The Longest Road

by Jeanne Williams

  Eden looked like a nice town from the glimpses Laurie caught of the dwellings on the slopes above the business district. Such grass, velvety rich green that didn’t seem possible after parched Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas! White houses with red-tiled roofs sparkled amidst the first palm trees Laurie had seen outside her geography book and luxuriant bushes that flowered crimson, rose, and pink. It was so beautiful she simply stared, spellbound, as the train whistled and the clack of the wheels began to slow.

  “We’re a long way back from the passenger cars,” said Way. “Soon as this baby stops, jump down before any railroad bulls come snoopin’. The squatters’ camp’s over there by the river. Reckon that’s the best place to start huntin’ your daddy.”

  Shacks of cardboard that would melt to sludge at the first rain; car fenders and doors wired to tree limbs; willow branches interwoven with scraps of carpet, old clothes, and cardboard. One family had fetched tin cans from the dump, flattened them, and nailed them to crooked boards and parts of orange crates.

  Back in the bushes, canvas was draped here and there. A woman came out of one shelter, straightening her dress. Laurie glanced quickly away from a man squatting among the bushes. Flies that would crawl on babies’ eyes and mouths swarmed around stinking places where folks who must have just completely lost all pride had gone outside their shelters. A scrawny child rising from beside a cardboard shack kicked a little dirt over his mess as a dog might.

  There were more kinds of bugs than Laurie had known existed, crawling or buzzing everywhere—plain ordinary flies, great big green blowflies, gnats, beetles, caterpillars, millers, fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes like the one shrilling in her ear. She swatted at it.

  “Watch you’re steppin’,” Way cautioned. “There’s camps like this all over California. Scariest thing is these folks for the most part aren’t shiftless bums or hoboes who like to drift. They’re families who lived in houses, had farms or little businesses or worked steady for someone. They came out here to save money and get back on their feet, but they’re lucky if they earn enough to eat and buy gas to the next job.”

  “But Way, it’s so dirty and awful!” Laurie whispered. Compared to this, the little house in Prairieville and Grandpa’s sharecropper’s shack were palaces. Daddy living like this! What would Mama have said?

  “Some big growers say California’s got to have peons—lots of cheap labor with no power or rights,” Way growled. “Well, the growers made peons of the Filipinos and Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese, and when that supply started to dry up because of emigration laws, here’s the Okies.”

  Keeping an eye out for Daddy but half-afraid now that they would find him here, Laurie said, “Daddy hoped he’d earn real well out here—enough to send for us and have a home again.”

  “I sure hate to cast you down, but look at how it is. Only takes about twenty year-round workers to look after a big peach orchard that needs two thousand pickers as soon as the fruit’s ready, and nary a one the minute the fruit’s packed.” Way shook his head and went on bitterly. “No way migrant workers can ever belong to a community. Folk’s who’ve been good members of the grange, who’ve always voted on local and state affairs, don’t have a thing to say about how things are run. It’s a—”

  “Look!” cried Buddy. “There’s our flivver!”

  It was indeed, with a clothesline stretched between it and a tent, a patched, stained tarp held up by poles canted at odd angles to tie it down over waist-high walls of scrap metal and wood. Outside the tent, a thin, yellow-haired woman in a faded dress jounced a fretful little boy on her hip while she stirred something in a kettle set on an old car grill spanning the small fire that sputtered sullenly in a shallow trench. At the approach of strangers, the woman pinned a strand of hair into the knot at the back of her long neck, the curving, graceful kind you’d call a swan’s neck if it hadn’t been so thin.

  At her questioning look, Laurie said, “Please, lady, we’re looking for Ed Field. Are you Mrs. Halsell?”

  The woman dropped the spoon and stared. “Oh, dear Lord!” Her face crumpled. She came blindly toward Laurie. “You must be Ed’s kiddies. Your Daddy talked about you so much—”

  Dread gripped Laurie. Her insides turned to water. “Is—isn’t he here?”

  The woman shook her head. “Children, I hate to tell you this. Your Daddy’s—gone.”

  “Gone?” shrilled Buddy.

