Lord of California Page 2

  None of the wives spoke for several seconds. I watched their beseeching, desperate eyes move from one face to another in search of answers.

  No one can turn a profit on ten acres, Claudia said.

  Not if they want to eat, Katie added.

  Dear God, no, Mama said. She bent forward so that her hair fell across her shoulders and hid her face from view. I set my hand on the ridge of her spine and stroked it up and down.

  It’s okay, Mama, I said. We’ll figure something out.

  She sat up straight and brushed the hair from her eyes, but I could tell from her open mouth and vacant gaze that she was far away from everything that was happening inside the living room. All through my childhood, every time nectarine prices fell or a bad harvest came in, I had to listen to her fretful exclamations about going broke and winding up on the streets. There was nothing in the world she feared more. And now, with this latest piece of news, her nightmare of poverty must have seemed so close to becoming real.

  It’s the same story all over the valley, Katie said. Men in charge decide how to divvy up the land, and they don’t want anybody farming who doesn’t match their idea of what’s decent. No gays, no illegals, and no unwed mothers. Doesn’t matter if we’re widows. Way they see it, if we really cared about our kids, we’d remarry in a hurry.

  And they call themselves Christians, Claudia said.

  Katie looked around the room. How about it, ladies? After all we’ve been through, you ready to find yourselves another husband in time for tax season?

  Not particularly, Jennifer said. But if worst comes to worst, I have a trustworthy foreman I can probably talk into marrying me in name only.

  Smart girl, Katie said. That was my idea too before I started reading up on California ag law. Then I stumbled on something so worrisome I had to invite you all up for a barbecue just to sort it out. It might be nothing, but if what I suspect about Elliot is true, we’ll be lucky to come out of this with ten acres between the five of us.

  Get the fuck on with it, Mama cried. Now all eyes were on her.

  You’re overheated, Mama, I said. You know how your head aches when you get too hot. Without drawing any more attention to us, I hurried to the kitchen and fixed her a glass of red wine to sip on. When I returned, Dawn was flipping through the stack of papers on her lap.

  Take your time, honey, Katie said. It should be a long blue document with a date stamped at the bottom.

  Found it, Dawn said. She held the form in front her as if to prove she was being truthful.

  That’s good, Katie said. Now go ahead and read out the name printed on the first line. Right above your own name.

  Dawn turned the document around and squinted at the carbon impression at the bottom. E. F. Rabedeaux, she said. Same as the signature.

  Katie touched her face and sighed. That’s what I was afraid of, she said.

  Who is it? Jennifer asked. Who’s E. F. Rabedeaux?

  Elias Rabedeaux, Mama said calmly. That was Elliot’s real name. He changed it when he moved out from the coast.

  For a second there, Claudia and Jennifer both appeared dumbstruck. I tried putting myself in their place. It was one thing to know you’d been lied to when four others had been deceived the same way. It was another to find out you’d been deceived just a little bit more than the others, that Daddy had tipped the scales by adding at least one extra lie to their plates.

  Elias Rabedeaux was the name he signed our parcel papers with nearly twenty years ago, Katie said. What about the rest of them? How many names did he have going in all?

  Amid the sudden outcries and shuffling of papers, the full picture of Daddy’s corruption gradually came into view. Twenty years earlier, Elias Rabedeaux had applied for a land parcel in Fresno County, aiming to grow plums with his young wife Katherine. But by the time he married Sandra and turned his eye to Kings County and nectarines, Elliot Temple was the name he was using on the paperwork. Year by year, county by county, wife by wife, his territory had expanded out across the entire length of the valley. Elias Temple applied to grow grapes in Tulare County with his wife Claudia. Eli Temple preferred almonds, Madera County, and Jennifer. When the time came to bring his new wife Dawn to Merced, E. F. Rabedeaux decided to try his hand at peaches. None of the wives had any idea what the F stood for, though I’m sure they could’ve offered a suggestion.

