Strawberry Sunday Read online

Rita Lombardi was her name. She was twenty-five years old, of Italian descent, and hailed from a town I’d never heard of named Haciendas, somewhere between Watsonville and Salinas. Her hair and eyes were soft brown, her nose and chin were as pointed as awls, her skin was the color of sole, and her spirits were as rampant as wind. She was engaged to be married to a man named Carlos Reyna and she was the most delightful young woman I’d ever met with the exception of my daughter Eleanor. Although I’d had major surgery, and was taking half a dozen potent pharmaceuticals a day, Rita Lombardi was by far my best therapy.

  We’d encountered each other for the first time two weeks earlier, in the corridor outside my room. We were each walking with help, supported by nurse’s aides and by the transparent juices dripping out of the IVs we towed in our wakes. We’d smiled as we passed each other in the hall, one day and then the next, walking in opposite directions, wishing we were anywhere but where we were. On the third day we’d met yet again, this time navigating on our own with the aid only of our walkers and our determination. Rita stopped to talk the usual hospital talk about the food and the nurses and the smells, but her manic energy and her oddly genuine interest in my welfare made the usual somehow remarkable. Her eyes pierced the shields that shutter my soul, laying bare my inner secrets, making it impossible to be other than candid with her. The third day we walked together, I told her about Charley and me and how he’d died, told her more than I’d told anyone else before or since.

  After that, we got together twice a day, at ten and two sharp, and walked in tandem for a full hour each time, an hour that seemed more like a minute. I don’t know what Rita imagined during these moments, but my own private fantasy was that we were on board a ship to the Caribbean, taking a turn on deck before we retired for the evening, elegant and aristocratic and in love with ourselves and our lives and each other. That’s what medication can do to you, I guess—I’d never had that sort of silk stocking fantasy in the previous forty years.

  Rita was in the hospital because of two birth defects that, now that her body had fully matured, could finally be surgically remedied. Her legs were the main problem—she’d been club-footed at birth, in both limbs, to the point that she couldn’t walk any distance without the aid of crutches. Her face needed attention as well. She’d had a large birthmark on her right cheek that made her look, in her words, like she’d slid into third base on her face. She’d had several plastic surgeries to remedy the facial flaw and now they’d taken care of the feet, and her new look and new alignment had made her ecstatic—from time to time I was certain she would start flying around the ward like a wren. Regarding her now, with her complexion free of blemish and her feet straight and true in their flexible soft casts, it was hard to imagine she had ever been other than perfect.

  I took a quick nap, then strolled into the hall. It still hurt in the gut when I walked, and my legs still moved as if someone other than me was the puppeteer, but it was lots better than the first time I tried it, when I was certain with every step that I was going to split wide open and spill my viscera over the floor, an embarrassment to myself and to the doctor who concluded I was ready to promenade, and a nuisance to the aides who would have to mop up after me. But now I was a veritable sprite, tripping through the tulips or at least the vinyl tile, feeling like jumping for joy when I saw Rita Lombardi shuffling toward me with a smile on her narrow face that made Meg Ryan seem like a grump.

  She wore powder blue pajamas with daisies blooming all over them and carried a little brown bear. The bear looked more in need of medical attention than either of us—Rita told me his name was Brownie and he had been given to her by her father when she turned two. Her father had died shortly afterward, so the bear had become both sentimental and symbolic; even now she refused to sleep a single night without it. I have some things in my life that serve the same function and given what happened to Charley, I expect to have a few more.

  “Good afternoon, John Marshall Tanner.”

  “Hi, Rita Maria Lombardi.”

  “You look like a man who’s ready to travel.”

  “Friday morning, they say.”

  She wriggled like a rabbit. “That’s so cool. I’m really happy for you.”

  “How about you?” I asked, with an odd tic of trepidation at the thought of life in the ward without her.

  She sobered. “This afternoon, I think.”

  My stomach knotted and my voice took on an artificial echo. “Really? That’s wonderful. But I thought they wanted to wait till next week.”

  “I guess I’m coming along better than they thought I would.” She touched her cheek where the birthmark had been replaced by a slice of fresh flesh. The graft had come from her hip. She’d made a bawdy joke the first time she told me about it.

  Rita put her cane in her left hand and gripped my arm with her right. “You remember your promise, I hope.”

  “What promise was that?”

  She squeezed. “You promised to visit Haciendas as soon as you get back to normal. Four fourteen Fremont Street. I wrote our address and phone number on your pad two days ago.”

  “I know; I’ve got it in my wallet.”

  “So that means you’ll come, right?”

  For some reason, it was important to Rita that I see her in her home environment, maybe to prove to both of us that she was fully healed in the eyes of the world and not just the hospital, so I said what I had to say: “I’ll be there.”

  “By the end of the month?”

  “If I can.”

  She nodded as though my promise had been etched in stone, as I guess it was. “Shall we stroll, Mr. Tanner?” she asked.

  “We shall, Ms. Lombardi.”

