a coffee finca. I’d never even asked Carlota about where she’d grown up, I didn’t know why her family was Mormon or even what that meant. Your father picked coffee? I asked. No, he was the plantation’s bookkeeper, she said. I pictured Bob Cratchit laboring over his ledger by candlelight in a hot, dark room filled with burlap sacks of coffee, mosquitos, and moths. Cerullo says the workers speak Spanish, I told her. I went alone to show her that I could. My cast had just been taken off and, gimpy leg swinging, I propelled myself down Parish Road on my crutches. A dirt road lined with tall pines on one side and browning thickets on the other led to a short row of brown wooden cabins. But I didn’t see any farmworkers around and rested on my crutches, listening to the work sounds coming from the other side of the pines, iron sporadically striking or pinging. The air was spiced with scents of conifer, cold earth, withered leaves and brush, something like nutmeg or cloves, and a smokiness suggesting that winter was coming closer, as if on the far side of South Hill it might already be snowing. I’m never going to live in a city, I remember telling myself, always near forests. Eventually a group of men turned onto the road through the pines and came walking toward me. They wore jeans, baseball caps, sweatshirts. One, wearing a frayed corduroy trucker jacket, seemed to be their leader. He was the shortest, also the oldest, with a pepper-and-salt beard, skin like an old baseball mitt, deep eyes inside soft craters of rake-like wrinkles. I explained in Spanish why I was there, and when I told them I was a classmate of Jaime, they looked at me blankly. The son of the owner of the farm, I clarified. El joven Jeem? the older man asked gruffly. In our Spanish class his name is Jaime, I explained. The older man chortled and emphatically repeated Jaime, and the others laughed too. I pulled my notebook from my back pocket and started in with my questions, and to almost every one—Do you feel that you’re being exploited? Does Mr. Cerullo steal your wages?—they answered no. But to a few—Do you miss your countries? Do you enjoy farmwork?—they answered yes. I asked, Do they give you enough to eat here? And the older man barked, Con una comida comen tres. I didn’t know if he meant that one meal was so big it would feed three workers or that three had to share a meal big enough for one, but I nodded like I got it and a favorite phrase of Uncle Memo’s came to me. I exclaimed, Ala gran chucha! and everyone exploded in laughter. The older man, whose name was Eugenio Pérez, was from Mexico. That first afternoon, I didn’t meet the three women migrant workers because they were baking pumpkin pies in the farm store kitchen. Eugenio pronounced it pum-keen, the way my mother and Carlota did. The workers were headed down to farms in Florida soon for the winter. I spoke to Eugenio the most, especially during subsequent visits. He’d first come to the United States with some other Mexicans, driven in a truck in the middle of the night from Tijuana to a bell pepper farm in California. They arrived around three in the morning and by four, said Eugenio, they were already at work in the fields. After three more weeks of hard work, they were told that they’d paid off what they owed in transportation, room, and board, and a few days later, the pepper harvest ended and Eugenio found himself stranded in America with only a few days’ wages in his pocket. “The green peppers on the sausage and pepper submarine sandwiches and pizzas at Dino’s, in our town square, come from the farms in California that Eugenio worked at,” I wrote in my term paper, and in the margin alongside Miss Mahan drew a row of exclamation points and a yes! If that insight, which I owed to Eugenio Pérez, is what hoisted my grade to my first-ever A+, it also directly helped me get into Broener College on the shores of Seneca Lake, in Wagosh, New York.
One night a month or so later, having forgotten her keys, Carlota rang the doorbell after everyone but me had gone to bed, and I opened the door and found her outside on the stoop with the boy who turned out to be Chip. Cold clouds of boozy breath puffed from their mouths, their freezing faces and smiles practically incandescent. Chip, on the short side, had long orange sideburns, and he held his ski-gloved hand out to me and, looking me in the eyes, smiled like a square-jawed Disney prince. I’d hardly noticed him at school. I think he was on the soccer team. I braced myself, waiting for Carlota’s whisper that she was going to sneak Chip down into her bedroom. Instead they shared a quick kiss on the lips, she came inside, and I closed the door on Chip. She yanked her boots off, toes to heel like an expert New England girl, and with a bashful flash of a smile that made me feel like a stranger whispered, Buenas noches, and bounded down the stairs in her wool socks to her room.
That spring, my cousin Denise had her wedding in Framingham. In the parking lot of the restaurant and banquet hall where the wedding was happening, a fight erupted between my parents in the car that rapidly escalated into vicious mutual loathing. I was used to Bert’s accusing shouts, his blame and complaints, but now they had a frantic, pleading edge. And my mother, who almost never raised her voice, was bleating her long-pent-up outrage and pain at my father in a way I hadn’t heard before, that sounded both newborn and ancient at once. That was the year I first became aware
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