  I know it’s hard to accept, Katie said. But it’s obvious we weren’t the only ones being duped. He wasn’t carrying on as a bigamist just for fun. There was a financial motive as well. Not many people know it, but the parcel program only allows each family a certain number of acres in total. In most counties the cap is at sixty, but anything more than thirty is usually pretty hard to come by. And here he was with a hundred acres of land under five different names.

  It’s a fraud, Beth said. He was defrauding the state. Sort of thing people go to prison for.

  That’s right, honey, Katie said. At best, we’re looking at heavy fines, back taxes, and censure. And that’s on top of eviction. Any time someone dies and leaves a bunch of land behind, the government’s bound to start poking around. All it’d take is a few phone calls and a state audit for the whole house of cards to come crashing down.

  Claudia shuddered briefly and retreated to the kitchen. I thought she might’ve been done for good until she returned carrying the wine bottle and four long-stemmed glasses. None of the wives bothered with decorum. Us kids waited silently for the slow gulping to cease.

  You still haven’t answered my question, Mama said. What are you suggesting we do to try and fix this?

  We cash out, Katie said. We sell our land back to the state while we still can. Take the money and start over someplace else.

  Mama showed a painful smile. Start over, she said. Does anyone here really have the energy to go through that again?

  If it’s between that and eviction, Dawn said, I think I could manage.

  Of course you’d say that. You’re what, twenty, twenty-five years old? Everything’s still an adventure to you. If farming doesn’t work out, you can just go back to working at whatever hole-in-the-wall dive Elliot found you in.

  I took the glass of wine from Mama’s hand and set it on the table. She looked at me. Mama, I said. You owe Dawn an apology. Katie’s right. There’s no use fighting among ourselves.

  In the space of a few blinks, Mama’s eyes turned glossy. You don’t—

  Mama. Apologize. Please.

  She looked at Dawn with the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m sorry, she said. Please try to understand. That farm’s been my home for eighteen years. Good and bad, my whole life’s been built around it.

  It’s all right, Dawn said. I know what it means not to have a home.

  Katie stepped up to the coffee table. There was only a little bit of wine left, and she didn’t seem to mind drinking straight from the bottle. You asked me what my suggestion is, she said. Still figuring that out myself. But here’s what I think. If we were to throw our lots in together, we could apply for cooperative status and get a whole new parcel to start on fresh. We could deal directly with the national ag bureau, bypass the good ol’ boys at the local level. And there’d be no limit to how many acres we could buy.

  That’s because we’d be selling short, Jennifer said. That’s how these co-ops operate. The government pays them to sell their produce for less than it’s worth.

  And we’d be at the mercy of our pickers and packing house boys, Claudia said. They’d all be shareholders under the law.

  Watching Katie kill the bottle gave me a giddy little thrill. Ladies, she said. Wives, women, whatever. Listen here. Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a reason the five of us ended up together in this room. You’ll know what I mean when I say Elliot was never a heartthrob, even as a younger man. It doesn’t make me proud to say, but I was in desperate straits when I met him, and at the time just about any man with a bit of money and an eye to settle down could’ve won me over the same way he did. He wa
s my golden ticket out of the Kingsburg tavern I was working in at the time. I believed in him, and here’s where it got me. Here’s where belief landed me in my middle age.

  Katie shook the bottle to see that it was empty. Then she walked to the side of the room and stood with her arms crossed over her chest like her sons.

  So how’s about we try believing in ourselves for a change?

  It was still light out when the meeting adjourned. Mama took Gracie to wash up and use the restroom before we headed home. She said to give her a while, that she needed to get her head together before she got back behind the wheel. I left Jessie with Beth and headed out under the twilight sky, following an old American irrigation ditch about a quarter mile into the orchard. That time of year, it wasn’t much different from our orchard at home—horse-flies clustering around stray dog turds, fermented fruit and pits hardened into a dark macadam. Not the best smelling place for a girl to grow up, but good for losing yourself in a daydream. I wandered barefoot with my shoes dangling from my fingertips, toes slapping on the hard dry ground.

  Suddenly a voice called out to me, Goddamn you’re heavy-footed.

  I stopped and turned in time to see Anthony slipping out from behind a column of leafy branches, kicking up globs of dirt with his sneakers.

