by Yvonne Prinz
“No.” One hand comes out of a pocket and scratches his head.
I kick Storm in the shin. She glares at me, her eyes wide.
Forest nods toward my camera. “What have you got there, a Nikon?”
“Yeah. An FM.”
“Cool. What do you shoot? Color or black-and-white?”
“Mostly black-and-white, a bit of color.”
“May I?” He picks up my camera off the seat.
“Be my guest.”
“Digital?”
“Nah, I’m old-school.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
“Where do you get it processed?”
“I mostly do my own. I have a darkroom. Some of it I take to the Looking Glass in Berkeley.” The truth is I give it to Steve to drop off for me.
The look on his face tells me that I might be racking up some cool points with him. He looks through the viewfinder at me and adjusts the focus. He snaps a photo before I have a chance to make my camera face.
“Nice picture,” he says, laying the camera down carefully. “Well, my coffee’s ready. I’ll see you around, I guess.”
I grope for meaning in his last words but maybe he just meant “I’ll see you around.” Around where? The barn dance? The book club? The Old Timer’s Cookout? Target practice? He strolls over to the register and pays Millie for the coffee. The bell tinkles again and he’s gone, walking up the street the way he came. I crane my neck and watch him out the glass window till he disappears.
“Okay, you really suck at talking to guys,” says Storm, disgusted.
“I know, I know. I never said I was any good at it.”
She shrugs. “Well, he’s weird anyway. He likes you, though.”
“How can you tell?”
“It was pretty obvious. Man, Roar, sometimes it’s really hard to believe you’re a city girl.”
On the way home, riding behind Storm on her scooter, her little skirt flapping in the breeze for everyone driving by to get a good look at her underwear (and by “everyone” I mean four cars), I muse over Forest. How do you figure out a guy like that? Most of the people around here can be sorted into nice tidy categories just by observing a few clues. If a guy drives a truck with nine-foot wheels and a rifle rack, well, I think you can pretty much figure out how he voted in the last election and you could probably even go so far as to say that he doesn’t support feminism. If a person is driving a truck that runs on biodiesel with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker and he or she is wearing Birkenstocks, it’s not too hard to fill in the rest. But Forest? He’s a tough one. He’s not giving me too many clues, and if Storm is right and he likes me, he’s playing it pretty cool.
Storm drops me at my mailbox and I walk up the road toward the house. I’m wondering where Rufus got to until I see a familiar truck parked next to my dad’s. It belongs to Reynaldo Valdez. He’s a grape grower from the next county over and a good friend of my dad’s. Rufus loves Reynaldo more than life itself, which makes me think that he’s a very good judge of character. When Reynaldo visits, no one else exists for Rufus; a gang of wandering thieves could rob us blind and Rufus would just sit there licking Reynaldo’s hand.
Reynaldo came to California from Mexico at sixteen and lied about his age to get a job in the vineyards. He has a third-grade education but he worked really hard. He rode a bike he bought for twenty dollars to the vineyard every day. Now he manages nine hundred acres of wine grapes in two counties. In the last few years, he started bottling wine under the Valdez name. His success story is rare, though. Reynaldo has been a U.S. citizen since 1996 but most of the Latinos who come to California from Mexico to work the vineyards are undocumented and most of them won’t ever be citizens. My dad goes on and on about how congress wants to spend billions to keep these people out. The California wine industry would be crippled without them. Not to mention the agriculture industry. Reynaldo met my dad back when we lived in the city. My dad defended his nephew, who’d been charged with jacking a car in the Presidio. His nephew was in Sacramento at the time of the carjacking. It was a clear case of mistaken identity. Reynaldo and my dad got on like a house on fire and they’ve been good friends ever since.
I pick up my pace and skip up the wooden porch steps and into the house. Reynaldo is sitting at the table with my dad. They each have a glass of red wine in front of them, and a dusty bottle sits in the middle of the table next to Reynaldo’s signature straw cowboy hat. When Reynaldo sees me, he jumps from his chair and gives me a bear hug.
