In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

by Jerry Apps

  The migrants lived in these little buildings, sometimes four or five or more in one room, where they cooked and slept with no privacy whatsoever. One woman, dark-haired, friendly, and a little more talkative, upon hearing Dewey was a newspaperman, invited him inside for a look around. The building, obviously hastily constructed, had a door that didn't close completely and one cracked window that didn't open; the air inside was stifling. She said she lived in this one room with her husband and four kids. It was clean and tidy but so cramped he didn't see how they could manage. She said he could take some pictures if he wanted to, as long as no member of her family appeared in any of them.

  Dewey talked to the owner of the farm, Fred Ulrich. Ulrich huffed on about how these migrants really liked where they stayed, never complained, and worked hard for him. “Don't know what I'd do without them,” Ulrich said. “Nobody can pick cucumbers like these Mexicans.”

  He wondered if there was more to the story that neither side was sharing. He decided that since Jake Stewart now had migrants, he could talk with him and maybe learn a little more. He headed over to Jake Stewart's farm. As he drove he thought about what he had seen. It seemed Fred Ulrich was taking advantage of his workers. However, none of the migrants he talked with complained; they seemed happy to work for Ulrich.

  Jesús Moreno, whom Carlos had recruited from Brownsville, had come north with the Rodríguez family. Jesús helped Carlos's oldest son hoist brown burlap bags of cucumbers onto the truck while the other two boys arranged the bags on the truck bed. Jesús was tall and thin, in his twenties, wore a wide-brimmed straw cowboy hat, and had hair as black as a moonless night. He had dark, cold eyes that could stare right through you. He had but one reason for coming north: the money. He hated the living conditions, didn't like the north, detested the way that some northern people talked to him, and couldn't wait to travel back to Texas. But money was a strong attraction, and he knew that the harder he worked the more money he would earn.

  If the crop was good, the weather held, and the prices stayed up—all big ifs—Jesús could earn as much as thirty or more dollars a day. No work in his hometown in Texas would come close to bringing in that kind of money. So he worked hard and kept his anger to himself. Carlos would keep a portion of Jesús's earnings for transporting him to Wisconsin and for finding work and housing for him—Jesús had agreed to this arrangement before he agreed to come.

  For the first picking of the season, the farm owner gave the migrants all of the money for the cucumbers. This first picking was difficult because the migrants were expected to train the cucumber vines—steer the plant runners back into the rows, which would make succeeding pickings easier.

  Carlos and his family had been picking since daybreak, when the dew was still on the vines. The moisture wet their pants and arms as they worked their way down the long rows, first filling pails and then dumping the cucumbers into burlap bags. The bags were soon lined up across the field, one after the other.

  Honeybees buzzed everywhere, visiting the deep-yellow cucumber blossoms in search of nectar. “The better the crop of bees, the better the crop of cucumbers,” J. W. Johnson had said when he visited the field and noted all the bees working. The pickers and the bees ignored each other. The bees busily collected nectar; the migrants, cucumbers. The bees stung few cucumber pickers, unless a picker accidentally touched one. “Leave them bees alone, and they'll leave you alone,” Johnson had warned.

  Mosquitoes, however, bit the pickers unmercifully, especially on hot, humid days with no breeze. The cucumber rows at the edges of the fields were strung out along thick vegetation where the mosquitoes hid. As the day warmed and a little breeze came up, the mosquitoes disappeared, but then the hot summer sun became the enemy. It was a paradox; the cucumbers needed the sun to grow well, but picking them on sunny days, especially at midday, was a miserable experience.

  In midmorning Jake Stewart stopped by the cucumber fields. He walked over to Carlos, busy picking on one of the long rows.

  “Carlos,” Jake said to get his attention.

  “Sí, Señor Jake.”

  “Could you call your family and Jesús together so I could have a word with them?” Jake carried a little book in his hand. It was a Berlitz English-to-Spanish dictionary. While everyone was gathering around him, he paged through it until he found the page he was looking for.

  Everyone stood around Jake, wondering what the owner of these vast cucumber fields wanted.

  Jake bent over and picked a couple of little cucumbers off the vine in front of him, the size that would be graded number one.

  “I want you to...,”he hesitated and glanced at the little dictionary where he had underlined the appropriate words, which he badly mangled when he spoke them, “Escoja los pequeños pepinos.”

  The group stared at him with no response.

  “Why don't you just say, ‘Be sure to pick the little pickles,’” Carlos said.

  “Oh, sure,” Jake said surprised. “Yeah, pick the little ones, the money is in the little cukes. Pick the little ones. Ones like these. He held up the two little cucumbers he had in his hand.

  “Sí,” said Jesús. “We know to peek the leetle peekles. Carlos told us.”

  “Oh, good,” said Jake. “Good, good.” He shoved the little dictionary into his back pocket.

  “That's all. That's all I wanted,” he said.

  “Thank you, Señor Jake,” Carlos said, motioning everyone back to work. They were all smiling as they resumed picking and Jake got back in his truck and drove away. Jesús was muttering under his breath in Spanish, “Horse's ass, that Señor Jake, trying to speak Spanish.” Carlos didn't hear Jesús; he was pleased when people tried to speak his native tongue.

