Homeland

by John Jakes

  He found wheat growing in the valley of the San Joaquin, presented himself as an experienced hand, and celebrated the Fourth of July by starting the harvest. He worked with migrants like himself, Irishmen, and a large number of Hungarians.

  He moved on and spent a few weeks weeding in sugar beet fields so long and wide, the boundaries were lost in haze. Here he encountered dozens of Chinese laborers in straw coolie hats. The only Chinese he’d seen before were in photographs or inside some steamy hell of a laundry in Chicago. Neither he nor the Chinese could understand each other, but they communicated all the same, with laughter and gestures.

  Working his way southwest, he was a gandy dancer for a while, tamping new ballast along a spur of the Southern Pacific. At night he shared a coffeepot or a whiskey demi-john with other railroaders. He said he wanted to see Los Angeles. They warned him that working men weren’t welcome there if they had pro-union sympathies, as he clearly did. The local Chamber of Commerce and a powerful paper edited by one Colonel Otis were promoting their city as California’s union-free haven for business. He continued on anyway.

  In Los Angeles he bathed in the Pacific and stood with his arms flung wide, tasting the salt wind from the Orient. He imagined he could smell exotic fragrances from the lands below the horizon.

  All during these travels, even as far back as Colorado, if he wasn’t too dirty and there was enough money in his jeans to allow him to squander a day, he’d visit a public library. Sit at a table and read for hours. He no longer wasted time on the political theorists to whom Benno had introduced him. He was delving deeper, out of some need he couldn’t articulate or even wholly understand. He was trying to read great works, to glean from them great and worthy ideas that might have some application to his rootless life. A life whose purpose, if any, still seemed ill-defined.

  He read from the Bible and he read the great English poets. He did it because he wanted to; there was no Joe Crown Senior driving him. No pedantic teacher saying his choices were foolish—“How can you be so witless, Master Crown? Perhaps you belong in another school.”

  The library, any library, was a school he could love. When the librarians didn’t order him out because of his wild looks or stink of sweat, he went to school until they locked the doors at night. He began a personal chapbook, nothing more than a cheap school exercise book from a general store. In it he wrote phrases and quotations that seemed to have special depth or importance. Only after some months, one day while he was leafing through the many pencil-scrawled pages, did he realize that a pattern could be detected in the passages he’d chosen.

  From the gospel of St. Matthew he’d copied a few words spoken by the master to the third servant in Christ’s parable of the talents. The third servant had buried his one talent in the ground for fear of losing it while his master was away. The other two servants invested their talents, which increased. They were praised by the master when he returned. The third servant expected praise and received a rebuke.

  From blind John Milton’s Areopagitica he copied I cannot praise the fugitive and cloistered virtue, which never sallies forth and sees her adversary. From Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, an admonishment by the Duke: Thyself and thy belongings are not thine.

  There were others. And he came to understand why he collected them. He wanted to strengthen his courage to protest when he saw some terrible wrong done to common workers, of which he was one. Chicago, Pullman, Benno, his mother, even his repressive father, had together kindled some fire in him. The words written down haphazardly were meant to remind him that genuinely great men of the past, great thinkers, believed such a fire mustn’t stay hidden in the dark of the heart but should be brought forth to ignite action and redress wrong.

  He released the fire willingly but not without cost. Twice he was badly hurt by beatings, and he was tarred once, near Ventura, when he told an owner he was paying slave wages.

  So there were regrets when he ached and bled and could hardly stand after a beating—yes, plenty of regrets then. But there was no regret about heeding the messianic call he heard.

  He was, in short, becoming a troublemaker.

  Not everywhere. Not on every job. Sometimes it wasn’t necessary. Occasionally men were paid fairly, treated decently. In Riverside, in the amazing and colorful orange groves he’d read about, he helped pick the winter crop of Washington navel oranges on the estate of a man named J. M. Chance. He never saw this owner, but the man housed his pickers in spartan but clean barracks, with privies and ample running water, and he fed them well.

