Chapter II: Part 2

"These tent" was a top and three walls of dirty canvas. "If you'd told me a Beecham would lay down in a filthy place like this. . . ." Grandma declared. Rose-Ellen did not hear the end of the sentence. She was asleep on the earth floor.

Next day when the men and Dick were hired to pick grapefruit, Grandpa asked the boss about better living quarters.

"He said there wasn't any," Grandpa reported later.

"My land of love, you mean we've got to stay here?" Grandma groaned.

Grimly she set to work. The Italian neighbor had brought her a pot of stew and some coffee, but now Grandma and Rose-Ellen must go to the store for provisions. They brushed their clothes, all wrinkles from the long trip, and demanding the iron Grandma did not have. They combed their hair and washed. They set out, leaving the baby with Jimmie.

"Shall I send these?" the grocer asked respectfully, when they had given their order. "You're new here, aren't you?" Mussed as they were, the Beechams still looked respectable.

Grandma flushed. She hated to have anyone see that flapping canvas room, but the heap of supplies was heavy. "Please. We're working in the grapefruit," she said.

The grocer's face lost its smile. "Oh, we don't deliver to the camps," he snapped. "And it's strictly cash."

Grandma handed him the coins, and she and Rose-Ellen silently piled their purchases into the tub they had bought. They had to set it down many times on their way back.

Next Grandma made a twig broom and they swept the dirty ground. Mrs. Rugieri, next door, showed Grandma her beds, made of automobile seats put together on the ground. That night the Beecham men went to the nearest dumps and found enough seats to make a bed for Grandpa and Grandma and the baby. Fortunately it was not cold; coats were covering enough.

On the dump Daddy found also an old tub, from which he made a stove, cutting holes in it, turning it upside down, and fastening in a stovepipe.

"I don't feel to blame folks so much as I used to for being dirty," Grandma admitted, when they had done their best to make the shelter a home. "But all the same, I want for you young-ones to keep away from them. I saw a baby that looked as if it had measles."

"If only there was a Center," Rose-Ellen complained, "or if they even had room for us in school. I feel as if I'd scream, staying in this horrid tent so much."

"I didn't know," said Daddy, "that there was a place in our whole country where you couldn't live decent and send your kids to school if you wanted to."

It was pleasant in the grapefruit grove, where the rich green trees made good-smelling aisles of clean earth, and the men picked the pale round fruit ever so carefully, clipping it gently so as not to bruise the skin and cause decay. It hardly seemed to belong to the same world as the ill-smelling pickers' camp of rags, boards, and tin.

Dick lost his job after the first few days. He had been hired because he was so tall and strong; but the foreman said he was bruising too much fruit. At first Grandma said she was glad he was fired, for he had been making himself sick eating fruit. But she was soon sorry that he had nothing to do.

"And them young rapscallions you run with teach you words and ways I never thought to see in a Beecham," Grandma scolded.

But if camp was hard for them all, it was hardest for Grandma and Jimmie and Sally, who seemed always ailing.

"We've got to grit our teeth and hang on," said Grandma.

Then came the Big Storm.

All day the air had been heavy, still; weatherwise pickers watched the white sky anxiously. In the middle of the night, Rose-Ellen woke to the shriek of wind and the crack of canvas. Then, with a splintering crash, the tent-poles collapsed and she was buried under a mass of wet canvas.

At first she could hear no voice through the howling wind and battering rain. Then Sally's wail sounded, and Grandma's call: "Rose-Ellen! Jimmie! Dick! You all right?"

Until dawn the Beechams could only huddle together in the small refuge Daddy contrived against the dripping, pricking blackness. When day came, the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but fitfully, as if they, too, were tired out. The family scurried around putting up the tent and building a fire and drying things out before the men must go to the grove. Rose-Ellen and Dick and even Jimmie felt less dismal when they steamed before the washtub stove and ate something hot.

Grandma and Sally felt less relief. Sally's cheeks were hot and red, and she turned her head from side to side, crying and coughing. Grandma was saying, "My land, my land, I'd give five years of my life to be in my own house with this sick little mite!" when a smooth gray head thrust aside the tent flap and a neighborly voice said, "Oh, mercy me!"

Then without waiting for invitation, a crisp gingham dress followed the gray head in. "Is she bad sick? Have you-all had the doctor? I'm Mrs. King, from town."

