Photos by Stacey Warde
By Stacey Warde
Fernando came out to the field and asked if there was any work. I told him to take it easy. Nothing to do today, I said. Mañana!
He left, appearing content, though his money and food were in low supply and his mother was sick in a hospital in Mexico. He returned less than an hour later.
“Mi Madre!” he began, wailing, letting loose the saddest string of Spanish words I’d ever heard, though technically I didn’t understand them.
The message, however, was clear: His mother was dead.
He’d received the message on his cell phone minutes earlier. He began to sob, I put my arm around his neck, and he embraced me. Tears fell for a moment. Then he told me he still wanted to work the next day, and sadly turned away to walk back to his humble trailer beside the packing house.
Fernando lived on the farm where we leased acreage to grow blueberries. He kept his little trailer neat and tidy and grew beautiful roses and kept a vegetable garden with peppers, corn and tomatillos. He was friendly and occasionally we’d drink a beer together after work.
He told me that roses were grown and harvested in his hometown where he’d grown up. He hadn’t been back home in years.
He was a seasonal worker who had come out to ask if we had any labor as we were setting up the field the year before. We put him to work whenever we could. He was a steady, even worker, although sometimes he’d get it wrong and have to do it over again.
As we worked in the field the following morning, Fernando’s cell phone rang and he began an animated conversation in Spanish. I can’t be sure but I think he was trying to explain to a sibling why he couldn’t attend his mother’s funeral.
With no green card or car, he could not risk leaving the U.S. for fear that he might never be allowed to come back. Unable to travel, he is the only child who won’t be at his mother’s memorial. He’s stuck with me working on the farm.
“Maybe Decembré,” he said when I asked him later if he planned to go home.
“December!” That’s almost a year from now, I told him.
“No denaro.” With no money or car or legal papers, he’s isolated, unable to travel or go places. His sister lives a few strides up the dirt road in a home with a family of her own. They haven’t been around the last few days, on an out-of-town venture.
I’m guessing she’s with other family—in L.A. or Mexico, I’m not sure. Her husband, who was already in Mexico and about to return home, is staying on a few days to assist the in-laws, according to Fernando, who has borne his grief mostly alone.
I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m beginning to understand him more as we both use signs, signals and spanglish to converse.
The lack of money was starting to get to Fernando. He’d asked me several times when he was going to get paid. He seemed worried, agitated.
“No denaro, no comida!” he exclaimed.
“You’ve got no food, Fernando?”
“No!”
I’ll do what I can, I responded. I don’t make the payments. I’ll let the boss know right away, I told him, which I did.
I brought him some comida, tamales and pintos the next day. I bought them with my last bit of denaro, about $10 in cash, which I had until my own payday. I understood his frustration and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of me. How could he not have any food?
I’m a sucker for hard cases. I figured it was better to err on the side of foolishness than see a grown man go hungry. So I brought him food.
When his phone rang, we were moving about 500 heavy, water-laden, soil-filled, 5-gallon grow bags into place, a task that wouldn’t have been necessary had Fernando set them up the way I had shown him from the start.
This has happened before, where I’ve demonstrated how to perform a task, explaining verbally and showing physically how to do it, and he continues to do it another way.
He watched me as I explained how to move the bags so we don’t trip over the spaghetti tubing that feeds the plants.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand me. “Fernando,” I said, “move the bags closer to where the tubes come out of the drip line so people and dogs won’t trip over them and break them. OK?”
I pretended to catch my foot on the loop to demonstrate accidental tripping. “OK?” I asked. “No tripping.”
I moved the heavy bag so that it protected the connectors, preventing the loops from catching people’s legs and feet. He nodded OK, indicating he understood. He went after it, slowly moving the bags into place.
He missed a bag. I didn’t get on him about it. I could move it later. But I’m amazed at how quickly he lets one go. Maybe it’s sloppiness, a failure to notice, a failure to care—or grief. I can’t be sure.
I had broken two connections the day before. Working alone, I tripped over the tubing and broke the connectors, which snapped right off.
I held a can of spray paint under my arm; I was marking the broken connections. When I bent over to pick up the loose spaghetti tubing I’d just broken, I managed to blast the paint into my face and eye.
My head already hurt and my eyes felt sore in the light, like a hangover, from the moment I’d awakened that morning. A friend told me it was a reaction to the radical pressure changes in advance of several storm systems about to slam into California’s southern coastline.
Each time I bent over, my head would ache and pound. I’d already adjusted 200 plants and felt terrible. The paint blast to the face put me over the top and I threw the can as far as I could in a fit of anger.
I was mad at Fernando for not doing what I’d asked him to do in the first place, and mad at myself for not watching him more closely. I was mad for not paying attention to how I was holding the spray can, and mad for doing work that wasn’t necessary, for picking up after Fernando with a splitting headache.
“It’s like watching a child,” the boss said once.
My newest neighbor, recently relocated to California and had at one time managed his father’s vineyards, said: “I hate to sound prejudiced or anything but sometimes I think they do it because it’s job security.”
You mean the workers purposely do things the wrong way so they’ll have work?
“Yeah,” he said, without hesitating, “I think they’re a lot smarter than we give them credit. They pretend not to understand and that way they can keep working.”
If that’s true, I said, they should be laughing at us stupid gringos.
“They are,” he said.
Fernando wasn’t laughing. When he hung up the phone, I heard a loud snapping sound, as though one of the bags had been suddenly pulled apart.
I turned and saw the top half of the heavy bag torn in two places where his hands had just tried to pick it up. He stood over the bag, back hunched over, arms hanging at his sides. He seemed frustrated, angry, defeated.
Until that point there hadn’t been any mishaps moving the bags, even though Fernando had continued to try lifting them instead of sliding them over the way I had shown him.
I stood up and walked over to him. “Are you OK, Fernando?”
He nodded his head, “Yes.” His eyes were red with grief and fury.
I watched as he continued to move the bags, he was listless and unhappy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home. He needed the work as much—maybe more—than I did. §
Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.
