Candelario by John Carr Walker
Candelario
Candelario came back to our vineyard to work a fifth harvest in a row. I remembered his mangled body, the left elbow pointing into his ribs and the dwarfed hand dangling palm-out, the only two fingers like twisted fangs. “Know how he got that way?” our father said, lifting Candelario’s arm, then letting go, letting it bungee at his side. “It’s from all those years of outworking everyone with one arm tied behind his back.”
Candelario lifted his chin and howled, laughing. White whiskers dotted his sharp Adam’s apple. Gray curls billowed from under his hat. We laughed too.
“I bet you, okay,” said Candelario, pointing at me and my brother. “You two, put together, I still pick more trays, bet?”
We both shook his good hand, the left one. The palm was one impenetrable callus; rice-like scars flecked his brown, almost black skin, the back ridged with veins. We bet two day’s worth of trays.
“You boys,” our father said, wagging his head. “You boys will not know what happened.”
* * *
All year we’d been preparing for the raisin harvest, our family’s only crop, building momentum from winter pruning through the long irrigation season. Then, the week before, the middles were carved into terraces, the dirt between rows angled to catch the sunshine and shed water in the event of rain -- a dirty word in August. Everything was shifting into a higher gear, speeding up. The night before picking started my brother and I were put to work sharpening the grape knives.
Our father kept the knives in an old sweat-box. The spiders had had a year to weave nets inside. He dumped the box on the workbench and Black Widows ran from the pile; he smashed most of them with the pad of his callused thumb. Their webs, as thick as fishing line, stuck to the knives. The blades were curved, a wing of flat steel from wooden handles, loops of twine for the wrist, all black from use. Our father gave us each small whetting rods and a can of 3-in-1 Oil to share.
“I don’t see why they can’t do it themselves,” my brother said.
I understood why. The pickers were always laughing, drunk, or sleeping. Our father had to kick their boots to rouse them from the shade. They only pretended to listen to him. We would be the butt of their jokes, in Spanish, the farmer’s sons picking grapes, stealing wages. This crop looked like our best yet, green bunches swollen tight, a score of them on every vine, but the Mexicans wouldn’t care. They’d keep laughing and boozing, lazy wetbacks. I’d picked last year. This was my brother’s first time.
I liked being the authority every time our father turned his back. I’d stop my brother every couple strokes. “Look,” I’d tell him, “you can’t fidget so much, it’ll round over the blade, you’ve got to make long clean strokes, like this.” I showed him how, pushing the inner curve down the greasy block until the cutting edge gleamed. Watching him, I thought my brother was a hyperactive putz. He wasn’t good enough “You’re not ready for this,” I said. “You’re a hyperactive putz.”
But I made sure he found a good knife for himself, one without nicks or twists in the blade, with a smooth, comfortable handle -- almost as good as the one I chose for myself. Then, after the rest of them were put back in the sweat-box, and the box put on the vineyard trailer, and the trailer hooked to the Massey-Ferguson tractor, we worked extra to make our knives the best.
Candelario’s arrival marked the start of our harvest.
* * *
That morning the trailer deck was loaded with bundles of paper trays; in a cardboard box were the payroll cards, a stapler, a fat black marker; there were wrenches and screwdrivers, just in case, and a five-gallon bucket of gloves, the sweat-box of knives, of course. An iron tank filled with drinking water was roped to the bulkhead and wound in a musty canvas sheet to try and keep it cool; the spigot was bandaged with rags, black, gangrenous, and a tin cup leashed by a yard of new twine knelled against the metal. It wasn’t water for me or my brother -- our father would bring out two thermoses clicking with ice-cubes.
Riding out, our legs dangled off the trailer. The unmatched tires knocked dust from the turnrow. Candelario’s good hand jumped from the tractor’s steering wheel to the throttle. The bad arm coiled in his lap like thick rope. A red handkerchief, fastened to his dirty cap, fell down the back of his neck and hung on his shoulders like a woman’s hair. It looked ridiculous. “He’s got a fag’s hat,” I told my brother. I was already spending Candelario’s pay -- our winnings -- on a Schwinn ten-speed.
He stopped the tractor and trailer where our family’s vineyard met the board and wire fence of a turkey ranch. We could see the birds moving between the gaps, white feathers and pink heads, hear their gobbling, smell their juicy stink.
