Children of the River

by Linda Crew

  Even after PE, she was still so distracted, she stood waiting for the bus by the curb a minute before remembering her aunt had sent her with the station wagon that morning so she could hurry home for tomato picking.

  She turned into the subdivision where their small house sat in a row with the others, the young, twiglike trees not yet large enough to soften the raw newness of the neighborhood. / hope Soka won't notice Pm late, she thought. They had to keep to American time now. Three-thirty meant three-thirty exactly.

  But when Soka flung open the door and ran out onto the driveway, she was clearly upset by something more important than Sundara's being five minutes late. “Niece” she cried in Khmer. “Quickly! Come see this letter. Grandmother and I can do nothing but weep all day” She hurried Sundara in, hardly giving her time to place her shoes on the mat by the door.

  Sundara set her books on the kitchen counter and followed her aunt into the living room. Grandmother crouched on a straw mat, her close-cropped gray head bowed in despair, touching the paper in question as if trying to decipher the strange markings with her gnarled fingers alone.

  Soka took the letter from her and thrust it at Sundara, who by now was trembling in sick anticipation, her mind whirling with the awful possibilities.

  “Will you boys turn down that foolishness?” Soka called to her sons in the next room. “We cannot think.” The hysterical cheering of a TV game show snapped off. Silence.

  Swallowing hard, Sundara unfolded the paper. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Thailand. News of her parents, her brother and sister? No, scanning the brief lines, she saw only the name of another aunt, Soka's sister Valinn, who, at the end of the last dry season, had scrambled down Khao-I-Dang mountain into a Thai border camp and collapsed in a malarial stupor.

  Sundara let out a tentative breath. “Younger Aunt, why are you so upset? It's not the news we want, but there is still hope, isn't there? It says here they need more information before we can sponsor her. They want us to—”

  “But look. Look.” Soka jabbed a finger at the crackly onionskin paper. “I've taken this to Prom Kea to tell me what the English says. And you see? ‘Do not contact us again about this case.’ Who can we turn to if not the United Nations? Prom Kea is telling his friends about this too. Everyone is very upset.”

  “Younger Aunt—”

  “Do they expect us to simply forget our families? My own sister? Oiee!”

  “Younger Aunt, do you see this word? Hesitate. It says, ‘Please do not hesitate to contact us again.’ It means just the opposite of what you thought. It's all right to write them more letters. They want us to.”

  Soka's round face went blank, then lit with a broad, embarrassed smile. “Oh” She put her palms to her cheeks. “Oh, I was so scared.” She dropped to a squat next to Grandmother. “It's a mistake,” she said into the old woman's ear. “The United Nations will still try to help us.” She allowed herself a moment to enjoy the relief, then jumped up. “That Prom Kea! He thinks he knows English so well! But then, I am too glad about this to be angry. Quick, Niece, change your clothes. There's some cold corn for you in the kitchen.” Then she called to the boys. “Ravy, Pon, come now! Grandmother, are you ready? We will pick many tomatoes tonight and send the money we earn to Valinn. Hurry, hurry, or the Lam family will pick the whole field before we get there.”

  Perfect weather for picking Mr. Bonner's fall raspberries and cherry tomatoes: warm, sunny, and dry. Sundara crouched over her row, her quick fingers stripping the small orange tomatoes from the vines. It hadn't taken them long to harvest the small berry patch, and the tomatoes were now thunking into the plastic buckets with a steady intensity.

  “Pon” Sundara called, brushing away the mosquito that tentatively tickled her lower lip. “I need an empty one.”

  Her six-year-old cousin picked his way through the scratchy vines with another cardboard flat in which he'd placed a dozen Styrofoam pint boxes. Sundara spilled the bucket of tomatoes into the flat.

  “Fore” On the other side of the blackberry and poison oak thickets that lined the fence, golfers strolled about the adjacent course, playing their odd game. To Sundara, the women golfers always seemed so brown and wrinkled. Americans certainly had funny ideas about what looked nice. She had even seen one blond girl pruning berry vines for Mr. Bonner in a bathing suit! Her skin was burned a deep brown, but she only seemed concerned with her nose, which was smeared with some kind of thick white paste. Sundara stood and retied the strings of her broad-brimmed straw hat. She did not want the sun to darken her skin, and avoided even the late afternoon rays.