"And you really think we're humans?" Grandma demanded, her cheeks as red as Sally's. "If you do, you're the first since we struck this place. You'll have to excuse me," she apologized, as the children stared at her with astonished eyes. "Seems like we've lost our manners along with everything else."

"I don't wonder. I don't wonder a bit. Our preacher telephoned this morning that there was a heap of suffering here in the camp, or like enough we'd not have ought of it, and us church folks, too. Now I got my Ford out on the road; you tote the baby and we'll take her to my doctor."

Mrs. King's doctor gave Sally medicine and told Grandma about feeding her orange juice and chopped vegetables and eggs as well as milk. Grandma sighed as she wondered how she would get these good things for the sick baby. However, Sally did seem to be somewhat better when they returned. Mrs. King and Grandma were talking over how to get supplies when the men came back to the tent.

"Laid off," said Grandpa wearily, not seeing the caller. "Storm's wrecked the crop so bad he's laying off the newest hired. Says it's like to ruin him."

Grandma sat still with the baby whining on her lap. "My land of love," she said, "what will we do now?"

5 CISSY FROM THE ONION MARSHES

"Well, I should think you'd be glad to get clear of this," cried their visitor. "Florida camps ain't all so bad."

"We've no money to move, ma'am," Grandpa said bluntly. "It took near all we'd earned to get here, and now no job!"

"This Italian next door says they're advertising for, cotton pickers in Texas," Daddy said, cradling Sally in one arm while he held her little clawlike hand in his, feeling its fever.

"We haven't got wings, to fly there," Grandma objected.

Mrs. King looked thoughtfully around the wretched shelter. A few clothes hung from corner posts; a few tin dishes were piled in a box cupboard. The children were clean as children could be in such a place. But the visitor's glance lingered longest on the clock.

"Your clock and mine are like as two peas," she observed. "Forty years ago I got mine, on my wedding day."

"Mine was a wedding present, too. And my feather beds that I had to let go at fifty cents apiece. . . ." Grandma quavered.

"These are queer times." Mrs. King shook her head. "I do wish I had the means to lend a hand like a real neighbor. There's this, though--my mister took in a big old auto on a debt, and he'll leave you have it for what the debt was--fifteen dollars, seems like."

"You reckon he will?" Grandpa demanded.

"He better!" said Mrs. King.

"Even fifteen dollars won't leave us scarcely enough to eat on," Grandpa muttered.

"But we've got to get to a place where there's work," Daddy reminded him.

They went to see the car, and found it a big, strong old Reo, with fairly good tires. So they bought it.

Grandma had one piece of jewelry left, besides her wide gold wedding ring--a cameo brooch. She traded it for a nanny goat. On the ever useful dump the men found a wrecked trailer and they mended it so that it would hold the goat, which the children named Carrie. Later, Grandma thought, they might get some laying hens, too.

Two days after the Big Storm, they set out for the Texas cottonfields. Mrs. King stuck a big box of lunch into the car, and an old tent which she said she couldn't use.

"I hope I'll be forgiven for never paying heed to fruit tramps--fruit workers--before," she said soberly. "From now on I aim to. Though I shan't find none like you-all, with a Seth Thomas clock and suchlike."

After the truck ride from Jersey even a fifteen-dollar automobile was luxury, with its roomy seats and two folding seats that let down between.

Grandma joked, in her tart way, "I never looked to be touring the country in my own auto!"

Rose-Ellen jiggled in the back seat. "Peekaneeka, Gramma!" she said.

When it rained, the children scurried to fasten the side curtains and then huddled together to keep warm while they played tick-tack-toe or guessing games. For meals they stopped where they could milk Carrie and build a small fire. At night they put up the tent, unless a farmer or a policeman ordered them to move on.

At first it seemed more of a peekaneeka than any of their adventures thus far. They met and passed many old cars like their own, and the children counted the strange things that were tied on car or trailer tops while Grandma counted license plates-when Sally was not too fussy. There was always something new to see, especially when they were passing through Louisiana. Daddy said Louisiana was the one state in the country that had parishes instead of counties, and that that was because it had been French in the early days. Almost everything else about it seemed as strange to the children--the Spanish moss hanging in long streamers from the live oak trees; the bayous, or arms of the river, clogged with water hyacinths; the fields of sugar cane; and the Negro cabins, with their glassless windows and their big black kettles boiling in the back yards.

