Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (36 page)

Soon my buche was full, so I started down the ladder. When I took the first step I heard something tumble through the branches below me. I looked down just in time to see the last apple fall out the bottom of the bucket.

“Dammit!”

The knotted ropes on the bottom had come out of the clips. I figured the knots weren’t big enough. So I put another knot in them and went back to picking. When the buche was full, I started down the ladder again. As I stepped on the bottom rung, I heard tumbling apples. Just the right side had come undone, but it still let all the apples out.

I yelled at the tree, “What am I doing wrong?”

So, it was back up the ladder. This time when I started down, I kept my eyes on the knots. Half way down, a branch snagged the left rope and yanked it out of the clip. When I leaned over to grab the bag, a twig jabbed into my right eye. Instinctively, my lid shut. But that didn’t stop the twig from ramming into the socket between the bridge of my nose and my eyeball. I froze as apples bounced off the ladder and down to the ground.

It felt like I had a whole tree in my eye. I was afraid if I moved, it would rip my eye ball out, but I couldn’t just stand there. So I slowly backed my head away from the branch. As it came out I could feel the knobbiness of
the twig rubbing my eyeball, and I expected to find blood and eye tissue on the twig. Would I be forever blind on my right side?

I wasn’t. My vision was blurred for a while and my eye was sore, but otherwise I was all right. Apple picking wasn’t so much fun anymore.

Before I went back up the ladder, I tied the ropes into the buche clips so the tree couldn’t rob me. By the end of the day I had filled three of the twenty-two bushel bins. At fifty-five cents a bushel that first day netted me $36.10, and a stick in the eye.

“Why don’t you take the day off?” Patricia said.

The next morning when I stood up from our bed, I moaned and quickly sat back down. Every inch of me hurt, especially my shoulders and arms, and my right eye felt like it was three times the size of my left. Patricia rubbed my back as she said, “You aren’t used to doing this kind of work. Give your body a day to rest.”

“They’ll all think I’m a sissy.”

When I stood up and walked into the bathroom, my muscles were screaming, “Bud, we
are
sissies! Please don’t make us do this!”

After I cooked and ate breakfast, and packed my lunch, I went out in the yard to climb on my bike. I was strapping on my helmet when Chris came out the door and said, “You want a lift to the farm?”

“No thanks, I can ride.”

He opened the door to his pickup “How many bins did you get yesterday?”

“Three.”

He walked around to the back of his truck. “So how do you feel this morning?”

“Fine.”

He opened the tailgate and turned to me. “Who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve picked apples all my life, and even though most of those people in the orchard are half my age, I bet I can still out-pick any of them.
But I also know, if I filled three bins today, I wouldn’t be worth a damn for a week.”

He motioned me over to the truck. “Put your bike in the back. Let me give you a lift to work, old man.”

On my second day of apple picking, I was the first one in the orchard. It was chilly, but the sun was out. And aside from the geese on the pond, it was peaceful among the apple trees. At first, my body protested when I began to pick, but soon my muscles limbered up and relaxed into the work.

I had just emptied my fourth bucket in a bin, when the first car full of Mexicans pulled into the orchard. Before long the morning quiet was replaced with that south-of-the-border beat, and the apple trees were jabbering in Spanish. The orchard was festive again.

The sky began to turn gray while I ate my lunch. From the north, came a wind with the feel of winter in it. I was up in a tree on my third row of Jonah Golds, when the first bit of ice landed on me. Within moments, it was a full blown sleet storm. Through the sounds of the ice landing on the trees, I heard ladders clang and car doors slam. The Mexican voices didn’t have the happy tenor I had grown accustomed to.

After a few minutes, the sleet gave way to snow. It was a Christmas-card kind of snow that quickly turned everything white. I was in awe of how beautiful it was–but it was obvious the Mexicans were not pleased.

I don’t know why, but suddenly I started singing. “Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but my dear you’re so delightful. . . . Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!”

I sang it at least half a dozen times, butchering the words and getting louder with each rendition. Whether the Mexicans heard, or understood me, I don’t know. But when I finished there was not another voice or any music to be heard. The only sounds were those of the snowflakes landing, and the crunching of my foot steps on the way to the apple bin.

