Across the Fruited Plain Part 9

"Do folks treat 'em nice?" asked Grandma.

"In the school," Rose-Ellen told her. "But outside school they act like even Nico had smallpox. They make me sick!"

Rose-Ellen spoke both indignantly and sorrowfully. That very day the three girls had come out of the church together, and had paused to look over the neat picket fence of the yard next the church. It seemed a sweet little yard, smelling of newly cut gra.s.s and flowers. Trees rose high above the small house, and inside the fence were tall spires of delphinium, bluer than the sky.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Looking over the fence]

"The flowers iss so pretty," said Nico.

"And on the porch behind of the vines is a chicken in a gold cage," cried Vicente.

Rose-Ellen folded her lips over a giggle, for the chicken was a canary.

Just then a head popped up behind a red rosebush. The lady of the house was gathering flowers, and she held out a bunch to Rose-Ellen.

"Don't p.r.i.c.k yourself," she warned. "Are you the one they call Rose-Ellen?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Rose-Ellen, burying her nose in the flowers.

"I had a little sister named Rose-Ellen," the woman said gently.

"You come play on the gra.s.s sometime, and we'll pick flowers for your mother."

"And can Nico and Vicente come, too?" Rose-Ellen asked. "They're my best friends."

The woman looked at Nico and Vicente with cold eyes. "I can't ask _all_ the children," she answered.

"Thank you, ma'am," Rose-Ellen stammered. When they were out of sight down the road, she threw the roses into the dust. Nico s.n.a.t.c.hed them up again.

"I wouldn't go there--I wouldn't go there for ten dollars,"

Rose-Ellen declared. Vicente looked at her with wise deep eyes.

"I could 'a' told you," she said, shrugging. "American ladies, they mostly don't like Mexican kids. I don't know why."

October came. It was the time for the topping of the beets. The Martinez family went back to Denver for school. The Garcias stayed; their children would go into the special room when they returned, to have English lessons and to catch up in other studies--or rather, to try to catch up.

"But me, always I am two years in back of myself," Vicente regretted one day, "even with specials room. Early out of school and late into it, for me that makes too hard."

Now Farmer Lukes went through the Beechams' acres, lifting the beets loose by machine. Rose-Ellen could not believe they were beets-great dirt-colored clods, they looked. Not at all like the beets she knew.

Topping was a new job. With a long hooked knife the beet was lifted and laid across the arm, and then, with a slash or two, freed of its top. The children followed, gathering the beets into great piles for Mr. Lukes's wagon to collect.

Vicente and Joe did not make piles; they topped; and Joe boasted that he was faster than his father as he slashed away with the topping knife.

"It looks like you'd cut yourself, holding it on your knee like you do!" Grandma cried as she watched him one day.

"Not me!" bragged Joe. "Other kids does." The beet tops fell away under his flas.h.i.+ng knife.

From the beet-dump the beets were taken to the sugar factory a few miles away, where they were made into s.h.i.+ning white beet sugar. ("And that's another thing I never even guessed!" thought Rose-Ellen. "What hard work it takes to fill our sugar bowls!")

Sometimes at night now a skim of ice formed on the water bucket in the chicken-house. Goldenrod and asters were puffs of white; the harvest moon shone big and red at the skyline, across miles of rolling farmland; crickets fiddled sleepily and long-tailed magpies chattered. One clear, frosty night Grandpa said, "Hark!

the ducks are flying south. Maybe we best follow."

7: THE BOY WHO DIDN'T KNOW G.o.d

Handbills blew around the adobe village, announcing that five hundred cotton-pickers were wanted at once in Arizona. The Reo, full of Beechams and trailing Carrie, headed south.

The surprisingly large grocery bill had been paid, a few clothes bought, Daddy's ulcerated tooth pulled, and the Reo's patched tires replaced with better used ones. The result was that the Beecham pocketbooks were as flat as pancakes.

"Yet we've worked like horses," Daddy said heavily. "And, worse than that, we've let Gramma and the kids work as I never thought Beechams would."

"But we can't blame Farmer Lukes," said Grandpa. "With all the planting and digging and hauling he's done, he says he hasn't a cent to show for it, once he's paid for his seed. It's too deep for me."

Down across Colorado, where the names were Spanish, Daddy said, because it used to be part of Mexico. Down across New Mexico, where the air smelled of cedar; where scattered adobe houses had bright blue doors and strings of scarlet chili peppers fringing their roofs; where Indians sat under brush shelters by the highway and held up pottery for sale. Down into Arizona, where Grandma had to admit that the colors she'd seen on the picture postcards of it were not too bright. Here were red rocks, pink, blue-gray, white, yellow, purple; and the morning and evening sun set their colors afire and made them flower gardens of flame.

Here the Indian women wore flounced skirts and velvet tunics and silver jewelry. They herded flocks of sheep and goats and lived in houses like inverted brown bowls.

"We've had worse homes, this year," Grandma said. "I'd never hold up my head if they knew back home." Along the road with the Reo ran an endless parade of old cars and trailers. There were snub-nosed Model T's, packed till they bulged; monstrous Packards with doors tied shut; yellow roadsters that had been smart ten years ago, jolting along with mattresses on their tops and young families jammed into their luggage compartments. Once in a while they met another goat, like Carrie, who wasn't giving as much milk as before.

"All this great country," Grandma marveled some more, "and no room for these folks. Half a million of us, some say, without a place to go."

d.i.c.k said, "The kid in that Oklahoma car said the drought dried up their farm and the wind blew it away. Nothing will grow in the ground that's left."

"He's from the Dust Bowl," Grandpa a.s.sented. "Thousands of these folks are from the Dust Bowl."

The parade of old cars limped along for two weeks, growing thicker as it drew near the part of Arizona where the pickers had been called for. The Beechams saw more and more signs on fences and poles: FIVE HUNDRED PICKERS WANTED!

"They don't say how much they pay," Grandma noticed.

"Ninety cents a hundred pounds is usual this year, and a fellow can make a bare living at that," said Daddy.

Soon the procession turned off the road, the Beechams with it.

The place was swarming with pickers.

"How much are you paying?" Daddy asked.

"Fifty cents a hundred."

"Why, man alive, we'd starve on that pay," Daddy growled, the corners of his jaws white with anger.

"You don't need to work if you don't want to," the manager barked at him. "Here's two thousand folks glad to work at fifty cents."

Leaving Jimmie to mind Sally in the car, the Beechams went to picking at once. Grandma had saved their old cotton sacks, fortunately, since they cost a dollar apiece.

Rose-Ellen's heart thumped as if she were running a race.

Everyone was picking at top speed, for there were far too many pickers and they all tried to get more than their share. The Beechams started at noon. At night, when they weighed in, Grandpa and Daddy each got forty cents, Grandma twenty-five, d.i.c.k twenty, and Rose-Ellen fifteen.