  If you were a deer you’d be shot already, he said.

  What the hell do you know about hunting?

  A lot, he said. I’ve got a .22 at home. Foreman taught me how to use it.

  Good for you and your foreman.

  He smiled and circled around me a couple paces. How old are you, anyway?

  How old are you?

  Sixteen.

  Well, I’m thirteen. What of it?

  You’re pretty scrawny for thirteen. You a hermaphrodite or something?

  A what?

  A he-she. Born with a dick as well as a pussy.

  You’re an ass.

  Maybe you are and your mom never told you. Maybe that’s why she gave you a boy’s name.

  How do you know what my name is?

  My mom. She said one of my new sisters was named after our dad. I figured she must be a real beast.

  Elliot can be a girl’s name too.

  Then how come you never see any girls named it?

  I dropped my shoes on the ground and slipped them on. Since third grade I had gone up to my teachers on the first day of every school year and asked them not to call me by the name listed on the roll sheet. Now the most annoying boy in the world had found me out, and I wasn’t going to stick around to hear what else he could make of it.

  Where are you going?

  Home. Mama’s waiting for me.

  Anthony laughed. Don’t go away mad, he said. Who knows when we’ll see each other again?

  We’ll be seeing each other a lot from now on. Unfortunately.

  How’s that?

  Our moms decided on it just now. Daddy was breaking the law with his parcels, so they’re selling the farms and buying a new place for us to live on. The whole family. I started walking, but he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back around. Don’t touch me, I said, and yanked my arm away.

  What the hell do you mean they’re selling the farms?

  It’s happening. We all agreed. Katie says if we get the papers filed right away, we should have the new place up and running by the time school starts.

  He set his hands on his sides and gawked. Son of a bitch, he said. No one asked me how I feel about moving.

  Guess you shouldn’t have run off, then.

  A drop of sweat rolled down Anthony’s face. His eyes, Daddy’s eyes, appeared suddenly hollow, like egg shells or paper mâché, like one hard blow could cave them in. When he started to move, I feared he could come at me, but instead he turned and took out his anger on the nearest pair of trees. In a rage he tore away handfuls of plums and leaves and snapped the narrow laterals so that they hung fractured with only slivers of bark holding them to the branches. I stood watching his tantrum play out until his fingers were green and dirty and he was all out of steam. And then he was down on his knees with his face in his hands, crying like a baby.

  Did that make you feel better?

  He didn’t answer. I took a few cautious steps forward until I was standing over him. His soft, defeated style of wailing reminded me more of Mama than of Gracie. I tried stroking his back like I did for her, but he pulled away.

  Listen, I said. Moving’s going to tough on all of us. I’m not wild about changing schools myself. But everything will be okay.

  He wiped his nose on his arm. It’s not that, he said. I can’t help it. I’ve been going back and forth like this for a while now.

  How come?

  What do you mean? Anthony looked up at me with his eyebrows wedged in confusion. Our father’s dead, he said. And he was a liar and a cheat.

  Oh. That.

  He stood and shook the sand from his pant legs. Fuck is wrong with you? You’re younger than me, and a girl. My kid sister. You’re supposed to cry and I’m supposed to say everything will be okay.

  I don’t know what to tell you.

  You know what the saddest part is? When he was alive, he hardly ever gave me the time of day, but now that he’s dead it’s like I’m the only one who cares. I’m the only one who’s broken up about it.

  That’s not true. You should have been in our house when Katie first got word to us that he was gone. Me, my sisters, and Mama, all crying at the same time. The pickers could hear us way out in the orchard.

  I guess I’m just soft, then.

  With the dusk light fading to darkness, I nodded toward the house and started walking in that direction. Anthony followed behind me and sped up until we were side by side. It was the first time a boy had ever walked me home at sunset. All sorts of new circuits were firing up for me that summer, and I had to remind myself that he was my brother.

  You’re not soft, I said. And you’re not the only one who’s sad about Daddy. It’s just hard when you know he was lying to us and our mothers the whole time. Almost like it cancels out every nice thing he ever did.

