Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  Slaymaker was organizing the men into a line to pass the smudgers along from shed to wagon, but the men wouldn’t stay in place, instead yelling at one another to wrap the horses and the burros, and Hearts was yelling at Slay to tell the boys to keep still. Muir Yuen and his cousins were in the yard as well, but they wore nothing warmer than blue fireman’s shirts as they fastened burlap and rope to each mule’s back. The real work hadn’t even begun, but Linda could see that the men were already angry about the cold and the rain, and she asked Willis if he didn’t have anything warm to lend them—scarves or blankets or anything?

  “We’ll need some coffee,” he said, the youth draining rapidly from his face.

  The smudgers held two and a half gallons of fuel each, and Slay was complaining that for a few years now he’d been telling Willis to buy five-gallon tanks. “They’ll burn up their gas before sunrise,” Slay warned, and the other men realized it too. Linda could see it in the downward etch in their faces, these men who knew that the long night’s work of distributing the smudgers throughout the groves was only the beginning; by the time they’d laid the last smudger and lit its greasy flame, they’d have to return to the first to refill its tank. Everyone seemed to know that they’d lose trees in the night—many more than they had lost in several years—and quite possibly a hand or two, quitters who’d ice up in the fingertip and walk off in the direction of Los Angeles, where a train would take them to better-managed strawberry fields in the San Joaquin. And each man knew that if he wasn’t careful, a flame could leap from one of the chimneys to his coat. There wasn’t a hand at the Rancho Pasadena who hadn’t seen a buddy burn from wrist to wrist on a black freezing night.

  Bruder was complaining that there weren’t enough smudgers for the grove, and yelling that they’d have to light brushwood fires in the ditches. He ordered Hearts to take five men into the groves and start piling up the cordwood. “Dump a little gasoline on the logs, and let the fires go.” The rain was beginning to stop, which meant that the night would turn only colder, and Bruder predicted that by two or three it’d be so cold that they’d need a smudger for every tree—and at last count they had only a thousand. “It’s going down below freezing. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight,” he said. He knew the San Gabriel Valley as well as anyone, and he knew the way the cold caught in the foothills and the arroyos and how the eucalyptus emitted its green scent as the temperature dipped. “Everything’s going to be ice. The oranges and everything else.” He yelled at Lolly, “You should go back up and wrap your roses.”

  But Lolly said that she’d come to help, and at once the men looked at her and took note of her hooded beaver and her velvet slippers peeking from her hem and her fists curled as tight and white as stones. “Then get in the wagon,” said Bruder. She extended her hand, seeking his assistance, but Bruder loaded another smudger and Lolly climbed onto the wagon bench next to Slaymaker. “That muskrat?” he asked.

  “Where’s the coffee?” Bruder shouted. “Get the coffee on.” He no longer frightened Linda when he was like this. She believed that she could now anticipate him, and it was as if suddenly the most mysterious man in the world had become predictable. She watched him as he grabbed hold of a smudger and hoisted it into the wagon. The two-and-a-half-gallon tanks were empty, and they echoed with cold. Bruder let Lolly try to lift one, but it fell to the wagon bed with a hollow clang that rose above the yard and called out to the fluffy ears of a screech owl, who responded kindly with a series of low, short whistles.

  Bruder had to calculate the best way to hold off the frost. He decided that they’d set out one heater for every four trees, leaving some trees unheated except for the ditch fires. He knew certainly that some of the oranges would freeze before dawn, but he told his men that he’d rather lose a harvest than a tree. But Willis disagreed with Bruder’s calculations, and argued that they should spread the smudgers evenly across the grove, one for every eight trees. “Maybe we won’t lose anything. Maybe it won’t get any colder than this.”

  “I’m not willing to risk anything with your hopeful wishing,” said Bruder, counting the hands off into teams. “One heater for every four,” he called through the megaphone of his hands. “Now get out there!”

  “You seem to be forgetting whose ranch this is,” said Willis.

