parts of the country and especially being paid the money he and his wife and children made picking cucumbers in central Wisconsin. He wanted his children to have a good education and nice clothing and perhaps find less demanding work when they became adults. Working ten-hour days bending over a row of spiny green cucumbers was hard work, no denying it. Carlos, along with most migrant workers, believed strongly that with hard work you got ahead. The Rodríguez family included Carlos's obviously pregnant wife and their three sons, ages fourteen, twelve, and ten. Their three-year-old daughter played nearby while the rest of the family picked cucumbers.

  As Carlos drove along the field road watching his sons load bags of cucumbers, he remembered when he was their age. He had worked alongside his father, his brothers, and his sisters picking cherries in Door County, Wisconsin, and then helping with the cucumber harvest in the central part of the state. Cherry picking was easier than picking cucumbers. You didn't have to bend over to pull ripe red cherries from a tree. And cherries didn't stain your hands either. At least not the way those cucumbers did. Picking cucumbers crusted your fingers with a greenish brown stain that only Lava soap would remove, but never completely. By the end of the cucumber season, your fingers looked like the cucumbers you were picking, without the spines, of course.

  Carlos had a dream that he hadn't shared with anyone, not even his wife. He wanted to live in the north year-round, to find a job where he and his family didn't have to make the annual trek from Texas to the cucumber fields of central Wisconsin. Few people outside his family knew he was a good cook, but he often thought about opening a restaurant, perhaps in Willow River. The restaurant would serve authentic Mexican food. He knew he would have steady customers in the summer, and he also knew that once the locals became acquainted with his food, they would like it.

  Or, even better, he dreamed of working for one of the big pickle companies like H. J. Heinz; Libby, McNeil and Libby; or even the H. H. Harlow Company. He could serve as a connecting link between the farmers, the migrants, and the company. He knew how to talk to farmers, and even better, he knew how to get along with them. And he could solve many farmer–migrant problems when they erupted. Carlos had never heard of a former migrant working for one of these companies, so he didn't tell anyone about his dream. But that didn't keep him from thinking about it.

  On that same day, Dewey John, editor of the Link Lake Gazette, drove over to a Willow River migrant camp in eastern Ames County. He was gathering information for a story about migrant workers in the county. The Willow River–area cucumber growers had employed migrants for several years, and Jake Stewart's migrants were the first ones employed in western Ames County.

  Dewey John was tall, thin, balding, and wore thick glasses that often slid to the end of his oversized nose. He was never seen without his clipboard and papers on which he was constantly making notes. Dewey, a Wisconsin farm boy, had been twenty-eight years old when he drove his green 1949 Ford coupe into the Village of Link Lake on a June morning in 1951. He had been hired as the new editor of the paper, which meant being reporter and photographer and doing whatever else needed doing at this small paper that covered western Ames County. He had been writing for weekly newspapers since he graduated from the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism in 1945. The paper's owner had selected him because of his interest in agriculture and previous experience with country
newspapers.

  Before driving to the migrant camp, Dewey had done his homework. He learned that the migrants, whom everyone called “Mexicans,” were really from southern Texas. Most migrant families spent winters at their homes and worked the harvests in the north during the summer. He learned that they arrived in central Wisconsin in mid-July and helped harvest cucumbers until the end of the season, usually mid-September.

  As he pulled into the migrant camp, he saw that it consisted of several small tar-paper–covered buildings clustered at one end of a cornfield, with no shade anywhere. Weeds grew up around these shanties and pushed between the steps leading to the doors. Three outhouses stood behind them, and the pungent smell wafting from them hit Dewey when he stepped out of his car. A toddler played in a mud puddle just to the side of the rutted trail that led to the shacks. The little boy smiled at him when he walked past.

  The workers had stopped picking cucumbers for their noon break, and were sitting in the shade of the shacks, resting. Dewey found several who spoke English, but they didn't have much to say. He told them he was working on a story for the Link Lake Gazette about migrant workers.