  In the near-dark, Anthony’s shuffling footfalls seemed to grow louder. He never did that many nice things for me, he said. And after meeting his other wives, I think I get why.

  Why’s that?

  Think about it. My mom is the only Mexican woman in the bunch. Why would he spend time with us when he had four white families to choose from?

  Dawn isn’t white. She’s part Asian at least.

  Okay, fine. But notice he never bothered to get her pregnant.

  I don’t think Daddy was a racist. He may have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t that. Why would he marry your mama if he was?

  Anthony snorted up a loogie and hocked it into the brush where it was too dark to see it land. He was after farms, he said. If you want to farm in California, Mexicans are the way to go.

  We kept walking at the same pace even as the trail in front of us fell out of clear view. Mama was bound to be mad at me for going off so far without permission. I knew it from the moment I stepped out from Katie’s porch. In the summertime, the hour or so before total dark was my favorite time of day. The heat dropped off and all the valley around us sparkled with little red and yellow lights from the neighboring farms. It was the same on Katie’s land as on ours. Same rich smell of wood smoke, same warm air on the skin. Having Anthony there got me to wondering about how different life was bound to be on the co-op, and how much harder it would be to find solitude with eleven siblings running around instead of two. Just thinking on it had me feeling claustrophobic, but I decided all the same to give my new family the benefit of the doubt. Katie was right again. Sometimes being a sister is as easy as recognizing that someone else has the same pain as you.

  Look, I said. If it makes you feel any better, you should know that Daddy wasn’t much for giving me and my sisters the time of day either. In thirteen years, I don’t think I ever saw him more than once every six months.

  A
nthony perked up. So you’re saying he didn’t single out me and my brothers?

  I’m saying if he hated you all for being Mexicans, he hated us just as much for being girls.

  Thanks. And I’m sorry for what I said. The Catholic stuff, the he-she stuff, and everything else. It’s been a hard couple of months. But it’s no excuse for being rude to you.

  Thanks. I appreciate that.

  Can we start fresh, then? As brother and sister, I mean.

  Yeah. We can start fresh.

  Good. I’m glad. And you’re right. The months ahead are bound to be tough on everybody. How do we even begin? How do we begin to build a home out of so many broken pieces?

  I don’t know. But we’ll try our best.

  We came up from behind the house in the pitch black and ascended the steps to the porch. Dawn and Jennifer’s cars were gone, but Mama was sitting in a folding chair by the door with Gracie asleep on her lap. She didn’t scold me for making her wait, or even cast me an angry look. Instead there was a tired sadness in her eyes that made me feel guiltier than I’d expected to. I put my arm around her shoulder and she wrapped hers around my waist. Anthony tipped his head to us and went inside.

  You’re not a little girl anymore, Mama said. She sounded dazed and dehydrated.

  I haven’t been one for a while now.

  I know. I’m sorry. It’s my fault for being useless so much of the time.

  It’s all right. It made me strong. I’m just starting to realize that.

  Mama smiled and pressed her cheek to my stomach. Across the road and through the trees, bonfire lights flickered dimly from deep inside the orchards. Strange music in the distance, drunken revelry of the day laborers. And nothing for us to do but sit and wait, and hope that somewhere in that darkness was a place we could call our own.

  We stopped going to church after Daddy died. I don’t think Mama ever liked going, but Daddy made a point every time he visited to make sure we were in regular attendance. He said a farmer ought to be involved in a local church, that other farmers would take notice if his family didn’t keep the Sabbath. And though he never made it himself to any Sunday service, he had Mama give his best to the pastor, and mention a church in Sausalito he supposedly went to when he was out on the road. Of our neighbors on the surrounding parcels, only the Mendeses were Catholic. The rest included fellow Baptists, Methodists, and Southern Baptists, as well as one old Mennonite couple who’d somehow managed to hold on to their place through drought, disbandment, and the rise of the parcel program. In town you heard rumors of secular families, but out in the country you’d be hard-pressed to find a soul at home on a Sunday morning. Or at least that was the case until God fated Daddy’s appendix to burst and freed us from the obligation forever.