  She stooped back to work, slapping another mosquito on her cheek. “Here's a full one,” she called. Ten-year-old Ravy carried the loaded flat to Mr. Bonner's truck, where Grandmother sat dreaming and sorting out the occasional bad tomato.

  Sundara's fingers flew. This was the last crop of the season and the best money-maker of all, an opportunity Soka did her best to guard. If all the refugees they knew who wanted work came to Mr. Bonner's small farm, no single family would earn much at all. Sundara had often heard Soka turn vague when the others tried to coax it out of her.

  “Ah, the cherry tomatoes again,” they would say with more than a trace of resentment. “And where can you possibly be picking raspberries in September? Are you trying to make your first million this year?”

  Soka would help these others if she could, Sundara knew, but their own family had to come first. As long as Valinn was still in Khao-I-Dang they had to send money to her. And what of the others in Kampuchea itself, the ones from whom they'd had no word? If they were alive, they might be needing money to bribe an escape. So Soka kept news of work to herself. And since Mr. Bonner couldn't communicate well with most of the Asians, she exerted a fair amount of control over how many families came to pick.

  Tonight, only the Lam family worked alongside them. The Lams had come to America just last year after escaping Vietnam by boat. They were Chinese, and as Soka always pointed out with a grudging admiration, the Chinese could practically smell money to be made. You could not expect to keep work secret from them. Lam Ming, the father, picked with admirable speed, even though Sundara thought it must hurt his pride to do this work at all, having managed his own wholesale produce company in his homeland.

  Faster, faster, Sundara urged herself, working steadily to the clank of the plastic bucket handles, the drumming of tomatoes on the bucket bottoms, the distant chug of Mr. Bonner's tractor as he disked under an early corn patch.

  At six Sundara's Uncle Naro appeared, having parked his new Ford near the Bonners’ house rather than dirty it on the dusty farm road. He had changed from office to work clothes, and carried a sack of Big Macs for the children.

  Soka glanced up just long enough to point out the next unpicked row to her husband. Naro kicked off his thongs, smoothly curled into a crouch, and proceeded to strip tomatoes into his bucket like a well-oiled machine.

  Sundara sat down next to Grandmother. She would have to eat quickly. It didn't seem right, taking too much time when Soka refused to stop even for a minute. But how Sundara's body longed for rest! She could have laid herself in the dirt and been asleep instantly.

  “Are you hungry, Grandmother?”

  The old woman sniffed. “Not for that pig slop.”

  None of the grown-ups cared for American food, and they hated the idea of eating in the middle of such dirty work. They preferred to go hungry until they could bathe and eat something decent. But Sundara was ravenous, and as for Ravy, he loved burgers and fries. He ate them every chance he got, and laughed at Soka's warning: “Watch out! You'll start to smell like an American” Now he slurped down his Coke, dumped the ice, and trotted out to fill the paper cup with wayward golf balls, which he planned to sell.

  Grandmother sighed. “I never thought I’d live to see my family work the dirt like peasants.”

  “Uncle says you loved the garden in Ream.”

  “A garden is one thing. To slave in someone else's field is another.”

>   “This is hard work, but surely it isn't slavery, Grandmother. We are earning money.”

  “Rubbish! Keeping your knees busy for someone else. How I miss the warm Cambodian sun, my loom in the pleasant shade of the house. Why did they ever force me to come here?”

  Sundara did not try to answer. No one could make Naro's mother understand that she was dreaming of a Kampuchea that no longer existed. If she'd stayed behind, she would have seen real slavery. If she'd lived.

  “Any day now they'll be locking me in one of those terrible nursing homes.”

  Sundara sighed. She had heard this so often, it no longer moved her as it had at first. “You know your son will never lock you away, Grandmother. Hasn't he promised?”

  “Perhaps a promise doesn't mean the same thing in America. Nothing else does.”

