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Authors: Gayle Brandeis

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BOOK: Delta Girls
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T
HE ONE BAD THING ABOUT THE HOUSEBOAT WAS THE
mosquitoes. We kept all the screens closed, but we were still riddled with bites, ones that swelled into fierce pink mounds. The sorter women had told Quinn mud would make the bites feel better; she kept slapping it on herself until she looked like some sort of swamp creature. After her shower each night, I replaced the mud with calamine lotion, but the bites were so bad, she found it hard to sleep. That wasn’t a problem for me anymore. Working in the pear orchard, even with the slower pace of the bottles, somehow made me more tired than anything I had done before. Or maybe just having a comfortable bed helped knock me out. Even the whine of the most persistent mosquito couldn’t keep me awake.

“Eema!” Quinn’s voice managed to pull me out of sleep. She was standing at the edge of the bed. “There’s a monster outside!”

“It’s just a dream,” I mumbled. The houseboat was rocking, as if a barge was passing by. That sometimes happened during the night. And the Delta breezes could get pretty intense.

“No, it’s a monster! I saw it!”

“Here, get into bed with me.” I lifted the sheets and Quinn crawled in, her whole body trembling in her thin nightgown. The top of her head smelled like sunbaked dirt.

“I’m scared, Eema.” Quinn wrapped her arms tightly around my waist, hooked one leg over both of mine.

“Dreams can be scary.” I closed my eyes again, felt my body rise and fall with the waves. “It’s probably from all the myths you’ve been reading. Go back to sleep.”

“Do you think it was Kraken?” she asked.

Kraken was a Norse sea creature with many arms, like the roots of an upturned tree. He would wrap those arms around ships and pull them underwater.

“It wasn’t Kraken.” A mosquito whined in my ear.

“It came out of the water and looked at me.” Her heart raced against my side.

“Just tell yourself that when you fall back to sleep, you won’t dream about it again.” I could feel sleep tugging at me, wanting to pull me back under.

“You never believe me.” Quinn’s words sent a shock through my chest. I wanted to tell her that wasn’t true, that she was the only thing I believed, the only thing I believed in, but then sleep closed over me again and sealed me away.

I WOKE WHEN
something brushed against the back of my leg. Something bigger than Quinn, who was sound asleep on my other side, wedged between me and the wall. Something hairy. It burrowed in closer, pressed against my back, leaking heat. Was this the monster Quinn had warned me about?

I sat up screaming. So did Quinn. So did the strange man in our bed.

“What the hell?” He jumped out and turned on the overhead light. He was just wearing striped boxers, his legs and chest
furred. His hair flopped onto his olive-skinned face; a soul patch sprouted below his lower lip.

“Get out of here, you pervert!” I yelled, kicking at the sheets, my voice both higher and raspier than I thought it could get.

“Wait a second,” said the man. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Who the fuck are
you?”
I shouted. Quinn clung to me, shaking.

“This is my boat.” The guy looked more puzzled than dangerous.

“No it’s not,” said Quinn into my shoulder. “It’s Mr. Vieira’s boat.”

“I’m Mr. Vieira,” he said.

“No you’re not,” said Quinn. I tried to shush her as I pulled the sheet back up over my nightgown, knees drawn to my chest, pulse still pounding in my ears. I looked at his bushy eyebrows, his generous nose. Relief flooded in.

“You must be the son.” My voice had almost fallen back into its normal register.

“Benjamim Vieira.” He held out his hand.
Ben-ha-meem
. He looked exhausted. “Ben.”

“Izzy.” His hand was damp but firm when I shook it. My leg prickled where his leg had brushed against it. “And my daughter, Quinn. We’re helping at the orchard.”

“I’m sure it’s appreciated.” He pulled his pants back on, tugged a shirt over his head.

I could feel my cheeks flush. Watching him zip up his fly somehow felt more intimate than seeing him in his underwear.

