The Peach Rebellion Read online

  Anna Mae hangs her head over and whispers, “What’s a Hooverville?”

  This sets off a spat between Bonnie Sue and Katie Bee. Bonnie Sue says, “It’s where they make vacuum cleaners!” and Katie Bee demands, “How do you know?” and they’re off like lightning bugs zappin’ each other….

  “What else would it be?”

  “Quit bein’ such a smarty-pants.”

  “You quit!”

  “But we don’t have a vacuum cleaner!”

  “So? Lots of folks do, and they’re all Hoovers.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you not know?”

  “Shh!” I whisper, but Katie Bee’s already scramblin’ up to her top bunk with her rag doll, on the verge of tears.

  Anna Mae’s head is still hangin’ above me, and one arm’s joined in, doin’ a lazy swing back and forth. “Didn’t sound like a vacuum factory when Mama was cryin’ about it to Papa tonight. Sounded like a bad place. A place she was afraid of.”

  “Were you eavesdroppin’ again, Anna Mae?” I whisper, ’cause while all us girls were tasked with cleanin’ up after supper, Anna Mae made herself scarce.

  “Of course I was eavesdroppin’! How else am I gonna know what’s goin’ on? Nobody tells me a doggone thing!”

  I consider doin’ what I usually do when one of the girls asks me a question about the hard days they missed: find some fanciful way of shieldin’ them from the truth. But tonight I don’t feel like it. Tonight I decide they’re old enough.

  “So, Anna Mae,” I say softly, “you’re ten now, and I reckon you’re old enough to understand.” I cast a line across the room. “But I’m not sure about Bonnie Sue and Katie Bee.”

  Katie Bee bites first. “I am too old enough!” she says, swingin’ back down to the bottom bunk. “I’m six!”

  “And I’m seven!” Bonnie Sue says, stretchin’ herself so she’s sittin’ taller than Katie Bee.

  “Well, I would think you’re too young,” I whisper, reelin’ them in, “but when I was six and seven, I lived in Hoovervilles, so I’m thinkin’ you should be able to take hearin’ about them.”

  Katie Bee’s face scrunches tight. “You lived in vacuum cleaners?”

  “You don’t live in a vacuum cleaner,” Bonnie Sue says with a scowl. “You live in the factory.”

  “Actually,” I tell them, “Hoovervilles have nothing to do with vacuum cleaners.”

  “Ha!” Katie Bee crows. “You were wrong!”

  “Girls!” we hear Mama shout. “Go to sleep!”

  “Sorry, Mama,” we all chime.

  I drop my voice to barely a whisper, causin’ the girls to lean in close. “Hoovervilles were places destitute people lived. They were also called shantytowns or Okievilles.”

  “What’s destitute?” Katie Bee whispers.

  “Poor as pig tracks,” Anna Mae says darkly, and for maybe the first time ever, I see that she is growin’ up.

  Bonnie Sue whispers, “So we lived in Hoovervilles because we’re Okies?”

  “No!” I whisper back. “You two never did, and Anna Mae was too young to remember. And technically the three of you aren’t even Okies. You were all born in California, not Oklahoma.”

  “I want to be an Okie,” Katie Bee whimpers.

  “Me too!” Bonnie Sue says.

  Anna Mae’s head swings back and forth. “You have no idea what you’re sayin’.”

  I look up at Anna Mae, wonderin’ if somewhere in her mind there’s the memory of that time. But whether there is or not, I’m sure now that she’s old enough to hear about it. So I take a steadying breath and let the truth out. “They were called Hoovervilles because Herbert Hoover was president during the Great Depression, and everyone blamed him because so many people couldn’t find jobs, didn’t have food, and had to live in houses that they made out of trash—wood scrap, sticks, cardboard, newspaper…anything they could find. The name stuck, and that’s what lots of folks called the camps where we lived after we came over from Oklahoma.”

  “We lived in houses made of trash?” Anna Mae asks. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Mostly it was before you were born,” I whisper. “Each place was small. Smaller’n this room. And there was no water, no electricity, and no latrine or outhouse.”

  “No outhouse? Where’d you go?” Bonnie Sue whispers.

  “In a bucket.”

  “Euuw!” Bonnie Sue and Katie Bee mew together.

  “And we all slept on one thin mattress.”

  I can see Anna Mae calculatin’ and not likin’ the sum she’s reached. “Mama, Papa, you, and…”

  Her voice trails off, stoppin’ short of the subject no one’ll ever talk about.

  “And the boys,” I say softly. “Yes. And after they were gone, you.”

  “How’d they die?” Anna Mae asks.

  “They got sick,” I say, sidesteppin’. I didn’t understand what dysentery was then, and I’m not keen on explainin’ it now.

  “Why didn’t they get better?” Katie Bee asks.

  “Papa couldn’t get a doctor to come to the camp, and then it was too late.”

  The room falls quiet. Soon Anna Mae gets under her covers, sayin’, “That’s enough for tonight,” and the Littles do the same.

  I wonder if, once again, I’ve made a mistake; if I’ve gone too far. Maybe some stories are best left unspoken. Even for me, talkin’ about those times feels like it’s put a leak inside me. A leak I’m not sure how to plug.

