The Peach Rebellion Read online

  ALSO BY WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN

  Flipped

  Swear to Howdy

  Runaway

  Confessions of a Serial Kisser

  The Running Dream

  The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones

  Wild Bird

  Hope in the Mail: Reflections on Writing and Life

  THE SAMMY KEYES MYSTERIES

  Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief • Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man • Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy • Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf • Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary • Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy • Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes • Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception • Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen • Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway • Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things • Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash • Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher • Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls • Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack • Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City • Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise • Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye

  this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Cover art copyright © 2022 by Kimberly Glyder

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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  ISBN 9780593378564 (trade) — ISBN 9780593378571 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780593378588

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1936: Northern California

  Prologue

  1947: Central Valley, California

  July

  Chapter 1: Reunion

  Chapter 2: Answers

  Chapter 3: Big Bad News

  Chapter 4: Patches

  Chapter 5: Quandary

  Chapter 6: Weatherin’ a Storm

  Chapter 7: Peach Pie Tangle

  Chapter 8: Surprises

  Chapter 9: The Road to Modesto

  Chapter 10: Babyland

  Chapter 11: Battle Lines

  Chapter 12: All Wrung Out

  Chapter 13: The Pits

  Chapter 14: An Invitation

  Chapter 15: Truths Avoided

  Chapter 16: Roller Rink

  Chapter 17: Off Track

  Chapter 18: A Dark Secret

  Chapter 19: Shade

  Chapter 20: Maybe Someday

  Chapter 21: Bigger Things

  Chapter 22: Reflections

  Chapter 23: Digging In

  Chapter 24: Hidden Picture

  Chapter 25: Setbacks

  August

  Chapter 26: Uprooted

  Chapter 27: Brash Moves

  Chapter 28: Secrets

  Chapter 29: Unexpected Gift

  Chapter 30: The Dance

  Chapter 31: Flabbergasted

  Chapter 32: A Warnin’

  Chapter 33: Trapped

  Chapter 34: The Getaway

  Chapter 35: Showdown

  Chapter 36: A Grave Situation

  Chapter 37: A Different Kind of Love

  Chapter 38: Runnin’ on Empty

  Chapter 39: Transformations

  Chapter 40: The Lion’s Den

  Chapter 41: Homecoming

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Dedicated to

  Compassion, Empathy, and Understanding…

  and those who work to foster them

  With special thanks to my sweet husband, Mark, who tends to my heart when I shed tears over my (imaginary) friends; to my agent, Ginger, who brought sunshine into a really difficult year; and to my editor, Nancy, who held the ladder and encouraged me to stretch for the high-hanging fruit.

  PROLOGUE

  Ginny Rose

  It’s August sixteenth.

  My birthday.

  I wake before sunup, excited. I’m not expectin’ much in the way of gifts, but that’s all right—it’s still my day. And maybe there’ll be cake.

  A bird twitters a morning song, and I smile through the lifting darkness. But then I hear a high, sharp cry—like a squirrel, shot just off the mark.

  I sit up.

  There’s no squirrel in our shanty.

  It’s Mama.

  “Jeremiah,” she cries. “The boys!”

  Papa’s quick to check on my little brothers, but everything goes still soon after.

  “Mama?” I call, shootin’ forward from the blanket bed she made for me when the boys turned sick.

  “Stay where you are, Ginny Rose,” Papa commands. His voice is thick in a way I haven’t heard before, and it sends me scuttlin’ backward.

  “They’re gone, Mary,” I hear him say to Mama a short while later.

  At first the words confuse me. How can they be gone? They’re right there! But Mama’s wail swirls through the shanty and I understand.

  “To Heaven?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Papa tells me.

  My eyes sting. It’s a sharp pain, sudden and fierce, and I’m grateful for the wash of tears that follows. For a few moments the room swims and sways and I can’t hear anything but my own heart, poundin’ in my ears.

  Lucas.

  Elijah.

  Gone?

  Lucas.

  Elijah.

  Gone.

  Papa’s voice cuts through. “No,” he’s tellin’ Mama. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Mama staggers up from the mattress on the shanty’s dirt floor, but she stumbles backward and falls.

  She tries again.

  Falls again.