  As the morning sun grew hotter, the vines dried and sweat poured down the faces of the migrant pickers, stinging their eyes and soaking their shirts. But not one of them complained, even though the work was hard and the hours long.

  Carlos picked on a row near where Jesús was working. He didn't know much about Jesús Moreno. He didn't know that last summer Jesús had come to Wisconsin with a big crew consisting of several families and single men. They had worked the cucumber fields in nearby Portage County. One day, a fellow migrant accused Jesús of claiming more sacks of cucumbers than he had picked. A fight quickly started, knives flashed in the sun, and before the boss could put a stop to it, blood poured from the side of the other man. The Portage County sheriff came by but made no arrests. None of the pickers claimed to have seen anything—they were all busy picking cucumbers. What the sheriff had was Jesús and the wounded migrant, each claiming the other was at fault. Finally, he told the migrant boss to keep his men from killing each other, and that was the last of it. The wounded man had spent several days recovering in a Stevens Point hospital.

  What Carlos did know was that Jesús always carried a sharp folding knife in his pocket, which wasn't that unusual. And he also knew that he was a loner. Whenever the family had stopped along the way when they were driving north, Jesús sat off by himself, saying little, opening and closing his knife or just staring off into space. But he was a good worker; he filled as many sacks with cucumbers as did Carlos.

  Later that afternoon, Carlos slowly drove his truck across the cucumber field as the young men loaded burlap bags filled with cucumbers. María and their little girl walked to their living quarters. Before the season, Jake Stewart had cleaned out a shed that had been used for storage. He dragged out some old horse-drawn implements—a one-horse cultivator, a walking plow—parts from an old grain binder, and a hunk of canvas that mice had chewed big holes in. He dumped the entire lot behind the shed, swept down the cobwebs, cleaned the dirt and grime as best he could from the concrete floor, and declared it livable.

  “They don't need much for these few weeks in the summer,” Jake had answered when his daughter, Amy, said the shed didn't look like a place where people could live.

  He had found some old beds and mattresses, bought a secondhand kerosene st
ove, and set up a makeshift sink with a pipe that spilled outside on the ground. A few yards away stood an old outhouse that Jake had abandoned when the Stewarts got indoor plumbing a year ago.

  When the Rodríguezes had arrived with an extra young man, Jake swept out the brooder house for him, a little building he had once used to raise baby chicks. There was a mouse hole in one corner of the building, and the wooden door had a missing board. Jake dragged in an old canvas cot he'd gotten as army surplus. When he finished cleaning, he stood back, quite proud of the accommodations he had prepared for his first-ever crew of cucumber pickers.

  He had shown the facilities to J. W. Johnson, who had said, “Looks purty good to me. Yup, I think your Mexicans will be right comfortable. Don't want to treat ’em too good, you know. Harlow folks tell me you gotta keep ’em in their place.”

  Dewey John arrived at Jake Stewart's place in time to see the migrants loading the truck. “Mind if I talk to them?” He had asked Jake.

  “Nah, go right ahead. But don't get in their way. They got work to do. Got at least a couple loads of cukes to haul to the pickle factory ’fore it gets dark,” Jake said.

  “Hello,” Carlos said, when he saw the man with a clipboard approaching. Carlos stopped his truck.

  “I'm with the local newspaper,” Dewey said. “May I ask you some questions?”

  “Sí,” Carlos answered.

  Carlos and Dewey chatted for a few minutes, as the latter gathered more information for his Ames County migrant worker story. The Rodríguez boys gathered around to listen in, but not Jesús Moreno. He said something to Carlos in Spanish and began walking to the far end of the field.

  It was early evening when the men had the truck fully loaded; Jesús and the Rodríguez boys hopped on the back, on top of the cucumber sacks, and Carlos slowly drove back across the field. He turned onto the dirt road that trailed by the Stewart farm, shifted gears as he picked up speed, and headed toward Link Lake and the pickle factory. Jake had given him careful directions on how to find it.

  Heads turned as the truck drove by farmsteads on its way into town.

  “Wonder who that is, and what he's haulin’?”

  “Guys on that truck don't look like they're from around here.”

  “Kinda looks like it might be bags of cucumbers on that truck, but where in God's creation did they find a whole truckload?”

  Carlos slowed the truck and turned into the drive that led to the pickle factory. Blackie Antonelli stood outside, motioning him to drive up alongside an area where two big doors stood open and a large piece of green machinery was visible on an elevated platform.

  9

  Unloading

  J. W. Johnson and Andy stood on the main floor and watched as the big truck from the Stewart farm backed up to the pickle factory door. Johnson's armpits were wet, and sweat poured off his face. Late in the day the humidity had come up, and there was no breeze, nor hint of one, in the valley where the pickle factory was located.

  “Good God, that's a bunch of cukes,” Blackie said. “Never saw that many come here at one time.”

  “Got our work cut out for us tonight,” Agnes said quietly.

  Jesús and the Rodríguez boys jumped down off the truck and quickly began dragging and lifting bag after heavy bag of cucumbers to the unloading platform.