“Aurora borealis! Let me look at you!” he says in his thickly accented English. He stands back and holds my hand up in the air, spinning me around as though we’re dancing. “Hermosa, beautiful! Senorita, if I were a young man I would run off with you!”
“Stop it, Reynaldo.” I giggle. He’s been promising to run away with me since I was six. His charm always melts me into a puddle. He has the kind of face you could look at for hours: darkly handsome with intense laughing eyes, broad cheekbones, and dazzling white teeth. I know that he wants to tell me that I look like my mother, who adored him, but he knows better than to say that in front of my dad. Rufus hangs on his every word and tries to situate himself as close as possible to Reynaldo without actually getting in his lap. Reynaldo sits back down in his chair and absentmindedly scratches Rufus’s head.
“Aurora, try our new cabernet.”
He hands me his glass and I take a sip. The deep, woody scent travels up my nose. It tastes rich and grapey and old. It makes me think of cool dark rooms made of oak.
“Delicious.” I smack my lips. “The best so far.”
He beams. “We produced only one hundred cases and all of them are spoken for already,” he says proudly.
My dad leans back in his chair. He sips his wine and grins. He’s watched Reynaldo struggle for so many years and it does him good to see Reynaldo happy and successful. We haven’t seen Reynaldo out here for some time; it’s a long drive over here from where he lives, and I have a feeling he might be here to talk to my dad about the Sylvia matter. My dad respects his opinion and he knows only too well what Reynaldo’s dealt with since he left Mexico.
I leave them alone. I have some film to develop out in my darkroom. Even as I head out the back door, I can hear their voices becoming louder and angrier as they switch back and forth from Spanish to English. I know that this argument will go on for some time and end in hugs and maybe even some tears. I’ve seen it before. Otherwise, the farm is quiet. Bruce crows from time to time, breaking the silence, but Sunday is a day off for Miguel and Steve and it’s the most peaceful day of the week around here. The crickets fill the air with a soft electric buzz. Even the neat rows of vegetables seem to be relaxing, basking in the bright sunlight, their leaves ruffling slightly in the gentle breeze off the delta. The air is perfumed with dill and lavender. I wander over to the Mission fig trees, letting my feet drag in the dirt, kicking up the dust. I pluck a couple of perfect purple orbs. I tear one of them open and study its crimson jeweled interior before I take a bite. It tastes like a faraway place to me.
Chapter 6
The first time I saw the farm it was hard to hide my disappointment. Even though I must have had a rough idea of what a farm out here might look like, I’d somehow built a fantasy farm in my mind with pretty wooden fences and sleek horses with billowing manes and tails prancing around their paddocks. I’d pictured a butter yellow farmhouse with white trim and neatly painted outbuildings to match, and an archway over the drive with “Lazy K” written on it and a horseshoe for luck. I suppose I’d probably read too many Pony Club Camp books as a kid. The fantasy farm probably exists in Kentucky somewhere but it has nothing to do with the farm my dad bought.
The first thing I noticed when we pulled into the driveway was a tornado of dust swirling around in front of the car and I thought, Great, a twister. Grab Toto. I had no idea that it was a sign of things to come. Dust coats everything on a farm: the buildings, your car, your skin, your hair, and even your teeth.
I loo
ked at my dad with what must have been alarm but he was already out of the car, excited to show me “the place.”
The farmhouse looked abandoned, not the kind of abandoned where the windows are boarded up but recently abandoned, and badly in need of a coat of paint. In fact, the entire farm was in need of a coat of paint. Every piece of wood on every building screamed “I’m old and I’m tired.” Rusted out pieces of farm equipment were scattered everywhere and had been there so long that monster weeds were growing up around them. An old truck with no wheels or windows or doors sat next to an outbuilding with springs escaping from the cracked leather on the seats.