  Papa puts a hand to her forehead and backs away quickly. “Mary,” he
says, like he’s drivin’ a stake into the earth. “Stay here.”

  “But, Jeremiah, I—”

  “You’re in no condition to go anywhere,” he says, but more gently. “You’ll need to say your goodbyes here.”

  “But…where will you take them?”

  “I’ll find a nice place,” he assures her. Then he turns to me and says, “Load the water jug, the soap, and the shovel, and wait for me in Faithful. I’ll be along shortly.”

  “But—” I say.

  “Git!”

  There’s a heavy fog hangin’ wet and cool over the camp, and the dirt shows signs of a drizzle. I don’t mind the cool, because I know it’ll give way soon enough to the sizzle of summer. But it does feel like the skies have been weepin’—like they knew about Lucas and Elijah while I lay dreamin’ of cake.

  I load the soap, water jug, and shovel in the bed of our jalopy, then go wait for Papa inside the cab. It’s a long wait. One that gives me time to shed quiet tears for my brothers. One that gives me time to already miss my only friends.

  When at last Papa comes out of the shanty, he’s carryin’ a tight blanketed bundle in his arms which I know holds the boys, wrapped together. I have a pang of jealousy as I step down from the cab. They’ll always have each other, and who do I have now besides Mama and Papa?

  I put on a brave face, and once Papa’s placed the bundle in the bed of the truck, he uses the soap and a worn cloth to scrub my hands and arms, clear up to the elbows. He gives himself the same treatment, then wrings out the cloth, feels my forehead, and nods. “Let’s go.”

  I climb back into the cab and watch as he cycles through the steps of startin’ Faithful. It takes a few tries, but when she fires up, we putter through the labor camp slowly, then bump along across a field in silence.

  At last Papa says, “Your brothers loved playin’ around that tree.” He’s got his eyes fixed on what Lucas called the Eagle Tree on account of the way it’s shaped. And Papa’s right—in the month we’ve lived at this camp, the boys were never so happy as when we’d picnic beneath its shady branches. “I’m thinkin’ it would make a nice restin’ place,” Papa adds, more to himself than to me.

  He parks Faithful near the tree, and once he’s walked around a bit, he leads me down to the river. “I need rocks,” he says. He picks one up and hands it to me. “This size is good.”

  The rock is smooth and shaped like a big egg. And, surprised by the weight, I nearly drop it on my bare feet. “I’ll need dozens of them, Ginny Rose. Can you fetch them for me?”

  I nod.

  He kisses my forehead. “Good girl.”

  So while he digs, I carry rocks. Back and forth I go, back and forth. Down to the river, up to the tree. Down to the river, up to the tree. And when at last the hole’s deep and wide enough and the stones are collected, Papa fetches the bundle out of the back of Faithful, steps into the hole, and lays it down. He looks around a little and frowns. “It should be deeper,” he says, but climbs out and shakes his head. “It’ll have to do.”

  I stand by, dumbly starin’ into the hole.

  Into the grave.

  My eyes sting again.

  “You don’t have to watch, Ginny Rose,” he says, but something inside me’s refusin’ to look away.

  “They have each other,” he says softly. “And their sock monkeys.”

  “Really?” I ask, and for some reason the sock monkeys bein’ with them makes me feel better.

  He nods. “And Mama’s necklace, too, to protect them.”

  I know what necklace he’s talkin’ about. She’s only got the one. But I don’t know what Lucas and Elijah need protectin’ from anymore, or what a little gold cross on a chain can do for them. I’m just glad they have their sock monkeys.

  Since I don’t move away, Papa says, “All right, then. Why don’t we say a prayer together?”

  I nod, and after a short quiet spell, he says, “Take Lucas and Elijah into your arms, O Lord. Release them to laughter and play in the company of their cousins Matthew and Jake, and bless them with the watchful care of family that’s passed into your Kingdom before them. We thank you for the time we had with these boys, and we await a joyful reunion with them when it’s our turn to be called home. We pray all of this in Jesus’s name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I whisper.

  And then Papa begins shovelin’ in dirt.

  I help by pushin’ it in with my hands.

  By layin’ the river stones in tidy rows over the top.

  By coverin’ the stones with oak-leaf mulch.