"But the funniest thing I saw," Rose-Ellen said later, "was a cow lying in the bayou, with purple water hyacinths draped all over her, as if it was on purpose."

After a few days, though, even this peekaneeka grew wearisome to the children; while Daddy and Grandpa grew more and more anxious about an angry spat-spat-spat from the Reo. So they were all glad to reach the cotton fields they had been steering toward.

But there they did not find what they had hoped for. There were too many workers ahead of them and too little left to do. Tractors, it seemed, were taking the place of many men, one machine driving out two to five families.

Though the camp was a fairly comfortable one, it proved lonesome for the children for there was no Center, and it did not seem worth while for them to start to school for so short a time. It was doubtful, anyway, whether the school had room for them.

Grandma was too lame to work in the cotton. When she bent over, she could hardly straighten up again; so she stayed home with Jimmie and the baby, and Dick and Rose-Ellen picked. Rose-Ellen felt superior, because there were children her age picking into small sacks, like pillow-slips, and she used one of the regular long bags, fastened to her belt and trailing on the ground behind.

At first cotton-picking was interesting, the fluffy bolls looking like artificial roses and the stray blossoms strangely shaped and delicately pink. Sometimes a group of Negro pickers would chant in rich voices as they picked. "Da cotton want a-pickin' so ba-ad!" But it was astonishing to the Beechams to find how many aches they had and how few pounds of cotton when the day's picking was weighed.

Tired and achy as they were at night, though, they were glad to find children in the next shack.

"Queer ones," Grandma called them.

"It's their talk I can't get the hang of," Grandpa added. "It may be English, but I have to listen sharp to make it out."

Daddy trotted Sally on his foot and laughed. "It's English all right--English of Shakespeare's time, likely, that they've used for generations. They're Kentucky mountaineers, and as the father says, 'a fur piece from home'."

It was through the eldest girl that the children became acquainted: the girl and her toothbrush.

Rose-Ellen was brushing her teeth at the door, and Dick was saying, "I ain't going to. Nobody brushes their teeth down here," when suddenly the girl appeared, a toothbrush and jelly glass in her hand, and a younger brother and sister following her.

"This is the way we brush our teeth," sang the girl and while her toe tapped the time, two brushes popped into two mouths and scrubbed up and down, up and down--"brush our teeth, brush our teeth!"

She spied Rose-Ellen. "Did you-uns larn at the Center, too?" she asked eagerly. "First off, we-uns allowed they was queer little hair-brushes; but them teachers! Them teachers could make 'em fly fast as a sewing machine. We reckoned if them teachers was so smart with such comical contraptions, like enough they knowed other queer doings. And they sure did."

Thus began the friendship between the Beecham children and Cissy, Tom and Mary--with toddling Georgie and the baby thrown in. Cissy was beautiful, like Grandma's old cameo done in color, with heavy, loose curls of gold-brown hair. Long evening, visits she and Rose-Ellen had, when they were not too tired from cotton-picking. Little by little Rose-Ellen learned the story of Cissy's past few years. Always she would remember it, spiced with the queer words Cissy used.

They had lived on a branch--a brook--in the Kentucky hills. Their house was log, said Cissy, with a fireplace where Maw had her kettles and where the whole lot of them could sit when winter nights were cold, and Paw could whittle and Maw weave a coverlet.

"Nary one of us could read," Cissy said dreamily, sitting on the packing-box doorstep with elbows on knees and chin on palms. "But Paw could tell purty tales and Maw could sing song-ballads that would make you weep. But they wasn't no good huntin' no more, and the kittles was empty. So we come down to the coal mines, and when the mines shut down, we went on into the onions."

These were great marshes, drained like cranberry bogs and planted in onions. Whole families could work there, planting, weeding, pulling, packing.

("I've learned a lot!" thought Rose-Ellen. "I used to ask the grocer for a nickel's worth of dry onions, and I never did guess how they came to be there.")

The first year was dreary. Maw took the baby (Mary, then) and laid her on a blanket at the end of the row she was working, with Tom to watch her. Cissy worked along with the grown folks, or some days stayed home and did the washing and minded Tom and Mary.

"I shore didn't know how to wash good as I do now." She patted her faded dress, pretty clean, though not like the clothes of Grandma's washing.

There was one thing about it, Cissy said; after a day in onions, with the sun shining hot on her sunbonnet and not much to eat, she didn't care if there wasn't any play or fun at night; she was glad enough to drop down on the floor and go to sleep as soon as she'd had corn pone and coffee. Sometimes she was sick from the sun beating down on her head and she had to crawl into the shade of a crate and lie there.