  “I’m not forgetting anything.” And then: “Maybe it’s you who’s forgotten.”

  There was a current in the air that everyone could feel as it ran between Willis and Bruder. Many of the hands were surprised that Bruder would speak to the captain like that, and even more surprised that the captain would let him.

  And soon Willis was conceding, “There’s no time for arguing. Get the boys to work.”

  By midnight everyone was in the grove, a chain of men down each row of trees. One hand would dig a shallow hole, and another would drop the smudger into it. Then they’d pull out the hose from the fuel-tank wagon and fill the smudger’s base. They’d light the smudger and an oily flame would catch at the chimney’s mouth, grimy black smoke lifting and settling on the men’s faces. Lolly helped with the fuel tank, and Linda and Mrs. Yuen ran the coffee from the stove to the men while Willis took orders from Bruder like any other ranch hand.

  After the coffee was made and a sloshing pot was hung from the back of each wagon, Linda said she was going to work in the grove as well. She looked around for something to do, and—inevitably, it seemed to her—she found herself working alongside Willis, she digging a shallow grave for the smudger and he guiding it in, laying it down.

  Willis didn’t say much as they worked. She asked him if he’d ever lived through a freeze and he said, “Not in a couple of years.” She could sense that he was aware of what everyone was wondering: why was the grove so poorly prepared for the winter? Eventually he said, “The last big icing was in 1912. They said it was a once-in-a-century freeze. I remember Father telling me I’d never live to see it so bad.”

  Lolly was enjoying herself as she turned the nozzle on the oil tank, filling a smudger and then cutting the flow. “And now!” Bruder would yell, and Lolly’s raspberry gloves would turn the crank and she’d throw her body against the tank. “Off, Lolly! Cut the oil!” Again Lolly would follow orders. By now her hair had loosened entirely, and it was thick and shiny across her shoulders, and her beaver coat was slick and skidded with grease. Distillate oil matted patches of the coat, but as far as Linda could tell, Lolly was having a good time. Willis was muddy, and soot smudged his face and his calfskin gloves were torn, and from the way his eyes hung sadly he looked as if he’d burn everything he was wearing once he returned to the house. His nose was red, and eventually he took Linda by the shoulders and said, “You’re cold, your nose and ears look frozen.” He asked her if she wanted to return to the kitchen and bring out more coffee. A couple of the hands hooted in agreement, and Linda set out across the grove, the fish scales of hoarfrost breaking beneath her foot.

  She stopped for a minute at a smudger burning alone; hundreds of yards separated her from the others and from the ranch house. In the distance, on the other side of a row of trees, was a string of burning flames, the oil hissing. The sky was black, and she pulled an orange from a tree. It was hard and dull in color, and Linda knew it would be scrapped, that eventually the Rancho Pasadena would fill train cars with dented brown fruit that had no use except to feed freckle-backed swine. At the stove, coffee brewing, she wondered how long she’d remain at the Pasadena, and if Edmund and Palomar and Dieter would welcome her back to Condor’s Nest. Maybe her brother would turn her away, and the dread of the unanswered letters visited her again. Where would she go after the orange season? Would Bruder ask her to stay? She had nothing more than the clothes she was wearing and the piece of coral that hung coldly against her chest. Even now, all the men in her life could still tell her what she could and could not do, where she could and could not go, where she could and could not sleep. If Edmund didn’t want her, and if Bruder didn’t want her—what then? She imagined herself fol
lowing the Naranjo boys around California, up to the vineyard where they worked in the summer, up north, where, as the boys said, things were different and the world left you alone. She imagined herself turning to Willis, head bowed, and asking for help. She hated her dependence, and she began to question whether in fact she could determine her own destiny.

  Through the kitchen window, she could see the heaters and the fires flickering and convulsing. She smelled the smoke and the oil, and knew that in the morning the entire valley would be veiled with an acrid odor; even the hearts of Lolly’s roses would be slimy with grease.