Candelario tripped stepping down from the tractor. The empty butt sack of his jeans hit the ground and for a moment he was obscured inside a dust cloud, then I saw him gathering up the hose of his ruined arm like something spilled. Another picker helped him up. A little ring of Mexicans gathered around and slapped him on the back, saying things in Spanish.
I could taste the wind in my teeth as I shifted into tenth gear, speeding down the long asphalt driveway away from the house, and the vineyards bordering both sides became nothing more than a green blur.
My brother and I picked a row together. Keeping to the low part of the terrace, with knees pushed into the berm, I showed him what to do. Touch the knife to the stem, cup the bunch with your empty hand, then flick your wrist. Just a flick of the wrist -- let the blade do the cutting. Just guide the bunch into the pan, soften its landing. When the pan’s full, build a bottom row on the tray paper behind you, then spread up from that. Give the fruit room to dry in the sun. “You got it,” I told him, settling down to work.
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s only picking grapes,” I said, trying on one of our father’s phrases.
Candelario worked a row over from us. The right leg dragged a little behind him. That whole side of his body, it seemed, was riddled with bad luck. After he cut with the grape knife, his bunches dropped straight into the pan, and when he turned to spread he locked the pan between his hip and elbow, his good hand flat underneath. The bunches tumbled out, shattering on the trays, loose berries rolling into the dirt.
“Okay?” he said, popping his head under the vines, looking down our row. “You must go much faster.” Within an hour he was a ways ahead of us.
I told my brother to ignore his example, to keep working the right way. He pulled farther ahead, doing two vines to one of ours, his one hand beating our four. It was a monster of a crop. The bunches grew so tightly together under the vines that getting the knife hooked on the stem wasn’t easy. The trays were heavy with fruit and the high part of the terrace was crowded with trays.
“He’s losing half the fruit,” I said, snapping the knife, cupping the fruit into the pan.
“He’s been doing it for a long time, I guess.”
“For other people,” I said. “This is our crop. He doesn’t care, he’s the same as any of them, but we have to care. That’s our real job our here, to care.”
Then Candelario started singing. The melody was rough, his voice more timbre than note, the words in Spanish. It echoed in the distance he’d put on us, rubbing our faces it.
So I started moving my mouth like I was a singing monkey, one arm behind my back, slashing at the stems and then shuffle-dancing like a Mexican up to the trays, then to the next vine. I dragged my foot, plowing a crooked line in the dirt behind me. My knife hand cut the air, conducting an invisible mariachi. My brother laughed and laughed.
A minute later I noticed the singing had stopped. My brother had stopped laughing. Down the row, Candelario was watching me. “You like music, changos?” He sang: “Well since my vaby left me all I found a new place to dwell nah nah all it’s down at the end of lonely street in heartbreak hotel all well ah I feel oh so lonely vaby I feel oh so lonely vaby I feel ohso lonely I could die.”
Later he shouted at us through the vines: “Faster, pandejos! I’m slowing down to not humiliate you. Okay?”
Near quitting time he popped his head through the canes and watched while we worked toward him, doing nothing but watching. “Want to know what happened?” he said when we got close enough to hear him hiss. “I got sucked between a tractor tire and the fender. Snapped the bones into tiny pieces until my arm wrapped all the way around the wheel. They took me to the hospital instead of paying me my wage. Said paying for a hospital bed was being generous.”
We kept our hands moving, slice and guide, slice and guide, next bunch, next bunch, again and again. The middle of the row was dense with fruit and the trays lay edge to edge to hold the crop. Bunches thick around as forearms. Berries as big as our thumbs.
“Do you hear me?” said Candelario. “I didn’t get my money! I was around your age, working for a guy just like your papa. He acted like him. Looked like him. I cursed them, sorry cringos. I cursed them and their farm.”
His face was framed in the cascade of green leaves. “Fucking changos,” he said.
Then he went back to work, breaking out in song, a harsh voice, a hoarse scratch, the words we didn’t know.
“You think that’s true?” my brother whispered.
“He’s crazy,” I said. “Just a busted up old man.”
My blade sliced at the stems and bunches dropped to the pan untouched, like they did for Candelario. My brother followed suit. Together we achieved a manic pace. Still his singing got father away, verse by verse, vine by vine by vine.