Bob Soames, the farmer who my dad bought the farm from, had left the day before. He moved, with his wife, to a retirement community in Phoenix with a nine-hole golf course and an Olympic-size pool featuring Aquacise classes. They don’t allow pets there, at least not mangy farm dogs, so Rufus was the only member of our welcoming committee. He seemed awfully happy to see us and I can’t imagine how traumatizing it must have been for him to watch a moving van full of furniture pull away without being asked to come along. Did he just sit there on the porch all night long, hoping they would come back? We bonded right away, my first farm friend and I.
My dad chose this farm because Farmer Bob was deep into organic farming. The soil was already in good shape and he wouldn’t have to detox the place. He could start farming organically immediately. In other words, he bought this place based on a pile of dirt. Pretty farmhouses didn’t figure into the equation; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad hadn’t even looked at the house.
We walked through the property with Rufus in the lead. My dad kept trying to make me visualize how it was all going to look when he was finished with it but it only made me tired. I just couldn’t imagine how we could possibly do it all, but my dad was full of energy and ideas and he almost skipped from place to place, talking, planning, and quoting from his sustainable farming books till my head hurt. He seemed to have it all figured out but I was doubtful. I couldn’t recall my dad ever completing even a simple home-improvement project when we lived in the city, and just because you wake up one morning and start calling yourself a farmer, that doesn’t mean you are one.
After we walked the property we went back up to the house and pulled open the creaky screen door. The house smelled a bit like rotting wood. Bob had left some furniture behind; basically, all the stuff that didn’t belong in his shiny new life: a La-Z-Boy recliner with worn-out armrests in the living room, a wooden rocker, and a radio the size of a Buick that looked like it was about a hundred years old (my dad was quick to let me know it worked). In the kitchen they left us an old farm table and six mismatched chairs. The cupboards were empty but the pantry held jars of pickles and jams and tomatoes, all carefully labeled and dated in small, precise handwriting.
I went upstairs to my new bedroom and sat on the edge of the iron bed frame. Without a mattress it looked like a medieval torture device. I looked around at the faded rose wallpaper and felt like I was a thousand miles from anything meaningful. Instead of getting ourselves a new life, we’d taken over someone else’s old discarded life. I couldn’t imagine how I would survive in this place. I looked up at the stained, cracked ceiling and vowed that I would find a way out somehow.
My dad hired Javier, an odd-job carpenter and the brother of Jesus, the plumber. Javier arrived very early every morning and set to work with my dad on his list of jobs.
The first job on the list was the bunkhouse, a place for the farmworkers to sleep. Dad chose a storage shed for this and Javier patched the roof and insulated the walls and then nailed sheets of plywood over the insulation. I painted the plywood white, first painting six-foot curse words and then painting white over them. If Javier saw them he never said anything. My dad bought two sets of bunk beds from a now-defunct Christian summer camp and we wrestled them through the door. The final touch on the bunkhouse was an outdoor shower. It ended up looking pretty rustic, but then we weren’t exactly building the Four Seasons Hotel. The outhouse was already there but my dad and Javier “upgraded” it, which means they put a new toilet seat on and fixed the door so you could lock it.
As soon as the bunkhouse was done my dad hired Steve and Miguel so that we could start the business of farming immediately. He found Steve at a farmers’ market in Berkeley and they hit it off right away. He offered him better money than he was making and the position of farm manager. Miguel appeared at our door one morning and my dad hired him on the spot after looking at his calloused hands. Farmer Bob had done a fine job of getting a lot of stuff in the ground before he left (he must have known our first year would be a struggle). All we had to do was water and feed it and let it do its thing. It would be our meager income for the coming months till we got the farm up and running. My dad sweet-talked his way into the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, and getting a stall at the Saturday market here in town was a breeze. Then he started working on local and not-so-local restaurants, promising fresh produce deliveries twice a week. We were the first farm from out here to do that and a lot of chefs were eager to give it a try.
When Javier and my dad finished my darkroom, they moved on to a farm stand on the roadside next to the farm’s gate. It’s sort of like a grown-up version of a lemonade stand. These farm stands are everywhere out here and they work on the honor system. You take what you want and leave the money in a coffee can. Even the Buddhist monastery up the road has one. They sell perfect fragrant ambrosia melons and an odd assortment of exotic Asian produce.