  A train rumbles by, long and slow, clackin’ and screechin’ along the tracks. After it’s passed, and after its lonely whistle sounds in the distance, the soft purr of sleeping sisters soothes the air.

  I stare at the bunk slats above me. What’s the use in talkin’ about that time when no amount of words can draw a true picture, and no picture can ever capture what it was like?

  And even if they somehow could, Mama’s right about one thing.

  They’ll never erase the heartache.

  3

  Peggy

  BIG BAD NEWS

  After dinner, I made a quick call to Lisette, who did have big news.

  Her family was moving to Oakvale.

  Oakvale was where we attended high school and was only five or six miles away, but it would mean a much longer bike ride to her house, and during summer harvest it was hard enough to spend time together as it was.

  The sudden news hit me hard. “How…? When did that…? Why?” I sputtered into the phone.

  She rushed to explain. “Valley Bank foreclosed on a house. There was an auction. Daddy won it. It all happened so fast!”

  “The bank where your father works foreclosed on a house and he bought it?” My head was spinning. “Is that—”

  “I know it feels like it happened overnight, but it didn’t. Daddy said the owners stopped making payments more than a year ago. It’s taken the bank forever to get them out.”

  There was a vague memory suddenly souring the pit of my stomach. It had to do with something Ginny Rose had said when we’d worked the orchard. She’d told me that her family used to have a wheat farm in Oklahoma, one the bank had foreclosed on. I could still hear the sizzle in her words, though at the time I didn’t really know what foreclosure meant. What I knew, though, was that she was spitting mad about it.

  Despite the heat, I felt a shiver crawl through me.

  Lisette was chattering on, but I was still stuck on the foreclosure. “But how could your father—”

  She rolled my question flat with a rush of words. “It’s going to take work to do repairs and get it the way Mom wants, but Daddy hopes we’ll be moved in by summer’s end. And since it’s three blocks from the high school, it means that…”

  Her voice trailed off as I caught up to what she was actually trying to tell me. “Oh,” I sa
id. “No more rides to school.”

  “I’m so sorry!”

  I could tell that she really was, and I didn’t want her to be. “You can’t help it,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “But…” Something else wasn’t adding up. “If the Oakvale house needs so much repair, why buy it? The house you live in now is so nice!”

  I could feel her on the other end of the line, but she wasn’t saying anything.

  “Lisette?” I prompted.

  At last her voice came, smooth tones over grit. “Well, you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That…well…look, Daddy just thinks that Oakvale is a more fitting place for a banker to live. He says that people need to have faith in their banker, and that if you’re not successful enough to be living in Oakvale, maybe they shouldn’t trust you with their money.” Then she rushed to say, “It’s different for you because you have land and that beautiful orchard. We don’t. And Daddy’s set on moving, so as much as I hate it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  She didn’t hate it, though. I knew her well enough to understand that. Ferrybank was where the farms and the dairy and the switching yard were. There were the sounds and smells of cows and pigs and tractors, and people labored. And one night last year when I was over at Lisette’s house for dinner, her father had grumbled about how the outskirts of Ferrybank were turning into “Little Tijuana.” He wasn’t the only one complaining, and his weren’t the harshest words, although the Mexicans rarely came into Ferrybank or Oakvale unless they were on a job. And the truth is, I just didn’t get it. Why complain about hardworking people? I think I have more in common with the field hands than I do with Mr. Bovee.

  So people in Ferrybank turned up their noses at people from Mexico, and people in Oakvale turned up their noses at people from Ferrybank. But people from Modesto turned up their noses at people from Oakvale, and city dwellers in San Francisco did the same toward people from Modesto. So where did it end? And what did it matter?

  Mother appeared in the kitchen and gave me the time’s-up signal—two taps on her wristwatch. During the war, when the phone company had asked families to not use their phones in the evening so lines would be open for people in the military to call home, Mother had restricted our talk time to one minute. But now that the war was over, she still gave the signal when I was on the phone for more than a minute, claiming she didn’t like me “wasting my life talking nonsense.”

  Tonight, though, she had a reason for the double tap. Bobby was waiting for me to help set the lug boxes. “Time’s up,” I told Lisette.

  Lisette no longer had such restrictions and so was easily annoyed by mine. “Already?” Then she hurried to add, “I know you’ve got to work the stand tomorrow, and I’ve got a shift at Woolworth’s, but…but there’s more to talk about and—”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing I can say while your mother’s tapping her watch. Maybe we can get malts at Dolly’s after work and do a toast?”

  Lisette was always wanting to make a toast to something. It had started when the war was ending. “To Hitler’s demise!” she’d cried, clinking milkshakes with me at Dolly’s. But since then she’d taken to toasting everything from cars to cardigans. Mostly it was just Lisette enjoying life, but now I was going to have to toast to her new house—something I really didn’t feel like doing. Still, I put a smile on and said, “Sure. Sounds like fun.”

  “Great! I’ll pick you up at…how about five?”

  To my annoyance, Mother gave the signal again, so I simply said, “Okay. I’ll look for you then.”