The second year was different. Next summer, early, when the cherries had set their green beads and the laylocks had quit blooming, there came two young ladies. They came of an evening, and talked to Paw and Maw as they sat on the doorsill with their shoes kicked off and their bare toes resting themselves.

First Paw and Maw wouldn't talk to them because why would these pretty young ladies come mixing around with strangers? Paw and Maw allowed they had something up their sleeves. But the ladies patted Georgie, the baby then, and held him; and Cissy crept closer and closer, because they smelled so nice. And then they asked Maw if they couldn't take Cissy in their car and pay her as much as she earned picking. She was to help them invite the children to a place where they could be safe and happy while their grown folks worked.

Cissy couldn't hardly sense it; but Maw let her go, because she was puny. The teachers got an old schoolhouse to use; and church folks came to paint the walls; and P.W.A. workers made chairs and tables; and the church ladies made curtains. The teachers got icebox, stove, and piano from a second-hand store.

Yet, at first, it was hard to get people to send their children even to this beautiful place. They'd rather risk locking them in at home, or keeping them at the end of the onion row. That first morning, the teachers gathered up only nine children. Those nine told what it was like, and next day there were fifteen, and by the end of the summer "upwards of forty-five."

Cissy told about the Center as she might tell about fairyland. Across one wall were nails, with kits sent by children from the different churches. The kits held tooth brushes, washcloths, combs. Above each nail was a picture by which the child could know his own toilet equipment.

"Mine was the purtiest little gal with shiny hair. But it wasn't colored," she added, regretfully. "Tommie's was a yaller automobile."

"Why'd you have pictures?" asked Jimmie.

"I were going on eleven, but I couldn't read," Cissy confessed.

Rose-Ellen patted Jimmie stealthily and didn't tell Cissy that he was going on ten and couldn't read either.

Cissy went on with her tale of the Center. There was toothbrush and wash-up drill. There were clean play-suits that churches had sent from far cities. Every morning there was worship. The children had helped make an altar--a box with a silk scarf across and a picture of Jesus above and a Bible and two candles. They all sang hymns and heard Bible stories and prayed. Oh, yes, Cissy said, back in the mountains they went to meetin'--when there was meetin'--but God wasn't the same in Kentucky, some way. The teachers' God loved them so good that it hurt him to have them steal or lie or be any way dirty or mean. He had to love them a heap to send the Center people to help them the way he did.

After worship came play and study, outdoors and in, with the clean babies comfortably asleep in the clothesbaskets, their stomachs full of milk from shiny bottles. The older ones sat down to the table and prayed, and drank milk through stems, and ate carrots and greens and "samwidges." And after the table was cleared, they lay down on the floor and Teacher maybe played soft music and they went to sleep.

Once they had a real party. They were invited to a near-by church by some of the children of that church. The tables were trimmed with flowers and frilled paper and there were cakes and Jello. The children played games together at the end of the party.

The big girls, when rain kept them from working, learned to cook and sew and take care of babies; and even the little girls learned a heap and made pretties they could keep, besides. From the bottom of their clothes-box, Cissy brought a paper-wrapped scrapbook of Bible pictures she had cut and pasted. Tom had made a table out of a crate, but there wasn't room to fetch it.

"I got so fat and strong," boasted Cissy, punching her thin chest with a bony fist. "For breakfast, Maw didn't have no time to give us young-uns nothing but maybe some Koolade to drink, and a slice of store bread; but at the Center us skinny ones got a hull bottle of milk to drink through a stem after worship."

"Are you going back there?" Rose-Ellen asked.

Cissy nodded, her hands folded tight between her knees. "And maybe stay all winter, and me and Tommie go to school. Because Paw and Maw feel like the teachers was kinfolk, since what happened to Georgie."

"What happened to Georgie?"

Six children huddled on the doorstep now, shivering in the chilly dark. "One Sunday night," Cissy said, "Georgie took to yelling, and went all stiff and purple, and we couldn't make out what ailed him. Only that his throat hurt too bad to swallow; so Maw tied up his topknot so tight it near pulled it out: that was to lift his palate, because dropped palates make sore throats.