* * *
We tried all week to catch up -- tried and failed just to keep from falling farther behind -- but he worked effortlessly ahead of us. With the harvest half complete, he was scores of trays up, maybe hundreds. More. Worse, he’d tattled on us to our father. “You boys are there to work,” he’d scolded that night at the supper table. “If you’re not old enough to behave, you’re not old enough to get paid. Period. Making fun of the poor old guy. Why don’t you show some respect for your elders? And your boss, I might add. He’s your boss, least when I’m not around.”
By that time, the other pickers had become a rattling noise around me. My joints moved easily with the motion of picking, but everything else hurt. Nights I lay in bed and my body felt tight and brittle. Even the wrinkles in the sheets pressed into my back like steel wires.
“We’re getting killed by a one-armed man,” my brother said.
“Pointing out the obvious,” I said.
We’d spent hours whispering in our dark room only to draw this conclusion. We were hopelessly swindled. Feeling wrung out in the hot sheets, thirsty, I shifted in the top bunk. In this exhaustion, this encompassing rage, breathing hurt my windpipe.
I said, “It’s gotten bigger than a bet—family pride’s at stake, the farm itself. He’s having fun with us. He thinks we’re a joke. I hate his guts.”
“What’re you gonna do?” my brother said, rhetorically, yawning.
I took a sore breath before I explained what.
Next we were downstairs in our father’s office. We’d succeeded in descending the steps without waking up our parents. We only turned on the desk lamp, a dim hole of light in the dark room. Unrolling the grocery sack of white payroll cards, unrolling slowly, slowly to keep the paper quiet. The cards inside were gritty from the vineyard. Smudged by dirty thumbs. The tray count was circled in one corner, one card per row, and bundled by picker. We found Candelario’s stack.
His writing was chopped, all corners and jagged lines. The letters ‘a’ and ‘e’ were mirror images of correct. “He’s not really left-handed,” I whispered, feeling a little sorry for him, even as I took them. We crept back up the stairs with his cards -- his entire earnings -- bowed in my hot palm.
We had him now, the great Candelario, the singer, the fastest man in the field -- he was losing to a couple kids. Strictly by the books, in fact, he hadn’t picked a single tray. We hid the cards in my dresser drawer. We’d saved our good name.
The last forty acres had the feel of a new race. To us, at least Candelario made a point of work a row over and putting distance between us, showing off. “Changos,” he crooned through the vines. “Monkey-boys. I’m breaking you. I’m breaking you.”
We worked deliberately, easily, knowingly. We didn’t give him the satisfaction of trying to keep up anymore.
* * *
Last day, payday, lunchtime, the pickers burned the blue tray wrappings and cooked their little logs of tinfoil next to the fire. The smoke, braided with blue ink, curled into the high sky. One by one they barehanded the food from the fire’s edge, juggling and flapping and laughing until they could peel back the silver and eat. The smell of chili peppers, beans, butter, tortillas. My brother and I watched from a distance. “And he calls us monkeys,” I said. “I bet they’ll be farting nonstop.”
Candelario approached, a pair of burritos in hand, the foil peeled halfway back. “There are extra. You want these?” He held them out. “We should be amigos. You finished the whole fields.”
“They’re our fields,” I said. “Of course we finished.”
But my brother -- no sense of the moment -- took the food. Candelario turned his back, his arm wagging as he shuffled away. My brother pinched a little from the tortilla and blew a stream of air at the hole he made. The stuff inside, whatever it was, threw a coil of steam back at him. “It’s hot,” he said. “It doesn’t look bad.”
He held one out to me. “I’m not going to eat that.”
My brother took a bite, chewed with his mouth open. I smelled the breath. After a minute he put the other burrito in the dirt between his feet and went on eating. I waited for his head to be engulfed in flames. For his belly to burst, his teeth to melt. I’d heard a few stories about their food. My brother stayed in one piece, however -- breathing hard and sharp, a little watery around the eyes, a little red of the face -- shame, I thought. Spontaneous combustion would have served him right.
Then our father was finally coming with the payroll. His truck was down the turnrow, crawling at us slowly so the dust wouldn’t kick up.
He handed the checks to Candelario; Candelario passed them out to the pickers, gimping from one to another. Our father came toward us. “You boys have been working hard,” he said, but that’s all the payment he had for us right then.
Beyond him, Candelario passed out the last of the checks, and he looked at the one left in his hand. He’d only been paid for a few days, a few hundred trays. He turned our direction, staring holes in our father’s back. I saw his mouth move but didn’t hear the words. The whole crew of pickers looked at us then, getting quiet. Our father heard all their silence and looked back. Candelario approached unevenly, as if the left side were trying to shed the right.