  “He—he drowned.” Mary Halsell began to sob. “He went in to pull our baby out, little Rob here. We—we tried our best but by the time we got him out, your daddy was gone. Didn’t know how to get in touch with you, though he sure talked about you children a lot.” Her eyes widened and she studied Laurie. “Wasn’t there—?”

  A girl, she was going to say. Her woman’s eyes had picked up what men’s hadn’t. Laurie gave her a warning look. Mrs. Halsell turned and pointed. “There’s some big eucalyptus trees down the river—see, over there—and we buried him where he’d have shade and sweet air.” The haggard woman broke into tears. “Ed was such a good man! Can’t tell you how much he helped us and now it’s our fault he’s dead. Bob thought I was watching the baby and I thought the kids were. Just no way to tell you how sorry we are.”

  Sorry! Laurie felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach and went all hot and sick. To come all this way …

  The pot-bellied toddler on Mary’s hip didn’t look to Laurie like much of a trade for her father but of course he’d had to try to save him. It stabbed deep that Daddy must have kind of made the Halsells his family instead of Laurie and Bud. It wasn’t nice, but Laurie stepped back when Mrs. Halsell tried to put her arms around her. Buddy had turned against Way and was hanging on to him, shoulders heaving. Little strangled sounds came from him. Laurie was glad Way was there. She didn’t have any comfort for her brother.

  It didn’t seem possible, it was a bad, wicked joke, that they’d come all the way out here when Daddy had drowned the day before they climbed into the boxcar back in Altus.

  “My husband, Bob, got real sick and he’s just now getting well enough to work,” Mrs. Halsell went on. “For a long time, we’ve been getting by on what I made picking cotton and the half-dollar a day Ed paid for his meals. Hated to take his money but he said we’d looked after him when he cut his hand and fed him when he couldn’t work.” Mary smiled tremulously. “Ed always had a joke. He said, ‘The Lord’ll take care of the poor folks and us rich devils will look after ourselves.’ We met Ed down in the Imperial Valley where we were all picking lettuce and tomatoes. He drove into camp and saw me brushing Bernice’s hair. Guess it made him homesick for you children because he parked the flivver a little way from our tent.” Mary blinked and swallowed hard. “He looked nice, and real lonesome so I sent Bob over to invite him to supper. After that—well, we just sort of helped each other out.”

  “I know,” said Laurie. “He—he wrote about how good you were to him.”

  “Poor folks have to help each other,” Mary said. “The way growers like it is to have two or three times as many workers as there are jobs so folks’ll hire on for two dollars a day or even a dollar since that beats nothing. We don’t dare ask for toilets or water close to the fields when there’s plenty waiting to take our jobs.”

  “Plumb wicked!” said Way. “Growers got to have pickers at just the right time or they’ll lose their cauliflower and cabbage, peaches and grapes, apricots, apples, plums, and artichokes—all their crops. If workers ever organized—”

  “Can’t,” said Mary flatly. “We have to work for whatever we can get.”

  “But if you didn’t, you could force growers to pay decent wages or lose their crops.”

  Mary shrugged. “Growers have you coming and going. You need to get to a farm before picking starts so as to get hired, but if the crop’s not ready, you have to wait for it to ripen, four, five days, maybe a week.”

  “So you get credit at the farm store where everything costs double what it should,” said Way.

  �
�That’s how we lost our jalopy. We picked our way north from the Imperial Valley into the great Central Valley—that’s the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys. Got just enough work to buy food and gas to get to the next job and then we hit a string of bad luck. Neither Ed nor Bob got work for a couple of weeks. We were flat broke when we chugged into a big peach orchard more on fumes than gasoline. The men were hired but we had to live in one-room shacks that cost five dollars a month. Over a hundred people used the faucet at one end of the street and the single dug toilet at the other. Well, the peaches weren’t ripe and there were five Halsells who had to eat. Bob was starting to get sick. He couldn’t keep up with the pacer who picked a tree ahead of him, and you have to keep up even if the pacer’s trees lots of times have to be done over. The pusher kept ridin’ Bob. On the second day, he fired him. So there we were, in debt for the shack and groceries. The sheriff attached our Model T.”

  The woman’s voice broke. Way nodded. “Single guys can hitchhike or catch a freight to the next crop but a family can’t.”