"Georgie didn't get any better. When the teachers come Monday morning to tote us to the Center, they begged to take Georgie to the doctor. Maw was might' nigh crazy by then, and she got into the Ford without her head combed, Georgie in her lap. Maw said she never had ridden so fast. She thought her last-day was come, with the fences streaking past her lickety-split. And when they come to the doctor he looked Georgie over and said, 'Could this child have got hold of any lye?' And Maw said, real scairt, well, she did have a bottle of lye water, and somebody might have set it on the floor.

"So every day the rest of the summer them teachers toted Georgie to the Center and the doctor cured Georgie up till now he can eat purty good. So that's how come we're shore going back to the onions next summer."

6: AT THE EDGE OF A MEXICAN VILLAGE

Cotton-picking was over, and the Beechams tided themselves over with odd jobs till spring came and they could move on to steadier work. This time they were going up into Colorado to work in the beets.

"And high time!" said Grandma. "We've lived on mush and milk so long we're getting the color of mush ourselves; and our clothes are a caution to snakes."

"But we'll be lucky if the brakebands of the auto last till we get over the mountains," said Daddy.

The spring drive up through Texas was pleasant, between blossoming yellow trees and yuccas like wax candles and pink bouquets of peach trees and mocking birds' songs.

The mountain pass between New Mexico and Colorado was beautiful, too, and exciting. In places it was a shelf shoved against the mountain, and Jimmie said it tickled his stomach to look down on the tops of other automobiles, traveling the loop of road below them. Even Carrie, riding haughtily in her trailer, let out an anguished bleat when she hung on the very edge of a curve. And the Reo groaned and puffed.

Up through Colorado they chugged; past Pike's Peak; through Denver, flat on the plain with a blue mountain wall to its west; on through the farmlands north of it to the sugar-beet town which was their goal.

Beyond the town stood an adobe village for beetworkers on the Lukes fields, where the Beechams were to work.

"Mud houses," Dick exclaimed, crumbling off a piece of mud plaster thick with straw.

"Like the bricks the Israelites made in Egypt," said Grandpa; "only Pharaoh wanted them to do without the straw."

"It's a Mexican village," observed Grandma. "I'd feel like a cat in a strange garret here. And not a smidgin of shade. That shack off there under the cottonwood tree looks cooler."

"It's a chicken-coop!" squealed Rose-Ellen as they walked over to it. "Gramma wants to live in a chicken-coop!"

"It's empty. And it'd be a sight easier to clean than some places where humans have lived," Grandma replied stoutly.

So the Beechams got permission to live in the farmer's old chicken-coop. It had two rooms, and the men pitched the tent beside it for a bedroom. They had time to set up "chicken-housekeeping," as Rose-Ellen called it, before the last of May, when beet work began. They made a pretty cheerful place of this new home; though, of course, it had no floor and no window glass, and sun and stars shone in through its roof, and the only running water was in the irrigation ditch. Even under the glistening cottonwood tree it was a stifling cage on a hot day.

They were all going to work, except Jimmie and Sally. It would take all of them, new hands that they were, to care for the twenty acres they were to work. Mr. Lukes said that children under sixteen were not supposed to be employed, but of course they could always help their parents. Daddy said that was one way to get around the Child Labor Law.

So the Beechams were to thin the beets and hoe them and top them, beginning the last of May and finishing in October, and the pay would be twenty-six dollars an acre. The government made the farmers pay that price, no matter how poor the crop was.

"Five hundred and twenty dollars sounds like real money!" Daddy rejoiced.

"Near five months, though," Grandma reckoned, "and with prices like they are, we're lucky to feed seven hungry folks on sixty dollars a month. And we're walking ragbags, with our feet on the ground. And them brakebands--and new tires."

"Five times sixty is three hundred," Rose-Ellen figured.

"You'll find it won't leave more than enough to get us on to the next work place," Grandpa muttered.

It was lucky the chicken-coop was in sight of their acres. Before she left home in the early morning, Grandma saw to it that there was no fire in the old-new washtub stove, and that Sally's knitted string harness was on, so that she could not reach the irrigation ditch, and that Carrie was tethered.

The beets, planted two months ago, had come up in even green rows. Now they must be thinned. With short-handled hoes the grown people chopped out foot-long strips of plants. Dick and Rose-Ellen followed on hands and knees, and pulled the extra plants from the clumps so that a single strong plant was left every twelve inches.

The sun rose higher and hotter in the big blue bowl of sky. Rose-Ellen's ragged dress clung to her, wet with sweat, and her arms and face prickled with heat. Grandma looked at her from under the apron she had flung over her head.