  Riverside was one of many small towns platted and touted to visitors and speculators in a great Southern California land boom of the 1880s. Promotion of the sale of building lots in these new towns was underwritten by the giant railroads, he came to understand; they hired writers to pen rhapsodic books about California, to lure customers from the East and convince them to settle on “America’s Mediterranean Coast.” The more settlers, the more business for the railroads.

  The boom had largely collapsed, but the towns remained, struggling on. Redlands, like Riverside, was another center of “the groves.” It looked surprisingly prosperous, with several business blocks, a large hotel, and a railway, the East San Bernardino Valley line, passing through. Joe Junior knew that many of the recent arrivals in Southern California were from the Midwest; Redlands, he was told, had been developed largely by Chicagoans.

  He was in Redlands in the extremely warm summer of 1897. He hired on to pick a crop of the Valencia oranges that ripened in the summer. The large grove belonged to an Englishman with a title. Joe Junior worked among a lot of Mexicans imported from over the border; dark, warm-eyed men who smiled even in the fearsome heat and spoke a musical language he picked up a little at a time. There were a few Chinese too. These Chinese seldom spoke. They never smiled. A Mexican who knew English told Joe Junior the Chinese were at the bottom of the heap, constantly abused. Thousands had been driven out of little China-towns all over Southern California because white workers wanted their jobs. White labor hated greaser labor but hated Chink labor even more. Joe Junior saw this when the red-haired freckled boss of the picking crew yanked a ladder out from under a Chinese youth. When the young man hit the ground, the white boss kicked him several times. For God knew what offense.

  On his fourth morning in the Redlands grove, Joe Junior discovered dark flecks—some kind of tiny dead insects—in the breakfast gruel brought to the open field where the workers slept, together with blue-enameled pots of coffee already grown cold. He spat out a mouthful of the gruel and protested to the crew boss.

  The answer to his complaint was simple and curt. “You don’t like the food, pack up. You’ll lose the pay posted to your account.”

  “Even if I quit, you haven’t any right to keep—”

  “Shut up.” The crew boss, a head taller, wrapped a hand around Joe Junior’s small wrist. The clasping fingers felt like an iron jail shackle. “You complain any more, we’ll have a real hard go, you and me. It won’t take much to smear a runt like you all over the ground.”

  He flung Joe Junior’s arm loose. “What are you, some college boy out here on a lark? I seen you writing in that copybook. What’s in it?”

  “I don’t think you’d care for it,” Joe Junior said and walked away. He knew this job would end as some others had.

  That afternoon the crew boss started abusing another Chinese. God damn slant-eyed son of a bitch, he called the man, whose queue was white where it hung down beneath his conical straw hat.

  The crew boss slapped the Chinaman’s face, hard. Old and frail as he was, the little fellow fought back. Pumped two determined but feeble punches into the belly of the white man’s shirt—just the excuse the crew boss needed. He threw the old man to the ground, seized his pigtail and dragged him a few yards, for the start of what he termed a real hard go.

  From the top of his ladder, Joe Junior looked around. Every other picker was bent to his task. The Chinaman wailed as the crew boss
kicked and pummeled him. Joe Junior uttered a soft sigh. There was always a wonderful fragrance in the groves. The orange blossoms were gone, but there was still a thick sweetness, because oranges were inevitably crushed underfoot, or surreptitiously broken open with a thumbnail for juice. It was an odor Joe Junior had grown to love. He wished he didn’t have to leave it.

  I cannot praise the fugitive and cloistered virtue, which never sallies forth …

  The elderly Chinese screamed louder. There was an audible snap as a bone broke. Joe Junior quickly climbed down from his ladder.

  Forty-eight hours later, he walked—stumbled—into a small general store across from the Redlands railway depot. The backs of his hands bore ugly bruises. His lower lip had split open and had stopped bleeding only after he held a rag to it for a long time. His right eye was shut, caked with blood and eye matter. The lid was swollen, the flesh around it dark.

