All You Get Is Me
Authors: Yvonne Prinz
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Adolescence, #Lifestyles, #Farm & Ranch Life, #Family, #Parents
All You Get
Is Me
Yvonne Prinz
For Rick and Kristie Knoll of Knoll Farms in Brentwood,
California, who inspired this story
Just before the crash, I was watching you
Thinking how time hasn’t changed
Even half of what it promised to
—Joe Henry
Contents
M
y mom always promised me she would keep me safe, and then she disappeared.
My dad made no such promise.
Five a.m. on a Tuesday morning, mere days after school has let out for summer vacation and I’m already getting into a delicious groove of sleeping late. I’m cruelly torn from a deep, luxurious sleep by my dad, pounding on my bedroom door.
“C’mon, honey, up and at ’em.”
No. NO! Go away
. My cheek is resting comfortably on my pillow in a warm puddle of drool and I’ve completely forgotten that I’m working the market today. Why did I say I would do that?
“Roar?” He says my name now, knocking lightly.
“Okay, okay, I’m up,” I mumble.
I hear his leather boots on the old wooden stairs leading down to the kitchen. I slide out of bed, one limb at a time. One foot hits the cool plank floor, then the other. The farmhouse is chilly right now, but as the day wears on, the early summer warmth will creep slowly into all the corners of this house. It never gets really hot in here, though; we’re protected by an ancient, enormous oak tree that leans over the old roof with its muscular arms providing much-needed shade in the long, hot afternoons to come. The same tree also diabolically twists its gnarled roots into our plumbing so that every couple of months muddy brown water bubbles up through the drains and into all of the sinks and the claw-foot bathtub upstairs. It’s beyond gross. We have Jesus, our Roto-Rooter man, on speed dial.
Rufus butts the bedroom door open with his snout and clicks across the wood planks to say good morning. He’s an early riser and a fantastic afternoon napper. Bits of dog food cling to his mongrel beard. He nuzzles my face with his nose and I ruffle the fur on his soft head, which smells slightly of skunk. Rufus is a country dog. I am a city girl. Rufus has lived here on the farm all of his life and I have lived in the city all of mine until two years ago last spring when my dad up and bought a farm like he was running out for a quart of milk. I’m pretty sure I’ll never forgive him for that.
I stand up, yawning and stretching, and peer out my bedroom window into the darkness. It looks like midnight except for a ribbon of pale blue marking the horizon. A light shines over the gravel driveway next to the house. The old brown pickup (like Rufus, it came with the place) is parked there, weighed down with our early summer vegetables and fruit: fava beans, dandelion greens, fennel, green garlic, arugula, baby potatoes, and the first of the apricots. Steve and Miguel and my dad loaded it after it cooled off last night. Steve, a UC Berkeley grad student, fast-talked his way out of doing his regular farmers’ market shift because he and his girlfriend, Jane, are going rafting on the American River. This is Steve’s second summer working with us, and lucky for him, I’m completely in love with him so I said I’d cover for him today. He promised me a mix CD featuring some indie bands he’s been listening to.
Out beyond the apricot orchard, which is thickly planted between the knobby trees with garlic, runner beans, and horseradish, a light burns in the window of the bunkhouse that Miguel and Steve share. My dad fashioned it out of one of the several outbuildings on the property. It gets pretty hot in there by August but Steve’s from the desert and Miguel’s from Oaxaca, Mexico, so they’re both pretty okay with the heat. Steve is here from late May till late August, and Miguel is here until he saves enough money to buy a little piece of land back in Mexico to build a home on. Miguel sends almost every penny he makes home to his wife, Magdelena, and his two boys, Carlos and Marco. Their photos are Scotch-taped next to the pillow in his bunk. Carlos and Marco have bright dark eyes and matching wide grins with big teeth and ears that they haven’t grown into yet and Magdelena smiles shyly and wears a delicate gold crucifix on a chain around her neck.
My dad is crashing around the small kitchen, preparing his standard breakfast: a giant latte (featuring organic local milk and fair trade coffee that he buys from an Italian guy in North Beach who roasts his beans to perfection) and a big bowl of granola from Sally and Jim, our half-crazy neighbors up the road who make it from scratch and sell it to health food stores. My dad trades them for apricots, which they dry for the cereal. As I brush my teeth and pull my hair into a ponytail, I can hear Dad foaming the milk on the espresso machine, a monster of a thing, left over from our life in the city. It takes up most of the counter space in our kitchen and cost us about as much as our secondhand tractor. Of course, I never even used to think about the cost of things till we became farmers. Now everything comes down to that.
“Hey, sport,” my dad says way too cheerfully when I appear in the doorway of the kitchen. “Can I fry you an egg or two?”
I shake my head. “I’ll just have toast. I don’t want to wake up too much.”