I said: “Candelario sings while he works.”
“You told me,” said our father. “And I told you it doesn’t matter.”
“He shatters the bunches, too. I saw him do it a thousand times.” I stepped between them, facing Candelario. I pulled the edge of his payroll cards out of my hip pocket just enough that he could see. His face changed. I said, “He’s rough with the fruit. Look at his rows and you’ll see berries rolling all over the place. Probably because he’s got only one arm.”
“Jesus Christ,” said my father, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Forgive him, I don’t know why he’s acting this way.”
“His singing makes up for it, though. It’s not bad, his singing. Let my dad hear you sing.”
The lines on the old man’s face deepened, lips pinched, closer to spitting at my feet than breaking out in song. Behind him the embers withered in the cooking fire, and the shifting wind smelled of smoke, and a spark shot up, bright in the air.
“I bet you dance, too,” I said. “How do you say ‘dance’?”
“Dance,” said Candelario.
“In Spanish, por favor.”
“Bailar,” he said.
“Do some bailar for us, too.”
My father shook me, pulling me around, and he saw my fingers still on the cards, figured it out, and the game was over, I was going to die. My father was going to kill me. “What have you done,” he asked me. “What in hell have you done?”
Then I heard Candelario’s feet begin to shuffle, raising puffs of dust. His boot heels drummed on the hard dirt, and the soles began to snap up into the air. He dropped the cap with its skirt on the ground and danced circles around it. Head bowed and good arm folded behind his back, the other swinging at his side, the palm twisting with his steps, a partner. He pranced figure eights around the fire, the hat. We could almost hear the guitars strumming, watching him dance. Bailar. The incantation stopped everyone in time.
When Candelario stooped to pick up his hat, dusting it against his thigh, the trance broke.
Our father talked to Candelario, standing apart, just the two of them. I thought back to him lifting the bad arm, letting it fall -- he didn’t touch him now, but gestured in the air around him. Candelario’s face remained down, his bad arm shrunken at his side. The other pickers murmured, watching from the corners of their black eyes, saying what I could only guess.
Our father herded us to the truck. I sat between him and my brother, even though I was older -- my feet on the hump, knees almost to my chin, feeling the driveshaft’s vibration drilling in my heels. “The crop’s down,” our father said. “That’s what matters. We’re done with them now. They’re done with us.”
I remembered looking back through the cloud of dust. One of them was kicking dirt on the last of the fire. Another took a drink from the water tank. There was a group already walking away, small swaggering figures in the rippled heat.
“What about us?” my brother said. “We worked just as hard as anybody.”
“You boys pulled a stunt,” our father said, wagging his head, wagging his head and starting to laugh. “There will be consequences. Don’t think you’ve got away with anything. I promise you there will be consequences,” he said, still laughing and laughing.
* * *
That night clouds rolled in, thick, gray, signaling rain. The next morning’s light spread slow and dim under the lid and the air could have been measured in pounds. Our father walked with his face to the skies, watching and waiting, calculating. If the wind started whipping the vines, he’d know the crop would get wet. We knew this. Everyone who grew raisins knew this. Rain could turn a perfect crop into a field of worthless, molding fruit. The packers wouldn’t buy it. A starving coyote wouldn’t even nibble. We’d have to plow it all under—the corners of the paper trays would stick out from the overturned dirt like little flags, blanching white in the sun. We’d have to live a year on meager crop insurance and hope to have better luck.
I’d been through that before, once, the year before Candelario first came to us. It poured on the crop and we almost lost our vineyard. What I didn’t know -- still to this day don’t know -- is if Candelario moved the world to protect or attack us? The crop stayed dry that year he danced the fields and he hasn’t returned since. Years later I took over the vineyard from my father and have two boys of my own. I wonder, sometimes, if by some miracle he’ll come back to pick my harvest. But why would he? He’s always known there are no repairable men.
* * *
John Carr Walker grew up on a raisin farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley and now lives in Saint Helens, Oregon, where there’s not a vineyard for miles. His writing has appeared in StringTown, Slow Trains, Prick of the Spindle, The Writer's Dojo, Eclectica, and elsewhere.
He's the editor and founder of the literary magazine TRACHODON.