  The little store was hot, dusty, silent. Open bins of nails, rakes and hoes in a barrel, burlap sacks of chicken feed in slanting sunbeams from the front window, reminded him of still-life groupings. He tapped his hurt knuckles on the counter, lightly. A small, round-shouldered man with a sour mouth came from the back room.

  “I’d like to buy a souvenir. I haven’t much money.”

  The storekeeper cleaned his spotless hands on his spot-less white duck apron. “Who did your face that way?”

  “A man out at the Dorset groves. He was beating one of the other pickers.”

  “Beating a white man, or a Chink?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Sure does.”

  “I can’t see why.”

  The storekeeper withdrew slightly from his side of the counter. “Are you one of them red agitators? Seems we get a few more in the groves every season.”

  “I don’t belong to any labor organization, if that’s what you mean.” Not yet.

  “You’re an Easterner.”

  “Chicago.”

  “Same thing. East of the Sierra.” He dried his hands on the apron again. “You come out here, buy up our land, and think it gives you a right to tell us how to do everything. Me, I was born in Los Angeles when it was dust and a few adobes. Now it’s real estate developments and sight-seeing trains and all you damn Easterners telling us how to do it.”

  “Maybe you need telling. Maybe you’re uncivilized out here.”

  The storekeeper spat a gob of silvery spit. Joe Junior heard the ting of a hidden spittoon. He should have known this neat man with the neat string tie and thin, oiled, carefully combed hair wouldn’t spit on the floor.

  “You just keep that up, you’ll get hurt again.”

  “I expect that’s true.”

  “I mean hurt bad. The worst. Go to San Francisco, that’s where they tolerate your kind. Reds. Now do you want to buy something or not?”

  “I want to buy a souvenir for my mother.”

  “Here’s a popular item.” From a shelf behind him he took a small replica of an orange crate stenciled with dark blue letters.

  SOUVENIR

  From the Famous Groves of

  REDLANDS CALIFORNIA

  “Where the Sun Shines All Year”

  “That’s candy in the crate,” the storekeeper said.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed real oranges. How much?”

  “Fifteen cents.”

  “That sign on the shelf says ten cents.”

  “Haven’t had time to letter a new one. You want it or don’t you?”

  Joe Junior paid for the souvenir and walked out. He found the post office, used the desk pen to ink the address on the little crate, then bought a stamp.

  “We send a lot of these from here—” The clerk stopped, taking notice of Joe Junior’s mauled face. “No sender address?” Joe Junior shook his head.

  He wandered over to the depot and sat on the lid of a platform toolbox, enjoying the healing sunshine on his face. He pulled the bedraggled chapbook from the knapsack sewn together from four old bandannas by a kindly farmer’s wife near Merced. Leafing through the pages, he wondered if the writers of these various passages knew how hard it was to follow advice, not merely dispense it. He felt weary and defeated then; and it didn’t help when the stationmaster stepped outside and ran him off.

  He walked out of Redlands at dusk, heading north.

  84

  Paul

  PAUL WISHED JIMMY WOULD make good on his threats to quit. Sharing a room with him had never been pleasant, but now it was an acute strain. Jimmy knocked about at all hours; occasionally he brought in a girl. On those nights, Paul’s salvation was a bed sheet partition he and Jimmy had rigged on a wire.

  In countless small ways, Jimmy continued to show his dislike of Paul: Paul’s quickness of mind, his willingness to work, his zeal to master every part of the business. Shadow didn’t help matters. He never bothered to conceal his increasing regard for Paul, and usually introduced Paul as his assistant while Jimmy remained “my helper.”

  It seemed to Paul that Jimmy didn’t belong in the picture business, or in any other reasonably honest enterprise. Jimmy was greedy and short on scruples. Why he didn’t take up one of the more lucrative occupations common on the Levee Paul couldn’t understand.

  And then Jimmy fell in love.

  One night in January of 1898, he brought home a voluptuous blue-eyed goddess of a girl. Not to bed her but to show her off at the supper table.

  Jimmy’s girl was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, and Jimmy was extremely nervous as he introduced her. Miss Honoria Fail. She said she preferred Honey. Her voice was high and small, a child’s voice in a body that was anything but childish. She had an ample Lillian Russell figure. Her straw-colored hair was piled high and pinned. And she wore white gloves.