  Then, after we rinse off in the river and spend another quiet minute at the grave, Papa takes my hand in his and we walk back to Faithful. “Thank you for your help,” he says gently.

  I nod, and through the sadness and confusion in my heart, I feel a swell of pride at his look. Suddenly I do feel bigger.

  So this is what it’s like to be six years old.

  July

  1

  Peggy

  REUNION

  Each year, as the sweet smell of peaches filled the June air and ripened into summer, I found myself looking for Ginny Rose Gilley. For seven summers, I held on to a fading hope that she’d show up at our orchard, just like she had the summers I’d turned seven, eight, and nine.

  The first summer she didn’t come I was devastated.

  Where was she? How was I going to survive harvest without her?

  Growing peaches may sound romantic, but when your family owns twenty acres of them, reality is quick to replace fantasy, and when picking season is in full swing, farms all over need help with harvest, including ours. Especially ours. There’s no shaking a peach tree to get the fruit down, or using a machine to harvest it. Peaches need hand picking, and every summer field workers swarm in to help.

  The summer I turned ten, pickers came, but Ginny Rose and her father did not. That left me spending long, hot days sorting peaches in the field with strangers, and my family certainly didn’t fill the void. Bobby, who was twelve and full of himself, and Doris, who was thirteen and full of spite, bossed me around, while Father ran the crew and Mother gave birth to twins.

  “They’re boys,” I heard Father say when Willie and Wesley were born, his breath gusting out on a big sigh of relief, as though he could see himself resting at some future date.

  Mother, on the other hand, seemed condemned to never rest again. Those babies cried. And fussed. And cried some more. “Boys,” I heard her mutter, and in it was a whole wide world of weary.

  My mother had been my only ally. Oh, my grandmother Nonnie, who lived with us, used to be, but the older she got—or maybe the older I got—the more she seemed to disapprove of me. And now they were both overoccupied with the twins and had little patience for my misery.

  “They’ve surely moved on,” Mother said that first summer, when I complained about missing Ginny Rose. “Maybe they’ve gone back to Oklahoma. You should hope for them that they’ve found something better than fieldwork,” she said, changing Willie’s diaper.

  “But Ginny Rose is my friend,” I whimpered. “My best friend!”

  “You have plenty of friends, Peggy,” Nonnie said, changing Wesley’s.

  “Not like her!” I wailed.

  Nonnie raised an eyebrow in Mother’s direction, indicating her disapproval at my tone. Nonnie is Father’s mother, and that eyebrow of hers has done my mother in on more than one occasion.

  “Well,” Mother said to me, ignoring the eyebrow as she finished pinning the diaper tight, “friendship won’t feed their family, and that’s the same for us. Now go out there and do your part.”

  I did do my part. From dawn to dinner, I sorted peaches brought down by the field hands, hauled buckets of drinking water out to the orchard, and helped load wooden lug boxes of fruit high on a truck bound for the cannery. I did my part until peach fuzz coated my arm
s and face, until it permeated every pocket, every seam, every fiber of my being. I did my part until the trees were bare and the sickening rot of fruit on the ground buzzed with flies. I did my part until I never wanted to taste or touch or smell another peach for as long as I lived.

  Anyone who’s lived this life knows—farming’s a roll of the dice, a prayer to the skies, and work. Endless, body-bruising work. And every nickel we earned seemed to be needed for repairs, supplies, and equipment.

  But even farmwork can be fun when you’ve got a friend. Nonnie was right—I did have other friends—but Ginny Rose was special. Maybe that was because we did the same work—fieldwork. Words can’t really explain what it’s like, so mostly I didn’t feel like talking about “my summer vacation” to other friends, or at school. Our family rarely went anywhere. And during harvest? We never took a day off, not even Sundays.

  Summer meant working the farm.

  Dawn to dark, we worked the farm.

  So there was that, but there was also the way Ginny Rose could make me laugh. We’d giggle about everything, including Bobby, who was as bossy then as he is now, and Doris, who’d rather sting us with insults than work alongside us. Having Ginny Rose around made the days go by fast.

  So even as I got older, even as I moved from working out back in the orchard to working out front at our fruit stand, I missed her. I missed us. But this summer after the month of June came and went, I finally stopped hoping she’d reappear. I’d be seventeen soon. It was time to let her go.