You’ve hurt me a great deal, he said. I hope you realize that. You hurt your father with how you handled yourself. You’re too much of a hothead.
A low breeze swept in over the lot, drying some of the tears on my face. I know, I said. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I get angry so easy. I’ve tried to keep it in check. I’ve prayed to God for patience and strength. Nothing works. It’s like there’s this part of me that’s impossible to figure out no matter how hard I try.
No one told you to go and make yourself complicated, he said. You’re a country boy. A farm boy. You should be carefree and easy-going.
I know. I’m sorry.
Call me sir. It’s a sign of respect.
I’d never called anyone sir or ma’am in my life except sarcastically, when me and my friends were joking around. Just the sound of it felt gaudy and old-fashioned.
Do you realize how embarrassed I was to get a call like that from your school?
I do.
You do what?
I do, sir.
Do you promise never to put me in a position like that again?
I do, sir.
Do you promise that, if you ever get in another fight, you’ll do it away from school?
I do, sir.
And do you swear that, no matter who it is next time, no matter how much bigger or older than you he is, you won’t back down until the fight is finished?
I do, sir.
Good. Now get up. Your mother’s going to be worried.
We drove back the same way we came. On the way through town he stopped at a drive-thru and bought me a chocolate milkshake in a tall paper cup. Don’t breath a word of this to your mother or brothers, he said. Tell them we sat outside drinking milkshakes and had a long talk about responsibility. Don’t even mention the paternity test. I’ll know it if you do.
The milkshake had turned soupy by the time we got home. I’d held it in my hand the whole way, but couldn’t bring myself to drink it.
I imagine myself in prison, in a room of iron and stone. I see my captor’s pale face. I ask what crime I’ve committed and I don’t receive an answer but I don’t fight against the prison walls because I know in my heart I’m guilty in one way or another. I was born guilty, and every day I’ve been alive I’ve only incriminated myself further. My sickness is my guilt. My guilt is my sickness. What healthy person would have dreams such as these? What dreams such as these would come to a healthy person? When I open my eyes for the first time in the morning, there’s a moment of blissful amnesia when I forget that I am who I am. And then it all comes back to me, the flesh and substance of reality, reminding me as well as I can be reminded that I’ve never been true to the word of God Almighty, that I’ve lied in confession, lied in conversation, lied in my day to day actions, and died already, spiritually, through my inaction. Who is there to hear my plea? Not the parish priest, that orange-haired man with his American accent and the logic of Rome buzzing inside his skull. Not the monsignor, old relic of the old way, discredited now by two popes in succession. What if no one is there to hear my broken cry? What if no one cares to be burdened with it? Is it damnation, or is it release, this feeling of being abandoned? Who am I, if not the child that was never wanted deeply?
Chris came to the farm one spring as part of a group of hired men fresh up from the state camp in Cutler. He had worked as a foreman for half a dozen farms around Dinuba, and with two of our regular foremen skipping out before the first grapes started to swell on the vine, he was brought on at the last minute to tackle the work of two men and be responsible for twice the load they’d carried. It was tough work even for a seasoned hand, and not much more money to compensate it, but if Chris was unhappy with the arrangement, he never complained about it in front of Mom or me. We never heard him complain about anything, in fact. Besides a few of the younger guys who’d grown up in the camps and in the fields and on the road, he was the only white man I’d ever known who didn’t seem to think the work of the farm was beneath him, who didn’t glare at my brothers and me on our way to school like they were wondering what sort of topsy-turvy world it was that saw Mexicans in the big house and white men working in the field. And after I found out about his military record, about how he’d fought in an actual American Army regiment in the wars before disbandment, there was nothing Mom or anyone else could do to keep me from trailing after him every chance I got.
He was good about it, too, always having a dumb and bratty kid like me underfoot. Sometimes in the summer he’d even let me sit beside him on the fence while he was taking his lunch break. I never saw him with any food other than the standard sack lunch the people at the state camp sent the laborers off with every day before dawn. It was always the same—cold meat and cheese wrapped in a cold tortilla, a packet of potato chips, a hard-boiled egg, and a piece of overripe fruit left over from the previous season. He’d sit atop a fence post with his heels on the board and devour first the egg and then the orange and let the shells of both fall onto the loose ground beneath him. I’d watch him through the corner of my eye. I could tell he was all alone just from the lack of variation in his lunches. It made me excited, and it made me sad, imagining what he’d done—or what had been done to him—to leave him with no one who cared for him. Even the most disagreeable pickers still arrived in the mornings with snacks and cakes and greasy tamales prepared by family members waiting for them back at the camp. Even those who had no one to begin with, the orphans and outcasts and runaway fathers, still managed after a time to be adopted out of necessity into some such group of traveling misfits. A man with Chris’s talents would’ve never found himself alone. Not unless he wanted it that way.
One afternoon I got gutsy and decided to see for myself what was lying underneath it all. I made like he was one of the eggs from the state camp kitchen—one crack at the base of the shell and you could peel the rest away piece by piece.
Did you spend a lot of time on farms like this when you were my age? Only reason I ask is cause you seem real comfortable out here in the vineyard.
Chris stared out past the tree line with his eyebrows pinched together and a shine of sweat across his forehead. No one grows up feeling comfortable around the vines, he said. God help anyone who starts acting relaxed with this crop. That’s when the bugs swarm in and pick you right down to the stem.
I nodded at the careful wisdom of his remark. I wanted to be like that when I grew up, to be so settled and sure of myself that my opinions rang out with the music of perfect infallibility. Did they have a lot of grapevines where you grew up?
I never saw a vineyard in my life until I was already a man, he said. I grew up back east, where the snows fall a foot thick in the winter. You ever seen snow up close?
The real answer to his question wasn’t something I had to think about. After living my whole life in the valley, snow was nothing to me but a word, a mirage that painted distant mountaintops on a clear day in winter and vanished from sight and thought the rest of the time. There was no reason for me to lie, and I didn’t understand why I did. My Dad took me to see the snow one time, I said. He took all of us. We made snowmen and raced each other on skis and snowboards. It was a fun day.
Chris wasn’t the sort of guy who needed to look right at you to have a conversation. Most of the times we talked, in fact, he tended to scan the terrain in front of him with my words falling in his ear as I spoke facing it. This time, though, he turned and looked at me like something about the tale I was spinning didn’t quite add up. Which it didn’t. I turned from his gaze and looked off across the field to the shaded area under the ash tree where most of the pickers liked to eat lunch. It was always the same problem for me, the same old Catholic dilemma. I was honest just enough to be bad at lying, and I lied just enough to get caught.