  “Where did you meet this young pup, Miss Fail?” Shadow asked. “Not in this neighborhood, I hope.”

  “Oh no, sir, we met at Pflaum’s Music Hall. My Aunt Maureen took me there specially to see the living pictures. She was afraid to go alone, she’s a maiden lady. I’d never seen them either, I got very excited. Afterward, in the lobby, who should we see coming out but Aunt Maureen’s friend Sally Phelan. They stepped away to chat. That’s when Jim and I became acquainted.” Miss Fail smiled prettily. “I don’t s’pose I’d have listened when Jim spoke to me, except that Aunt Maureen was way across the lobby, sympathizing with Sally for the loss of her husband right after Christmas. Jimmy was pretty fresh.” She giggled. “He marched right up, told me his name, and said he made the very pictures they were showing inside. I was so impressed! When he asked for my address, my knees got all watery. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I gave it to him.”

  “Her number, too,” Jimmy said. “Her folks have two telephones in their house.”

  Honey Fail giggled again, blushed, and sought Jimmy’s hand for reassurance. At supper, she talked a lot about her priest and her church on the South Side.

  Light snow was falling when Jimmy fetched Miss Fail’s muff in preparation for taking her home on the trolley. Gravely, she shook hands all around. “Colonel Shadow. Mary. Paul. So happy to meet you. I hope I’ll see more of you, I will if Jimmy asks me back, it’s so thrilling, this business of yours.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” Jimmy said, putting on his derby. He sang out a cheerful good night and with visible pride escorted Honey Fail to the stair.

  When they’d gone, Shadow said, “I can’t get over this. For once the little squirt shows some interest in something.”

  “I’d say the lovebug’s bit him,” Mary offered.

  Shadow loosened his flowing cravat. “Jim had better be careful. He’d better not try taking liberties with that little morsel.”

  “Is she someone special?” Paul asked.

  “Kid, that pretty little piece is only the daughter of one of the most powerful aldermen in the city. A man on a par with the Bath and Hinky Dink. Francis X. Fail, from the South Side. Hot Stove Fail, they call him. Because he’ll steal anything, even a red-hot stove. But
he draws a line between civic boodling and morality at home. He’s a devout Catholic. Five daughters. The oldest is twenty-three, and I’m told every one of the little darlings is a virgin. If there’s one who isn’t, I pity the son of a bitch responsible if Alderman Fail finds out.”

  So it was that Jimmy Daws stayed in the colonel’s employ with an improved attitude. He complained less. Sometimes he actually pretended to like the work. Honey Fail came to supper at least once a week, discussing her sisters, her priest, her parish, and the flickers—“So thrilling, the most exciting, marvelous invention ever!” She was dim-witted in a harmless, innocent way. Paul liked her enormously.

  On Wednesday morning, the sixteenth of February, Paul bolted out of bed when the colonel shouted, “Oh my God!” on the other side of the wall between the bedroom and the kitchen. He dragged his pants on, then his singlet. Jimmy continued to snore away. Paul tiptoed across the freezing floor barefoot and tapped on the kitchen door. Shadow was sitting at the table, wearing an old velvet robe with a hole in one elbow. Mary was rattling the blue enamel coffeepot at the stove. Gardens of sparkling frost flowers bloomed on the windows.

  Paul noticed Shadow’s boots, wet and dripping on a newspaper. He’d already tramped through the drifts for his morning Tribune.

  “Dutch, there’s big news. I mean the biggest. Look.” He showed the front page.

  EXTRA!

  3:30 A.M.

  MAINE IS BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR.

  American Battleship Destroyed

  By a Terrific Explosion

  Said to Have Occurred on Board.

  MANY ARE REPORTED AS EITHER KILLED OR HURT.

  All the Boats of the Spanish Cruiser Alfonso XII

  Are Sent to the Assistance of the

  Officers and Crew of the Wrecked Vessel.