“I guess I’ll head over to the house, then,” he said. “Didn’t want to scare the folks—they weren’t expecting me for another week. Sorry I scared you instead. I honestly had no idea you were there—I was so tired; I just thought the sheets were bunched up.”

“At least you’re not a monster,” said Quinn.

“I try not to be.” Ben picked up his backpack.

———

“SO YOU MET
my son,” Mr. Vieira said as we unhooked more bottles from the tree the next morning. I felt my face get hot again. “Scared the hell out of my wife last night. She wakes if she hears a pear drop—thought someone was breaking in.”

“He gave us a pretty good scare, too.” I looked at a pear inside one of the bottles. It had grown against the glass; one side of the fruit was completely flat. No one would buy it for eighty dollars.

“Didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Mr. Vieira. “He just wanted to come down for the
festa.”

I handed Quinn a bottle, which she placed carefully in a section of the wooden crate. She looked serious, nervous. A couple of wasps started to buzz around the bottles and she jumped back, almost knocking the crate over. She hadn’t mentioned the monster or Ben’s visit all day, but I could tell both were weighing on her.

“Say”—Mr. Vieira reached for another bottle, carefully untying it from the branch—“why don’t you come to the
festa
with us? Get out a little. It would be good for the girl to have some
sopa.”

I had no idea what a
festa
was, or a
sopa
. He spread out his arms and said, “Nine thousand pounds of beef!” and I was even more confused.

“Is it a big crowd?” Maybe it would be better to just stay in the orchard, on the boat.

“Only all the Portuguese in the Delta,” he said, but that didn’t help.

“Can we go, Eema?” Quinn looked so earnest, her eyes bright, her mind not on monsters for the first time all day.

“Do you really want to?” I handed her another bottle. “You don’t even know what it is.”

“I do, Eema,” she said. “I really really want to go.”

Mr. Vieira looked at me as if to say
See? I told you
.

“We’ll miss the mass,” he said, “but if we clean up fast when we’re done picking, we might make the parade.”

———

MRS. VIEIRA WAS
loading cases of her homemade pear preserves in the back of their silver pickup truck when we drove back to their house, freshly showered and changed. Quinn had put on what she considered her best outfit—a plaid dress shirt and a floral skirt, with green penny loafers; I had thrown on clean jeans and a black tank top, some worn huaraches, large sunglasses. A slash of lip gloss, which I hadn’t done in ages.

Ben came out of the house, carrying another box of preserves to add to the stack. His cargo shorts gave me a good glimpse of his hairy legs. I blushed as I remembered their tickly heft.

“So we meet out of bed,” he said as he walked down the steps, and I felt my blush grow deeper.

He set the box in the back of the truck. The jars clanked and settled inside. “Need anything else, Ma?” he asked. She shook her head.

He walked over and bent down next to Quinn. “Sorry I scared you last night,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said, but leaned hard into my side.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I couldn’t seem to look him in the eye as he stood back up, but I could feel him the way you feel static electricity, a thick buzz all over my skin.

WE PILED INTO
the Vieiras’ truck—Mr. and Mrs. Vieira in the front bucket seats, Quinn squeezed between me and Ben in the bench seat behind them. The center of Comice wasn’t too far away—just about a mile after crossing the yellow bridge—but the road was so uncharacteristically full of cars, it took almost fifteen minutes to get there. I stared out the window the whole time, too embarrassed to look in Ben’s direction.

Downtown Comice wasn’t much to speak of—just a couple of blocks of worn brick and wooden storefronts, many of them vacant, most built by Portuguese immigrants in the late 1800s,
the Vieiras among them. The majority of the Portuguese settlers in the Delta had become dairy farmers, but a few, like the Vieiras, had turned to pears. You could still buy Portuguese sweet bread and wine and cheese and linguica from little shops that also sold Twinkies and Bud Light. The street, normally quiet, was bustling with families and packs of teenagers as we drove slowly past.