  When Linda returned to the crew with the pots of coffee, she discovered that Willis had left. “He gave up,” said Bruder.

  “He didn’t give up,” said Lolly. “He’s been sick.”

  “Sick?” asked Linda.

  But there was no time to talk, and Bruder asked Linda to help him refill the oil tank, and she drove with him and Lolly back to the shed where the distillate was stored.

  “Your brother’s going to ruin this ranch,” Bruder said, offering his hand to Lolly to help her descend from the wagon.

  Together they ran the hose from the portable tank to the great iron pot in the shed, inserting the hose’s head into the pot’s rusty pink canal. Soon the oil was running and the bitter fumes swirled. Lolly said she couldn’t bear it, and she went to sit on a crate a hundred yards away.

  “Cut the oil in another minute,” Bruder told Linda. She watched him follow Lolly and sit beside her, and Linda couldn’t be sure but their shoulders looked as if they were pressed together, blocking out the cold. When a minute had passed, she pulled back the lever and the tank shook on its iron feet and the hose sputtered. She disconnected it, and the nozzle sprayed her with oil. She called to Bruder and Lolly, saying that the tank was full and they should get back to the trees. They were far enough away that she couldn’t see their faces, and then Bruder’s voice reached Linda: “In a minute.” But Linda wouldn’t wait. She ran to them; she would get them on their feet at once. And as Linda, whose brow was holding back a feverish fury, approached Bruder and Lolly, she looked up the hill and saw that the house was dark except for a light in Willis’s room. She stopped, and for a long time she watched the house, hoping he would appear in the window, but nothing stirred in the mansion as it loomed above the cold valley and the groves, framed by the yew trees. Then, at the opposite end of the mansion, a light came on, two windows brightening to gold, and Willis’s silhouette entered the room where Linda now slept. She watched Willis—what was he doing? what did he want? He was a black outline in the light, still and careful and faceless, and then he came to the window and gazed down into the valley where she stood, down into the wide span of the freezing night.

  10

  It turned out that Bruder had been wrong, and by one A.M. the temperature leveled, and by two it rose above freezing. They had burned through twenty-five hundred gallons of oil and half a ton of cordwood for almost no reason at all. No trees were lost, and Hearts and Slaymaker estimated that the frost had browned no more than a thousand oranges. As the night waned, the ranch turned quiet with relief. The hands were exhausted and angry about the chaos. The blame that had been falling upon Willis’s shoulders shifted to Bruder’s. “Who’s in charge here, anyway?”

  By the time Linda returned to her room, she had only a few minutes to change her clothes before she’d have to go back to the kitchen. Willis hadn’t touched anything—or, if he had, he had replaced it carefully—but she sensed his presence, looming over the bed, the air disturbed, inhaled by him and released. She expected to find his fingerprints on the silver stem of the hairbrush or on the hand mirror; but no. What had he wanted? Had she not been wearing the coral pendant, he would surely have cupped it in his hand—she could imagine this. And then she saw the little hat she had bought for the trip to Pasadena. It sat upon a needlepoint chair, and it appeared reshaped, its felt pressed and molded, and the band that had held the bald-eagle feather now captured a sturdy, flaxen feather from a golden eagle. How had Willis known? Who had told him?

  But Willis hadn’t known. It was Rosa.

  Soon dawn would spill over the valley, and the air was already as clear as glass. Linda wiped the oil from her hands and face and returned to the ranch house, and for the first time, Linda—sleepless and weary—descended the hill resentfully.

  She brewed more coffee and boiled the oats and baked four dozen conchas, and then she waited as the thin near-solstice dawn pushed itself farther up. The morning sky was without color, and the sun was dull, but the chaparral on the hillside had turned green with fresh shoot and leaf and bud. The early rains had polished the scrub and the live-oaks, and except for the orange trees, everything pushing from the earth looked as if today were the first day of spring. But nothing stirred except for the coffeepot’s trembling lid; all else was still.