  We walked the halls as though we were flanked by the trees and bistros of the Champs-Élysées rather than the recovery rooms of sick people. Rita told me about the book she’d been reading—Julia Alvarez, whom she loved. I told her some stories about Ruthie Spring and the boys in the poker group. Then I asked what she was going to do the first thing when she got home.

  Her voice soared and her hand tightened on my forearm. “I’m going to go dancing. At a bar called the Cantina. I’m going to play every record on the jukebox and dance with Carlos till they make us go home. It’ll be the first time I’ve danced in my life.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “You can come, too, when you visit. In fact, I know just the woman to fix you up with. Sal Delder. She works as a receptionist at the police station.”

  I tried to stem my shudder. “That’s nice, but I’m not much of a dancer.”

  Rita elbowed me in the ribs, which sent a spur of pain scraping down my torso as though someone were chiseling a notch in my spine.

  “You never say anything good about yourself, do you know that?” Rita chided as I tried not to convulse from the pain.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I want you to say something good about yourself. Right now. Just one thing. What’s the best thing to know about the man named Marsh Tanner?”

  I smiled at her homegrown psychotherapy. “The best thing about me is I have friends like you.”

  “That means you must be a good person, right?”

  The therapy was going in the wrong direction. Before I could say anything to reverse it, Rita poked my ribs once again. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Blaming yourself for what happened.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  She tugged me to a stop and turned me so I faced her. “I get so mad when you do that. He did it; not you.”

  “But I helped.”

  “How?”

  “I didn’t stop him.”

  “He had a gun. He’d already shot two men. How were you supposed to stop him?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to stop him,” I said. “I was just supposed to try.”

  Rita shook her head with elaborate exasperation, as if I were an obstreperous school kid. “You were no more responsible fo
r what happened to Mr. Sleet than I was for what happened to my legs and my face.”

  “Your legs and your face are lovely.”

  She abandoned her burlesque of the angry schoolmarm and looked at something down the hall, then told me what she had probably needed to tell me ever since we met. “You didn’t see me before, so you don’t know,” she said softly, as though uttering a furtive confession. “My feet were twisted like someone had ripped them off and glued them back on sideways. Even with crutches, the only way I could keep my balance was to shuffle along all hunched over so it was impossible to look at anything but the ground in front of me. Hermie, is what they called me. For hermit crab. I was forever bumping into things. Things and people. They acted like they’d touched a toad when I bumped them. Some of them. Most of them, in fact.”

  The echo of her lifelong torment drifted down the hall, to meld with other sad stories being told at the foot of sickbeds. “But now look at you,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. “You’re the belle of the ball.”

  “Yes I am.” She laughed like a child, then stuck out a foot and did a slow pirouette on her walking cast. “Look at me. I can stand up straight and look people right in the eye.”

  That’s not always a good idea, I almost said, thinking of the last time I’d ridden the Number 3 bus, but I held my tongue.

  She clutched my hand to her chest. “I’m so glad we met, aren’t you? It would have been creepy in this place without you. The noises; the smells; Nurse Gertie. Yuck.”

  “Double yuck,” I said. We chuckled and resumed our stroll. “Is Carlos coming to get you?”

  “If he can get away. But it’s the height of the season now; he’s busy in the fields. I might have to take the bus to Salinas.”

  “Tell me some more about strawberries,” I said, partly because I was interested and partly because Rita loved to talk about them, almost to the point of obsession. Rita worked as a bookkeeper for her boyfriend, Carlos, who had something to do with growing the berries. In our previous conversations, she had made the business seem both enchanting and sinister and Carlos a mix of clergyman and mobster.

  “You don’t really want to hear any more about strawberries,” Rita said. “I’ve bored you to death already.”

  “No. Really. I love strawberries. I just wish they didn’t have that green thing on top, so you could pop them straight in your mouth.”

  “That’s called the cap.”

  “So is there money in strawberries or what?”

  Rita sobered. “If you really want to know, the only crop more profitable than strawberries is marijuana.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. In a good year you can make up to twenty thousand dollars an acre. Of course there aren’t all that many good years.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weather, mostly.”

  “Even so, it sounds like you and Carlos are going to be rich.”

  I’d expected a smile, but she laughed rather mordantly. “I’m saying just the opposite. The landowners and marketing companies are getting rich. Everyone else is barely surviving, and survival comes at a very high price. Do you know what they call strawberries in Mexico?”

  “What?”

  “The Fruit of the Devil.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it takes so much suffering to grow them. And there’s more suffering now than ever in the fields. The life expectancy of a strawberry worker is less than fifty years.”

  I was surprised and said so. “I thought Cesar Chavez and Jerry Brown took care of the problems with farmworkers.”

  “They tried, and it helped for a while, but most of the protections have been cut back by the politicians who came along later. And even the laws that haven’t been repealed, like the minimum wage, are mostly ignored in the fields. The average income of a campesino is only five thousand dollars for twenty-five weeks’ work with the fruit. That’s half of what they were making when Chavez was leading the union.”

  “That’s it? Five thousand a year?”

  “For many of them. Especially the ones without families.”

  “Then why do they do it?”