  For a moment, the pickle factory crew just stared because they had never seen migrant workers before, never heard anyone speak Spanish, never seen people with dark skin.

  Quarter Mile Sweet and Blackie Antonelli began untying each bag and dumping the cucumbers onto the sorter. Sweat dripped from all the men, running into their eyes and soaking their shirts. But they didn't stop, didn't even slow down.

  Not stopping to rest may have had something to do with an unspoken competition, pickle factory guys versus Mexicans. Neither Mexicans nor factory workers wanted to slow down or even suggest that they couldn't take the hard work, the heat, and the humidity. So they sweated, and in the process eyed each other, watching how each other worked, used their hands, lifted—looking for differences but not finding any.

  Agnes Swarsinski hovered over the vibrating sorter like a mother hen watching her brood. Cucumbers bounced across the sorter, the little ones dropping through the narrow slots and tumbling into wooden crates first, the larger ones working their way along the jerking sorter, falling into their designated channels. Agnes searched for imperfection, a badly deformed cucumber, evidence of disease, rot, or mold—anything out of the ordinary. But she saw nothing as wave after wave of green passed before her eyes. She watched the young migrants and Quarter Mile and Blackie eyeing each other but not saying a word, and she thought of strange dogs that come together and circle each other sniffing and prancing, looking, growling a little, but not too much. Showing their teeth on occasion.

  Preacher carried each wooden bushel crate to the scale—box upon box full of number threes and number fours, fewer boxes of number twos, and fewer boxes still of gherkins. Soon his shirt was wet and sweat dripped from his brow. He was not accustomed to heavy physical work, and he grunted each time he lifted a box. He probably didn't even know he was doing it, but Agnes heard it and turned to look for the source of the sound. Andy Meyer heard it too but said nothing. He worked the scale, moved the brass indicator back and forth until the scale arm balanced, and then wrote the numbers on a pad. Then he put down the pad and pencil and helped Preacher lift the bushel crates of cucumbers from the scale to a four-wheeled cart that would tote them to the vats for salting, a job that the crew would do later that evening.

  When he had a pad full of numbers, Andy carried the sheet to the office where Helen Swanson started two tallies, one for a check to Jake Stewart and one for a check to Carlos Rodríguez, half the total to each. Carlos had jotted down the number of bags of cucumbers Jesús had picked, and he would pay him accordingly. And as per their agreement that the migrants would receive all the income from the first picking, Jake would endorse his first check to Carlos.

  It took nearly an hour to unload Jake's load of cucumbers. While they waited for Helen to prepare the checks, Carlos and Andy talked. It was the first time that Andy had talked to a migrant worker—in fact it was the first time he had been this close to one. Andy was surprised that Carlos seemed like any other person—skin a bit darker and hair blacker than most people Andy knew, but a friendly fellow with an easy grin.

  Andy told him that in the three years he had worked at the pickle factory, this was the largest amount of cucumbers they had ever taken in at one time. Carlos talked about Jake Stewart's cucumber fields and how good the crop was this year.

  Meanwhile, Quarter Mile and Blackie and the young Mexicans were still circling each other and sniffing. “You speak English?” Quarter Mile asked, looking Jesús Moreno in the eye.

  “Sí, we speak English,” answered Jesús.

  “People call me Quarter Mile; my real name is Paul.”

  “I am Jesús, Jesús Moreno,” the young Mexican said. He pronounced it “Hay-soos.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  The young migrant spelled, “J-e-s-u-s.”

  “Hey, that spells Jesus,” Blackie Antonelli piped in. “For God's sake, you got the same name as Christ?”

  “Sí,” said Jesús Moreno. “But you say ‘hay-soos.’”

  “Sure as hell is a dumb name,” Blackie said, walking away and leaving Quarter Mile with the young migrants.

  “He got a problem with me?” Jesús asked, bristling.

  “Nah, Blackie's like that,” Quarter Mile said.

  Helen came out of the little office and handed the payment to Carlos Rodríguez. The migrant workers got back in the truck without another word. The red truck drove up the drive and disappeared into the twilight.

  “Seems like a good time to eat supper,” Andy said as he pulled up an empty cucumber crate and opened his lunch bucket. The rest of the factory crew grabbed their lunch buckets as well, except for Helen, who was working at her desk in the off
ice.

  “Before we eat, we must have a word of prayer,” Preacher said.

  “Let us bow our heads.” Everyone was so taken by surprise that they stopped unwrapping their sandwiches and did as he asked.

  “Heavenly Father,” he began, “we are gathered together this evening in a place of your creation; we are gathered among the fruits of the harvest, this wonderful bounty of cucumbers. We are gathered as workers celebrate this work and thank you for the meal we are about to receive. We are gathered . . .”

  “For Christ's sake, I want to eat, not pray,” Blackie Antonelli interrupted, jumping to his feet. “Godammit, this is a pickle factory, not a church. What in hell has got in to you all? You takin’ up religion?”

  “Young man,” Preacher said quietly. “I am offended by your comments, and your ill-advised profanity.”