  Sundara stood, carefully gathering the paper wrappings and stuffing them in the sack. Thank the heavens the season was nearly over. They had begun in June with strawberries and picked every crop in the valley that needed swift and careful human hands for harvest. A whole ton of boysenberries, three tons of pole beans. Sometimes the crops overlapped. One day they had come home exhausted from blueberry picking to find the phone ringing. It was Mr. Bonner. Did they want to pick tomatoes that evening? Wordlessly, they'd piled back into the car.

  Tonight they picked until dusk. Their practiced hands could find the little tomatoes with their eyes closed, but they had to quit when they could no longer tell the properly pale orange fruits from the green or overripe red.

  Sundara was already at the truck when Soka picked her way, barefoot, out of the tangled rows, weighed down by a stack of three flats. She set them on the wooden pallet with a grunt and straightened up, bracing her back, rubbing her dirty sleeve across her forehead. Strands of black hair had escaped from the knot at the back of her neck and were sticking to her cheeks. She sighed deeply. Then, noticing Sundara watching her, she returned one of those long, searching looks that always made Sundara uneasy.

  “What do you think, Niece? Would your mother call me ‘little pampered lady’ now as she used to?”

  Sundara hesitated. Was Soka feeling proud or sad? She answered honestly. “I think not, Younger Aunt.”

  She busied herself counting the flats and helping Mr. Bonner load them. Fifty for their family. They had done well.

  “You people sure can pick,” Mr. Bonner said, stacking the last flats on the truck.

  “We pick more tomorrow?” Soka asked in her broken but confident English.

  Sundara wondered where her aunt found the will to sound so eager for more work when a moment before she seemed ready to collapse.

  “Well,” Mr. Bonner said, considering, “how about Sunday? My wholesalers won't take anything on Saturday night.”

  “Okay, Sunday. But first have to go to church.” Soka insisted the family present themselves regularly at the First Presbyterian Church, which had sponsored them. “Pray to Buddha, pray to our ancestors, or pray to Jesus Christ,” she always said. “It's all the same anyway. The important thing is to go and show our gratitude.”

  “Do you want to call some of the other families, then?” Mr. Bonner asked.

  “Oh, we pick all,” Soka put in quickly. “No problem.” She knew the words to say to Mr. Bonner. Useful phrases such as “Those other people not pick clean. We pick clean.” Or “We happy to start more early in the morning if you want.”

  “We also wish to pick,” said Chun-Ling, the Lam daughter who did most of the interpreting for her family.

  “Yes, Lam family, too, of course,” Soka said, nodding deferentially at the girl's mother. Sundara and Chun-Ling exchanged glances. Neither had made any effort to become friends, but there was a certain understanding between them. They were, as the Americans put it, in the same boat.

  “I guess I'll see you tomorrow morning, then, right?” Mr. Bonner said to Sundara.

  Sundara nodded, proud. She was the one he'd singled out to sell his produce at the Saturday farmers’ market.

  They plodded up the parallel ruts of the dirt road, passing through alternating pockets of warm and cool air, wispy puffs of haze forming where the sun-heated earth met the chill of the coming night. Sundara carried Pon in her aching arms, his head nodding sleepily against her shoulder. A few stars blinked, but before they could brighten, the moon loomed above the eastern treetops, glowing orange through the field smoke.

  Soka stooped to gather some tender young pigweed she had spotted earlier. She liked to scold Mr. Bonner about all the good food he grew without trying and then never bothered to harvest.

  “Listen,” she whispered, standing up, holding the greens. “What's that sound?”

  They stopped, and in the quiet punctuated only by the chirping crickets, Sundara heard a distant roar. It died away, then rose again, coming from the direction of town. They all looked west, back across the Willamette River, where the lights of town paled the sky.

  “I know” Ravy cried. “It's the high school football game! The fans are going wild!”

  “Soka, this son of ours! He's so American.”

  “I know. How do you think I feel, always having a child explain things to me?” Her voice wavered between annoyance and pride.

  “Odd, isn't it?” Naro said. “How the sound carries over the fields.”