  Her voice became grave and her eyes became spectral. “Because in Mexico they earn five dollars a day and they’re starving.”

  “All of the landowners are white, I assume.”

  “Most, but not all. In the Pajaro, many are Japanese. And in north county, many are Mexican.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “They worked hard, saved money, and got financing from some of the big marketing companies. They farm tiny plots, of course; ten acres on average. And they pay the lowest wages in the industry.”

  “Why doesn’t the union make them shape up?”

  “Because the union is Mexican, too.”

  “Most of the strawberry workers are Mexican?”

  “Ninety percent.”

  “Are you talking about illegal immigrants?”

  “At the peak picking season there are lots of illegals—friends and relatives of regular workers or crews hired from labor contractors, who use mostly illegals.”

  “I thought the Border Patrol was cracking down these days.”

  Rita laughed. “Immigration sweeps through after the crop is harvested and sends the illegals back where they came from. Then, the next season, Immigration closes its eyes and lets them come back and pick fruit. But more and more workers are permanent residents now, with homes and families and kids in the schools. There may be two or three families sharing those homes, or living all year in a labor camp, but at least they’re real homes, not cars or caves or holes in the ground.”

  “The working poor.”

  Rita nodded. “An imported peasantry, is what it amounts to. Ever since the Franciscans started growing strawberries in this country in 1770, the problem has been who would pick the crop. The first pickers were mostly Chinese, then the Japanese took most of the jobs until the Second World War, but after the war it’s been almost entirely Mexicans.”

  “Why haven’t conditions gotten better for them?”

  Rita sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Because the union is weak and the workers have no power. UFW membership is less than ten thousand now; it used to be more than fifty. Plus there’s no one around with the strength and charisma of Chavez.”

  “Who runs the union now?”

  “Chavez’s son-in-law, Arturo Rodriguez. He’s a good man and he works hard and has had some success, especially with the public corporations that own the land or market the fruit, but …” She shrugged. “Without a strong union and a magnetic leader, the workers have to take what they can get, which is still next to nothing.”

  I poked her. “Maybe you should be that leader.”

  I expected her to laugh but she didn’t. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But I’m not Hispanic. And I’m not a man. Farm work is still very much a macho culture.”

  “What about Carlos? Or is he a landowner, too?”

  She straightened with pride. “Carlos is an independent grower.”

  “How many acres does he own?”

  “None, yet. That will come later.”

  “So how is he involved?”

  “The landowners hire men like Carlos to tend the plants and harvest the crop. Carlos farms thirty acres for Gelbride Berry Farms. Then he and the Gelbrides split the profits.”

  “Sounds like sharecropping.”

  “It is sharecropping. Only worse.”

  “How?”

  When she answered, her words were rasping and urgent, the invocation become a testimonial. “Carlos is a good farmer. He’s smart, energetic, a hard worker. Plus he knows the pomology and he’s liked by his workers.”

  “So he must be doing well.”

  Rita paused for effect. “Carlos owes Gelbride Berry Farms more than sixty thousand dollars.”

  “Wow. How did that happen?”

  “Because last year it rained at the wrong time because of El Niño. And becaus
e he signed an evil contract.”

  “Why did he sign the contract?”

  Rita muttered a curse. “Because he had no choice. If he wanted to work in the business, he had to make the deal.”

  “Why?”

  “Sharefarming is the way the owners avoid the farm labor regulations by passing the responsibility on to men like Carlos, who can’t afford to obey them. Workman’s comp, unemployment insurance, health care—Carlos can’t afford that. Not even the owners can afford that, or so they claim.”

  Rita’s voice rose to a pitch that caused two patients and one nurse to look our way in wonder. “What I don’t understand is why they never get enough,” she said in what amounted to an invocation.

  “Who?”

  “The owners. They make more and more money, and live better and better lives, but they never say, ‘That’s all I need, I’m happy, let the workers have more of the profits, let them live decently as well.’ I don’t see how they can live the way they do and call themselves Christian, when the people who work their fields live with such hardship and disease.”

  Tears came then, tears of frustration and confusion, of anger and accusation. I waited for her to wipe them away on the sleeve of her jammies, then tried to buck her up. “I’m sure things will get better in time. People like you—”

  “They’re going to get better right away,” she said stiffly. “The minute I get back to Haciendas and get in touch with the Gelbrides.”

  I started to ask Rita how she was going to manage that, but we were interrupted by her nurse, who wanted her back on the ward for her final exam before heading home.

  “Well, this is it, I guess,” she said, her eyes still misting over, her voice quaking just a tad.

  I tried to keep my own voice on a level pitch but I’m not sure I succeeded. “I guess it is.”

  “Would you mind very much if I kissed you, Mr. Tanner?”

  “It would be my distinct pleasure, Ms. Lombardi.”

  She leaned over and pecked my cheek, gave me a brisk hug and a wave, then shuffled off toward her room with her nurse, her newly repaired legs not quite up to full speed, but almost. Both my cheek and my heart stayed moist and tingly until I was visited by an assistant D.A.