  “You’ll come out?” she asked, which was code for her not wanting to run into Bobby.

  “Of course,” I said. Then, trying to sound more cheerful than I felt, I added, “I know you’re going to love it in Oakvale.”

  “Nothing will change,” she rushed to say. “I promise you—nothing will change!”

  I hung up and went out to find Bobby and set the lug boxes. Aside from dawn, this was my favorite time in the orchard—a time when the sun cast the trees in a soft glow and gave the day over to the Delta breeze, which swept in cool, damp air from the rivers and ocean. It was a time when the trees, the land, the house, and everyone on the farm breathed a big sigh of relief.

  The empty lug boxes were already loaded on the flatbed trailer. The sturdy wooden crates saw their fair share of action during harvest. Filled at the orchard and emptied at the cannery in a seemingly endless cycle, they were thumped and bumped, filled and spilled, and served as the final reset at the end of each day.

  As usual, Bobby had scouted the orchard with Father before dinner to determine which trees would be harvested the next day, so he knew exactly where the crates needed to go. And, as usual, he hopped on the tractor first, leaving me to ride the trailer and distribute the boxes.

  Setting lug boxes is not a hard job or a precise one. You dump them off the side of the trailer as the tractor rig moves forward, and however they land in the dirt alongside the trees is just fine.

  It’s easy to get lost in your own thoughts while setting lug boxes, because talking’s not practical over the noise of the tractor—something that had never been a problem when working with Bobby because he rarely said much, at least not to me.

  So I was already lost in thought, conjuring sweet images of Rodney St. Clair, when Bobby’s voice invaded.

  “What did you say?” I called forward as I shoved two boxes off the left side.

  “Is she going out with Hot Rod?”

  It took a moment for me to catch on that Bobby was thinking of Rodney, too. “Lisette?” I asked. “With Rodney St. Clair?”

  “Yeah. It seemed there was something doin’ between them.”

  “No!” I called with a laugh. “She hates him!”

  “So why, then? Where am I going wrong?”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. For one thing, he was asking me something instead of telling me what to do. For another, he was asking me about a girl.

  I couldn’t help but have a pang of sympathy for him. If it had come to him talking to me about it, he must be in a world of hurt.

  But…what to say? I was about as fond of him as Lisette was.

  I attempted diplomacy. “You…you come across pretty stern.”

  “Stern?” He looked shocked. Like he couldn’t imagine anyone describing him this way.

  I tossed out a group of boxes, then tossed him some truth. “Yes! You seem very stern. All the time. To everyone.”

  We lurched to a halt, and he craned around the tractor seat to look at me. “Did she say that?”

  I almost blurted out, No. She said you give her the willies. Is that better? but I bit it back and lied. “Yes.”

  Even with the kindness of the lie, he seemed crushed.

  “Look,” I said. “I know you don’t know what to say to her, but lurking in the next room, or watching us from behind the house, or shadowing her around the grocery store…it makes her feel uncomfortable. It would make anyone uncomfortable!”

  “I don’t mean to do those things! I just don’t know how to approach her. I tried going right up to her, but that was a bust, too.”

  “You’re talking about today? When you rode up on Blossom?”

  He nodded.

  I now realized that what had felt like an intrusion at the fruit stand had actually been an act of bravery. “What were you trying to say to her today?”

  “I was trying to ask her out.”

  A dozen incredulous comments sprang to mind, but again I held my tongue.

  I scrambled forward on the trailer so I wouldn’t have to shout. “Bobby, look, I can see you have feelings for her, but I’m not sure Lisette is right for you.”

  “I’m not a kid, Peggy,” he snarled.

  “You haven’t been a kid since you were about ten,” I said. “Which is
the problem. You act angry and burdened. Like life is nothing but hard work.”

  “It is nothing but hard work! In case you haven’t noticed, that’s all I do!”

  “It’s all I do, too, but I don’t take it out on the rest of the world!”

  “It’s different for you.”

  “What are you talking about? I work dawn to dark, just like you!”

  “It’s not the same!”

  “How? How is it not the same? You’re the foreman. It’s not like you’re out here climbing ladders and picking fruit.”

  He turned his back on me. “Someday you’ll be gone, just like Doris.”

  I stared at the back of him, stunned. The very last thing I wanted for my life was to end up like Doris. Why was he saying this?

  He ground the tractor into gear. “At the end of the day,” he called back, “you can walk away. You don’t have the weight of the farm on you. I do.” Then he let out the clutch, and the tractor lurched forward, sending me tumbling backward into the boxes.

  4

  Ginny Rose

  PATCHES

  The sun risin’ before five o’clock makes it easy to wake on time for my first day at the cannery. I slip from bed, mindful to not wake my sisters as I tuck the bedsheets into place and gather my work dress from the small wicker chair where I’d laid it out. It’s clean and ironed, starched stiff from a fit of nerves last night.

  I’ve had odd jobs before. Some were paid in food—biscuits and beans, maybe an apple—but for us, that could make the difference between starvin’ and just bein’ hungry. And sometimes I got nickel jobs. Especially before the war, those nickels felt like gold.