We snaked through a residential area filled with small bungalows and neatly trimmed yards, to a large field that had been turned into a parking lot. The crowd didn’t seem rowdy, just excited. A couple of carnival rides twirled in a park on the other side of the field, booths set up all around them. Loud music, heavy on the trumpet, pumped through a sound system. Lights poured down on some sort of arena in the distance even though sunset was still hours away.

“Looks like the parade is just about to start,” said Ben. “We got here just in time.”

THE CROWD BY
the cars formed a channel between the park and a low, stucco community center on the side of the field. Everyone was turned toward the park, where a brass band, likely the one that had been blaring over the speakers, had assembled. The musicians began making their way down the aisle of cheering people, playing what was likely traditional Portuguese music. Quinn put her hands over her ears as they drew nearer. They were followed by a couple of cows decked out in garlands, pulling wooden carts full of waving children. Quinn took one hand from her ear to wave shyly back.

“The cows were blessed earlier today,” Ben told us. “Along with the cows we’ll be eating tonight.”

Behind the cows, women in traditional Portuguese outfits—colorful patterned scarves around their heads, equally colorful shawls over their white blouses, and wide colorful skirts—carried huge baskets of rolls. They tossed the bread to the crowd. I caught one—light and airy—and gave it to Quinn.

“The bread was blessed, too,” he said.

Quinn took a big bite, scattering crumbs down her shirt. “It just tastes like normal bread,” she said, disappointed, as if blessed bread should taste like magic.
Eat it all up
, I wanted to tell her.
We need all the blessings we can get
.

A group of girls were next, ranging in age from about five to seventeen, wearing poofy, sparkly dresses, velvet capes, and tiaras.

“Beauty pageant?” I asked.

“Different kind of queen,” he said.

The girls, it turns out, represented Queen Isabel; in the fourteenth century, she would sneak food to the poor, against the wishes of her husband, King Diniz. One day, Diniz came upon her when she had her apron full of rolls and demanded to know what she was carrying. “Roses,” she said, which made him suspicious—roses were not in bloom that time of year—but when he yanked at her apron, a flood of white flowers came tumbling out.

“It’s kind of sad,” he said, “how much money the families pour into this. Some have the capes hand-beaded in Portugal, thousands of dollars. The
festa
is supposed to be about giving to the community, but these dresses have become a competitive sport.”

The girls passed us and Quinn got very excited, waving and waving. An elaborately beaded saint beamed from the back of one teen’s purple velvet cape. A little girl’s pink satin cape featured a huge chalice and crown embroidered in metallic thread. A huge dove made of countless tiny seed pearls spread its wings across the red velvet backing of another. Some of the dresses had hoop skirts that made the girls look like they were floating down the dirt path.

I found myself worrying about the girls forced to wear these fancy things, their faces fluorescent with makeup; I worried about what they must have endured at home, their mothers coming at them with curling irons and mascara wands, expressions and expectation equally intense. The girls all looked proud and happy to be queens, though. None of them seemed to resent the crown.

When they reached the community center, a young girl walked toward them, holding a dove in a cage festooned with red ribbons. She handed the cage to the smallest queen, who opened its metal door. At first, the dove didn’t want to fly out, but the little queen shook the cage until the bird flopped out and flew listlessly into a nearby jacaranda tree.

“It’s supposed to be the Holy Spirit,” said Ben.

“Doesn’t look so spirited to me,” I said. Mrs. Vieira threw me an offended look, but Ben laughed, and we finally made eye contact. Just for a split second, but it made something zap in my blood.

“I have to help my parents unload the jam,” he said. “Why don’t you two go check out the fair before the
sopa
starts?”

THE SNACKS AT
the booths were unlike any fair food I had seen before. Fried sardines. Dark red octopus stew. A dish made with pork and clams. Lupini beans. Salt cod. Chestnuts. Quinn looked appalled by most of the offerings, but the sweets caught her eye. Spiced cookies. Fragrant rice pudding. Lemony doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar.

BOOK: Delta Girls
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