  “I don’t know what we’d have done without Ed. He quit his job and loaded us in his flivver, tied the mattress and tent on top, and we headed for here.” Giving herself a little shake, Mrs. Halsell said, “Ed had a little money saved and I know you children will want your mother’s Bible.”

  She hurried into the tent, came back with Mama’s red-letter Bible, and held it out to Laurie. The leather binding was worn from Mama’s hands—and Daddy’s, hands that would do no more work, ever, or caress the faces of loved ones. Laurie didn’t recognize the cry of grief as her own, but when Mary Halsell drew her against a thin bosom, this time Laurie didn’t pull away.

  8

  Mary Halsell walked with them to the eucalyptus grove. Thin, rose-gray bark peeled from great trunks and the oval, silvery-backed leaves murmured in the breeze that freshened with the coming night. It was still light enough to make out the words carved and charred on the end board of an apple crate:

  ED FIELD

  Gave his life for a child

  October 28, 1935

  Daddy might have been alive if he hadn’t met the Halsells, but they had gone to a lot of trouble to bury him in a pretty place and mark his grave. Only—he shouldn’t be dead! Not him and Mama both. If he had to die, if he had to be buried, it ought to be where he had lived, where people knew who he was. He should be with Mama near the honey locust tree in the Prairieville cemetery, not here where he was just another Okie.

  There was no way to fix that. This was how it was. But she could play for Daddy. She got out the harmonica and Morrigan’s voice sounded in her head. “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley.…” She played “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and finished with “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly fitting, but the dust had blown them here, and now Daddy was dead, she could forget how he’d acted since Mama died and remember when it had been good to know him, to be his child.

  Kneeling, Laurie touched his name, which was carved roughly into the wood. Poor Daddy. He’d come a long way to die. It didn’t seem right just to leave him here. More than likely neither she nor Buddy would ever come back. The marker would fall down and rot. In a few years, the grave might sink in a little more than the soil around it, but that would be the only sign that here a man’s body was becoming part of the earth.

  Laurie had brought the Bible out of a vague feeling that it retained some essence of her mother. Something valuable—something that meant a lot to Daddy—Laurie stared down at the Bible. It was the only thing that was not an absolute necessity that he’d brought to California, Mama’s Bible, comments neatly written on almost every page with the purple satin ribbon bookmark worn threadbare where she’d used it.

  Laurie supposed the dead couldn’t know what was buried with them, that such a sacrifice was useless, and yet it seemed right to leave the volume with Daddy. She drew Buddy out of earshot of the others.

  “Buddy, would you mind leaving Mama’s Bible with Daddy?” His eyes, swollen from crying, widened as much as they could and she explained quickly, “We’d dig down a ways and leave it. We—we wouldn’t try to put it in Daddy’s hands or anything like that.”

  Buddy considered. “Do you think he’d like that?”

  Laurie nodded.

  “All right.” Buddy dug his heel in the soft ground. “Guess I’d rather leave it. If we carried it around with us, you’d probably want to make me listen to the whole thing. The New Testament’s bad enough—I mean, it’s plenty.”

  Using the strong part of fallen branches, with Way’s help they dug down a couple of feet above where Laurie reckoned Daddy’s heart would be. It didn’t seem respectful to just put the Bible in the hole. Laurie padded the space with eucalyptus bark and leaves, and placed the much-read book on the fragrant lining, covering it with many long strips of bark.

  In a way it seemed wicked to leave a Bible like that, especially Mama’s. Laurie’s heart pained at losing her mother’s dearest possession. Yet it seemed fitting. They gently scooped the silty earth over the tiny burial and pressed it down. Burrowing against Laurie’s shoulder, Buddy sobbed, and so did she. All the months at Grandpa’s, Laurie had held on to the hope of being with Daddy again, being as much of a family as they could without Mama.

  That hope was gone. Kids couldn’t be a family without at least one parent. All she was sure of now was that she had to take care of Buddy and get out of here. There was nothing for them in California. But what could they do? Go back to Grandpa’s and grow into sharecroppers if they were lucky enough to find a farmer who’d take them on when they grew up?