  The football game, Sundara thought. That's probably what the rest of the students were doing tonight. She shifted Pon in her arms and followed the others along the soft dirt road.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next morning at dawn Sundara pulled the station wagon into the parking lot of Mr. Bonner's produce stand. Gently she shook Ravy awake.

  “Time to work, Ab-own.” She did not often call him Little Tender One these days, but at this moment it seemed fitting. He looked so small and vulnerable in sleep, breathing softly through parted lips.

  He blinked, looked around, and sighed with ten-year-old resignation. “Why do we bother going home at all?”

  She smiled. Not a bad question. It had been only a few hours since they left the night before.

  “Come. We must hurry.”

  While Ravy trimmed lettuce, Sundara cut an armload of pungent dillweed, tying it into bundles. Then she waded into the dewy, overgrown flower patch and went to work with her pocketknife. The sun's rays were shooting over the horizon now, touching the bronze strawflowers and the yellow apples in the orchard with gold.

  “Don't forget your wreath,” Mr. Bonner reminded her when the big flatbed truck was loaded. He took the circlet of rose-red flowers from its peg in the fruit stand. “Got to keep my reputation. Only farmer down there who's got a princess pushing his stuff.”

  Sundara smiled, shyly placing it on her head. The first time she'd worn the wreath, Mrs. Bonner had said she looked exactly like an exotic Sunset Magazine travel ad: Come to captivating Tahiti, discover enchantment Sundara had blushed, unsure if this was to be taken as a compliment. Then Ravy had elbowed her in that American way he'd learned, and hissed in Khmer, “They think you look pretty, get it?”

  Of course. The Bonners always meant to be nice— even if they sometimes said strange things. And Mr. Bonner did seem pleased with her work, had even offered a full-time job all summer if she would work only for him. But Soka and Naro thought the family should work together. “A bundle of chopsticks cannot be broken like one alone,” Naro reminded her, and Soka added that even at the piecework rate Sundara might earn more by picking. “Work more hours and help watch little Pon at the same time.” Still, the idea of guaranteed work had its appeal. They hadn't forgotten the year the price fell so low on cherry tomatoes that Mr. Bonner couldn't afford to have them picked. Finally they agreed to let Sundara work the Saturday markets. Ravy would be her helper. And, she suspected, her chaperone.

  The fir-lined ridges of the Coast Range foothills etched a faint line above the swirling fog as Sundara drove west, back toward town. She hoped the last wisps would burn off quickly; she didn't want to be wearing her shabby jacket when people started coming to the market. But it was still chilly when they pul
led into the municipal parking lot by the river. Ravy got out, hopping from one sneakered foot to the other, slapping his thin arms around himself.

  “It is cold, isn't it?” Sundara said. She envied the Cambodians who had left Oregon for the warmth of southern California. A warmer place might have made her family's exile from Kampuchea less harsh, but they'd had to go where the sponsors could be found. And a sunnier climate alone would not be enough to lure her family away now, not when they finally had a house of their own —a new American subdivision house—and Naro was once again working as an accountant instead of a dishwasher. And at least Oregon was green. Here the luminous, newly sprouted grass fields surrounding Willamette Grove reminded her of the paddies of tender rice shoots covering the lowland Kampuchean countryside. It was good to dwell among living things. She thought of the refugees the resettlement people had sent to the cold gray cities of the northern states. How could they bear it, after the lush green and rich brown of Kampuchea?

  “Let's hurry,” she said to Ravy now. “You'll feel warmer if we keep moving.” They arranged the empty crates as a makeshift counter and tugged the full crates off the truck, struggling to set up ahead of the customers. Already the first eager buyers were poking into the wire-bound crates of corn, asking prices, getting in the way. Sundara quickly filled the bins to give them the overflowing look Mr. Bonner wanted, set out the pails of purple zinnias and spicy pink carnations, then put the raspberries in a tempting spot. It never failed—customers would scurry from all over the lot like ants surrounding sugar to admire and buy the luscious ruby-red fruit.

  The bakery lady pulled in next to them, and at the first whiff of warm pastry, Ravy turned his big eyes up at Sundara.