I slice a big chunk off a loaf of bread and wedge it into the toaster. My dad hands me a jar of homemade strawberry jam from the fridge, the kind where you can still see the whole strawberries. When the toast pops up, the edges are burnt. I slather it with butter and jam and sit down at the old table. My dad pours me a glass of orange juice and sits down across from me. National Public Radio drifts in from the stereo in the living room. Rufus curls up under the table and we both use him as a footstool. I bury my bare feet in his soft fur and he groans. I crunch my toast and my dad slurps his latte and spoons granola into his mouth while he reads yesterday’s
New York Times
. He won’t get today’s until this afternoon. Country life.
I glance at a brochure from a solar panel company sitting on the table next to a jar of honey. My dad has ordered solar panels for the roof of the barn but we probably won’t get them up until after the summer growing season because the roof needs repairs. Once they’re up we’ll have enough free power to run the tristate area but we’ll probably be paying off the panels forever.
At six o’clock we finally get ourselves out to the truck, which doubles as my dad’s office. Papers and receipts are stacked under both visors, and the dusty seat is littered with clipboards, pens, CDs, a carrot, a screwdriver, and a baseball cap. I put my camera down on the seat between us. It’s a Nikon FM with a Nikkor thirty-five-millimeter lens. I don’t go anywhere without it. My dad slips his insulated coffee cup into a carrier he installed in the dash, above the stereo that he also installed. He pulled it out of the old black Mercedes sedan that he drove in his pre-farm days, which is now gathering dust and pigeon poop in the barn. He says I can have it when I learn to drive. What he doesn’t know is that I already know how. Steve taught me in his Jeep. I just need a license, which I’ll get the minute I’m sixteen, two months from now.
My dad starts the truck and it groans to life. He grinds the gearshift into reverse and we back out and roll past the farmhouse on the gravel driveway. Even though the pretty flowered kitchen curtains ruffle in the breeze, the house still always looks to me like the house in a southern Gothic thriller. The kind where the farmer goes insane and everybody ends up dead with a pitchfork through the brain.
The sun is all the way up now and Miguel already has the tractor out.
He’s hooked up a flatbed trailer to the back of it and he’s heading out to the vegetable patch. Steve’s Jeep is already gone. My dad pulls up next to Miguel and asks him in Spanish if he can collect the eggs from the chicken coop and let the chickens out. They roam free during the day, eating bugs and pooping everywhere. Every organic farmer knows that chicken poop is the best fertilizer on earth. The chickens are my chore but I’ve been spared today. The coop is off behind the barn and it smells like sweet rotting grain, and even though I feed them every day, the chickens seem to resent me. I’ve given them beautiful names like Gretta and Frieda and Mona and Astrid. I praise their work, the simple perfection of the eggs they lay, but I get nothing from them. It’s like they know I’m a fake. I don’t belong here and they’re onto me. Luckily Rufus doesn’t share their dim view of me and he trots along beside the truck like a Secret Service guy running next to the president’s motorcade, ready to take a bullet for me.
Miguel calls out “Adios” to me and waves. He calls me by my full name, Aurora. Everyone else calls me Roar. I wave back. We stop at the entrance to the farm and pull out onto the road that will eventually take us to the freeway. Rufus stops there and watches us disappear before he turns around and heads inside for a nap. I’m pretty sure that my dad and Steve have a lot to talk about on these long drives. They have tons in common, even though Steve’s a lot younger than my dad. They’re both very political and love to talk about how this country’s going to hell in a handbasket, but they can go from that directly to which Jimi Hendrix album rocks the hardest.
No such luck with me. I start to doze almost immediately. Tom Waits is playing on the stereo. He’s singing “Hold On.” It’s beautiful and sad. My head bobs along with the rocking of the old truck as my dad navigates his way along the winding road. He and Steve do the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco twice a week, so my dad knows every bump and curve in the road.
I jerk awake to the sound of my dad cursing. “Goddamn development people!” he says, watching his side mirror nervously.
I look in the mirror on my side of the truck. An SUV is behind us, inches from our rear bumper. A blond woman is at the wheel and she’s honking her horn. There’s no shoulder on this road and it’s full of sharp turns and blind corners. Since they started building housing developments on some of the land north of us there’ve been a lot more people using this road. My dad, a man with a big opinion about everything, considers the development people to be sort of an alien invasion, a blight on the land in the form of Costco-shopping, SUV-driving breeders, people who have to commute hours to the surrounding cities just to go to work. He believes that humans have lost their way in the world, that they’re so far removed from the land that they don’t even recognize it when they see it anymore. Pretty big talk for a guy who became a farmer about twenty minutes ago. The small farmers around here have started organizing themselves against the developers, with my dad at the helm. He knows that zoning laws are quietly being manipulated to accommodate the builders and he’s not about to sit still for it. When we lived in the city, my dad was a human rights lawyer, so trust me, no one’s better at getting up in your face than he is. Still, even though they enjoy the occasional victory, it’s mostly a losing battle here and all over the country as farmland is being sold off to developers because farmers are giving up the struggle to survive.