  “You’ll want to spend the night.” Mary Halsell touched Laurie’s cheek with fingertips callused from pulling cotton bolls. “Your daddy’s quilts are in the Model T. That’s where he slept. The stew’s ready.”

  Laurie turned instinctively to Way. It would be rude not to eat with the Halsells but she couldn’t sleep in Daddy’s bedding. Way said, “We’d appreciate a bite to eat, ma’am, but then we’d better get over to the railroad yards and catch a ride east.” Laurie didn’t realize that she’d been holding her breath till it came sighing out.

  We, he had said. That sounded like he was staying with them, at least for a while. Maybe he’d eaten their food, but he’d looked out for them. He put one hand on Buddy’s shoulder, another on Laurie’s, and as they walked back to the camp, Laurie didn’t feel quite so alone and desperate. But it seemed wrong, sad and awful and strange, to walk away from Daddy’s grave, to leave him here for always so far from home.

  Jimmy and Bernice Halsell were fair-haired, nice-looking, and hazel-eyed like their mother, but their clothes were rotting off, long past what patches and a needle could fix. They had just gotten home from school and Bernice, who looked about seven, was crying.

  “I don’t wanna go to school! No one’ll play with me and the teacher says I’m stupid and—”

  “You got to go to school,” Jimmy told her roughly. He was older than Laurie, maybe thirteen. “Playing’s not what matters, silly. You’ve got to stay in school and learn all you can so when you grow up—” He broke off, flushing, with a guilty look at his mother. “School’s the only chance folks like us have, Bernie,” he finished a bit lamely. “So just you pay attention to your books and not to those stuck-up California kids.”

  “But I got put back to first grade with the babies!” Bernice wailed.

  “That’s because you wouldn’t let me help you with your reading and arithmetic.” Jimmy’s tone was unsympathetic and Bernice wailed louder.

  “You—you got to go to school back home! Back where we had our nice house and our store and—and everything. It’s different here. None of the other kids in camp have to go to school.”

  Mary rested her scratched, sunburned hand on Bernice’s thin shoulder. “I know it’s hard on you, sugar, but you’ve got to get your education so you can have a nice job teaching or keeping accou
nts or—”

  “I don’t care about when I grow up!” Bernice’s narrow, freckled face screwed into wrinkles. “I—I want someone to play with now, at recess and noon!”

  “Hush!” said Mary Halsell. “Wash your hands and get the bowls and spoons. Mr. Kirkendall and Larry and Bud don’t want to listen to your fuss.”

  When the thin stew was dished up and a bowl carried in to Mr. Halsell, who was resting on a mattress on the ground, Mrs. Halsell turned to Way. “Are you some relation to the kids, Mr. Kirkendall? They’re welcome to stay with us. We’ll sure do our best for them, though you can see we don’t have much.”

  The words snapped Laurie from a daze. She’d been trying not to smell the camp but the stench permeated her now, urine, feces, grime, and despair. Despair had an odor, like rotting fungus. She’d smelled it on some of the men in the boxcar and it rose from all over this camp.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Halsell,” she said, mechanically polite. “But we—we’ll go back to grandpa’s.” She said it so Daddy’s friends wouldn’t worry, but she didn’t see how she and Buddy could go back—of what they could do if they didn’t. She just knew they weren’t staying here.

  Way said, “I’m not blood kin to the young’uns, ma’am, but I’ll look after ’em.”

  “Guess you’ll want to take the Model T.” Mrs. Halsell glanced toward her husband. “Bob’s able to work again. We were fixin’ to start for the Sacramento Valley as soon as the cotton finishes, but—”

  Her voice trailed off. “I can drive,” Way said. “But we’d have to buy gas. Best thing to do is sell the flivver in Eden.”

  Daddy had written that the Halsells had lost their car and were traveling with him. Without the Model T, the family would be stranded. They’d been good to Daddy, took care of him when he cut his hand.

  “You keep the flivver,” Laurie said.

  The Halsells’ faces brightened, but then Mr. Halsell shook his head. “We can’t pay for it, sis. It’s worth at least fifty dollars, maybe more, with them good secondhand tires Ed put on it before we came here.”