Now, being a city girl, I assumed that the coffee can would disappear in a hot minute, but it didn’t. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone’s coffee can disappearing. It’s like the coffee cans are considered sacred. Stealing one would be like taking one of those collection boxes next to the candles in a church. You would surely get hit by a bolt of lightning on your way out. Besides, here in farm country people don’t like to mess with one another’s livelihoods.
Somehow (because no one else would do it), it became my job to stock the farm stand and collect the money every day. Whatever we were selling had to be weighed out into little green baskets that held roughly a pound, or else I would have to bunch lavender and rosemary into neat bouquets with a rubber band, which left a scent on my fingers that would last for days. Then I would post the prices on a little chalkboard.
I often pointed out to my dad that, before we moved here, I didn’t have a job, nor did I want one, and suddenly I seemed to be working ten hours a day on something that I had absolutely no interest in. He was always quick to respond with the fact that the alternative was school. I’d wrapped up ninth grade at my city school early after my dad spoke with my teachers and arranged for me to take all my exams before we left. It didn’t hurt that my grades were already good. My grades have somehow always been good. I even skipped sixth grade (a curse back then; I still looked like a little girl among all the developing “young women”). If I’d known that my dad was arranging for all this so that he’d have slave labor, I probably wouldn’t have been so excited about finishing school early. School was never this hard. At night, my dad and I fell into bed exhausted. I’d never been so tired in my life, and a day on a farm starts alarmingly early, so something as luxurious as sleeping in is out of the question. My pale Irish skin had developed little freckles everywhere even with goo-gobs of sunscreen, and I was covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises.
Steve and Miguel got to work putting in raised beds with drip irrigation. We would be growing all things green in these: baby spinach, arugula, pepper cress, and mache. After they finished that, they cleaned out the greenhouse, chased away the pigeons, and replaced the broken glass panes. This is where we would start the seeds for the baby greens and most of the other plants and then transplant them to the raised beds and the regular garden. My dad and Steve also planted a few marijuana plants in there for their “private use” and tended them like they were premature newborns in an incubator.
&nbs
p; It took me a solid week to clean out the ancient barn. I hauled out enough crap to make a giant bonfire. You could probably see it from space. I was stung by two bees on two separate days and then I cut my knuckle open on a glass window. Who knew there was so much blood in a knuckle? I lost about a gallon of it before my dad and Steve got me to the hospital. I looked like the star of a slasher movie. I also threw up in the hospital parking lot. Not pretty.
There are three stalls in the barn from back when they kept horses. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow I cleared out all the straw and the thousand-year-old poop. I came across a bat and her tiny baby bats, sleeping upside down with their leathery wings wrapped around them like Dracula’s cape. Under the straw in one of the stalls, I found a bunch of loose boards, which I pried up, hoping for a hidden treasure: a chest of gold coins or bullion or bonds or anything to help get me out of this mess. Instead I found a black metal box and a rat trap with a dried-up rat in it. The box was filled with old photos: several sepia-toned wedding photos of a handsome, young, large-eared groom and his delicate-looking bride. They appear shy and hopeful. There was another photo of the groom but in this one he’s in an army uniform. He looks proud and scared at the same time. There was also one of a baby in a christening gown, a beautiful little girl with rosebud lips. The last photo in the stack was our farmhouse, newly painted with window boxes and a porch swing. A little girl in a smocked dress and white patent leather shoes is sitting on the porch steps. The oak tree barely touches the top of the eaves and there’s a rooster weather vane on the spine of the roof. I figured that this must be the first young family to own this place and I wondered what happened to them. I wondered if they were able to make a go of things here or if the husband even made it back from the war. In the box I also found a Saint Christopher medallion on a chain and an army medal, a bronze cross with an outstretched hawk or an eagle in the middle. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would leave these mementos behind. How could a person forget about them? I took the box into the house and put it in my dresser drawer.