  Linda moved down the hall of the ranch house. She heard the bleating snores from the room Hearts shared with Slay. She leaned her ear toward Bruder’s door, but there was no sound, and she turned to go back to the kitchen.

  “You were looking for me?” said Bruder, pulling his door open.

  She said she wanted to know if he was awake. “There’s coffee …”

  He took his coffee to the damp table outside. “The ranch is officially shut today,” he said. “The boys have the day off. No one will be up for hours.”

  She needed to speak to him, but she didn’t know how to form the words. She knew that he felt that she had betrayed him, but she had not. How to explain it, even if only to herself? Can a heart lurch two ways at once? Can a man appear handsome in the dark, and loathsome in the dawn? “He insisted that I join them in their little party,” she tried. “I work for him, after all. How could I say no? I was on my way to you.”

  “Nothing is as it seems. You don’t have to listen to him. You can move back to the ranch house tonight.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. You can come and go as you like, and you can find work and Willis listens to you because … because …”

  “Because?”

  She couldn’t go on: she didn’t know why Willis listened to Bruder. She was going to say that it was because he was a man, but she knew that it was more than that. It was almost as if some sort of debt were being paid off.

  Bruder said, “I asked you to come to Pasadena to be with me.”

  “It’s no longer so simple.” She moved to his side, and her hand shook almost imperceptibly.

  “Why do you spend your time with him?” he asked.

  “I work for him.”

  “You work for me.”

  As morning pressed onward, she could see the red in his eyes and the bruise-color in his tired lids. She thought of what she might say, but there was so much, and a small planet of fury began to orbit in her chest—would the day ever come when she worked for no one? If Bruder blamed her, then he knew nothing of the fate she was perpetually fighting against. She said, “Rosa’s in love with you; you realize that, don’t you?”

  “You’re being silly. This has nothing to do with Rosa.”

  She said that she didn’t believe him and that time would tell—won’t it, Bruder?—and Linda was crying and she was upset with herself for breaking into tears, for she liked to think of herself as the type of girl who didn’t cry; but her eyes were wet and the tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks, and she had no choice but to mop her face. In her pocket was one of the handkerchiefs embroidered by Esperanza—“You’ll show it to Willis for me? You’ll do that for me, Linda?” But Linda had forgotten about Esperanza’s handiwork and had never shown it to Willis, and now she wiped her face with the little white square of cotton stitched with a happy, breaching humpback whale.

  On their day off, the hands usually left the ranch and went into Pasadena for a matinee at Clune’s or an afternoon at the pool hall, where orange bourbon swirled in soda bottles, or they dropped by the whorehouse behind the bakery, where the bedsheets smelled of yeasty rolls an
d the narrow by-the-hour rooms overlooked the racks where the baker cooled his cherry pies. The hands would buy themselves pies and taquitos from the open-fire stand, or drink so much that they’d forget to eat, and one or two would pass out at the whorehouse and have to empty his pockets to pay for the time he slept in a girl’s bed. None would return before dark, and some wouldn’t make it back to the ranch before dawn, and Linda wouldn’t have to cook until the next morning, and the day was hers, too, and she realized she was momentarily free.

  After her argument with Bruder, suddenly exhausted, she returned to her room and climbed into bed. She hadn’t been napping long when there was a knock on the door. Her heart leapt, as she expected Willis’s voice to pass through the keyhole, and Linda pulled herself out of bed and ran to the mirror and pinched her cheeks and witnessed her own disappointment as the voice said, “It’s me. Rosa.”

  It was the first time Linda had ever seen Rosa out of uniform. Her dress was a dull brown-gray color, and it hung loosely upon her frame, and Linda felt sorry for her that she was doomed to wear such plainness. Its only brightness was the silvery-white orange blossom Esperanza had stitched upon the breast. Rosa wore a small, round straw hat, and the embroidery and the hat, with its pink ribbon, pointed to her refined, fragile beauty, like that of a ceramic figurine.