It didn’t take me long to figure out everyone else had left. No one told me to quit picking if it snowed, so I kept working–but it was a frigid affair. The icy apples were hard to hold and my fingers got numb from handling them. So I put gloves on, but they were soon soaked. So I decided it was better to pick bare handed. The worst part was touching the cold aluminum ladder, which made my fingers feel like they were on fire. But I soon came up with a routine that made it more tolerable. I’d put gloves on to move the ladder, pick bare handed, then warm my hands in my pockets while I walked to the bin.

It had been snowing for almost an hour, when I heard the motor of a vehicle coming toward me. I was climbing down the ladder when Chooey’s truck stopped beside me. Through his open window he asked, “What are you doing?”

“Picking apples.”

That little-boy grin bloomed on his face. “I thought so. You okay?”

About twenty minutes after he drove off, a parade of Mexican cars and trucks pulled across the dam into the orchard. The snow had slacked to flurries, and before long it stopped. The clouds parted, the sun came out and soon the Mexican music returned.

“Chooey used you today?”

Chris was handing me a platter of roast beef that Patricia had fixed for dinner as I asked, “How’s that?”

“After he found you picking apples in the snow, he went to the house and told the Mexicans, “If Loco Gringo can pick in the snow, you can too.”

Karen said, “You mean Gringo Loco, don’t you?”

Chris pointed his fork at me and said, “No. Him they call ‘Loco Gringo!’”

The evening of my third day of apple picking, Chooey stopped by the barn while I was cleaning manure out of Della’s stall. He asked, “How’s it going?”

“Great! I finished those three rows. Where do you want me to pick next?”

“I’ll meet you there in the morning and show you.”

The next day when I got to the orchard, I found a stack of empty bins at the end of the rows I had just picked. I was dismounting my bicycle when Juan pulled up on his tractor. He was Chooey’s cousin, and one of those who stayed in the Harding House. Next to me, Juan was the oldest one working in the orchard. I met him my first day picking and liked him right off the bat–partly because he spoke some English and was closer to my age, and he was the only one who seemed interested in communicating with me.

Juan had a wife and three children back in Mexico, and he had not been home in three years. His goal was to save enough money to open a small grocery store in his village. So he sent most of each paycheck home for his wife to put away.

“Chooey sent me to show you what to do,” Juan said.

“Where are we going?”

He pointed to the apples on the ground. “Here. You pick these up.”

My heart sank. My back cringed. I had two broken vertebrae in my lower back. One as the result of a bicycle accident, and the other from when I fell off the roof of my house. Every time I nailed shoes on Della, my back would hurt from being bent over so long. What was this going to do to it?

“I thought they picked the ones off the ground with a machine.”

“No, hombre. If you pick the trees, you pick the ground.”

Juan grabbed my buche, put the strap around his waist and squatted so the bucket dangled between his thighs. Like a machine he began to rake the apples into it with his hands. In less than two minutes the bucket was full. While he waddled toward the stack of bins he said, “These for jugo. Uh, how you say? Juice.”

“So just throw them in?”

“Si. No big deal.”

Easy for him to say. Juan was at least a head and a half shorter than me, and he didn’t have a broken back. But those were just excuses, and there were apples to be picked up. So with the strap around my waist, I squatted down and tried to do what Juan had done. But I didn’t fit under the trees like he did, and my back couldn’t take squatting that long. Soon I was on my hands and knees crawling through the fruit, some of which had begun to rot. Within minutes my jeans were soaked with apple juice and coated with pulp. My nostrils were inundated with the sensations of vinegar, and my back was a race track of spasms.

When I crawled out from under the tree, I remembered Chooey’s raised eyebrow when I said, “I figure being tall will be to my advantage.” No wonder he said, “We’ll see.”

Apple picking continued through Thanksgiving and into the first week of December. Weather was always a factor. Some days we couldn’t pick because the apples were too cold. Every morning, Chooey and Chris tested them with pressure gauges and thermometers to make sure fingers wouldn’t harm them.