"Run and stretch out under the cottonwood awhile," she said. "No use for to get sunstroke."

Rose-Ellen went silently, thankfully. It was cooler in the shade of the tree. She looked up through the fluttering green leaves at the floating clouds shining in the sun. Jimmie hobbled around her, driving Sally with her knitted reins, but they did not keep their sister awake. The sun was almost noon-high when she opened her eyes, and she hurried guiltily back to the beets.

She had never seen such a big field, its green and brown stripes waving up and down to the skyline. It made her ache to think that five Beechams must take out these extra thousands of three-inch plants; and after that, hoe them; and after that. . . .

Her knees were so sore that night that Grandpa bought her overalls. He got her and Dick big straw hats, too, though it was too late to keep their faces from blistering. All the Beechams but Grandma wore overalls. She couldn't bring herself to it. That night she made herself a sunbonnet out of an old shirt, sitting close to a candle stuck in a pop bottle.

"I clean forgot to look over the beans and put them to soak," she said wearily, from her bed.

Rose-Ellen scooped herself farther into her layer of straw. She ought to offer to get up and look over those beans, but she simply couldn't make herself.

"It seems like I can't stay up another ten minutes," Grandma excused herself, "after the field work and redding up and such. But we're getting like all the rest of them, buying the groceries that we can fix easiest, even though they cost twice as much and ain't half as nourishing. And when you can't trade at but one place it's always dearer. . . ."

Mr. Lukes had guaranteed their account at the store, because of the pay due them at the end of the season. So they went on buying there, even though its prices were high and its goods of poor quality, because they did not have money to spend anywhere else.

When the thinning was done, they must begin all over again, working with the short-handled hoes, cutting out any extra plants, loosening the ground. By that time they were more used to the work; and in July came a rest time, when all they needed to do was to turn the waters of the big ditch into the little ditches that crinkled between the rows. It was lucky there was irrigation water, or the growing plants would have died in the heat, since there had been little rain.

Rose-Ellen loved to watch the water moving through the fields as if it were alive, catching the rosy gold of sunset in its zigzag mirrors. She missed the Eastern fireflies at night; otherwise the evenings were a delight. Colorado sunsets covered the west with glory, and then came quick coolness. Dry as it was, the cottonwood leaves made a sound like refreshing rain, and the cicadas hummed comfortably. All the Beechams stayed outside till far into the night, for the chicken-house was miserably hot at the end of every day.

"The Garcias' and Martinezes' houses are better if they are mud and haven't any shade," Rose-Ellen told Grandma. "The walls are so thick that inside they're like cool caves."

She and Dick had made friends in the Mexican village with Vicente Garcia and her brother Joe, and with Nico Martinez, next door to the Garcias', and her brothers. Even when they all picked beans in the morning, during the vacation from sugar beets, there were these long, cool evenings for play.

Grandma complained. "I don't know what else to blame for Dick's untidy ways. Hair sticking up five ways for Christmas, and fingernails in mourning and the manners of a heathen. I'm afraid that sore on his hand may be something catching. Those Garcias and Martinezes of yours . . . !"

"The Garcias maybe, but not the Martinezes," Rose-Ellen objected. "Gramma, you go to their houses sometime and see."

One evening Grandma did. Jimmie had come excitedly leading home the quaintest of all the babies of the Mexican village, Vicente Garcia's little sister. He had found her balancing on her stomach on the bank of the ditch. Three years old, she was, and slim and straight, with enormous eyes and a great tangle of sunburned brown curls. Her dress made her quainter still, for it was low-necked and sleeveless, and came to her tiny ankles so that she looked like a child from an old-fashioned picture.

Grandma and Rose-Ellen and Jimmie walked home with her, and Grandma's eyes widened at sight of the two-roomed Garcia house. Ten people lived and slept, ate and cooked there, and it looked as if it had never met a broom or soapsuds.

The Martinez home was different, perfectly neat, even to the scrubbed oilcloth on the table. Afterwards Grandma said the bottoms of the pans weren't scoured, but she couldn't feel to blame Mrs. Martinez, with five young ones besides the new baby to look after. When the Beechams went home, Mrs. Martinez gave them a covered dish of _enchiladas_.

Even Grandma ate those enchiladas without hesitation, though they were so peppery that she had to cool her mouth with frequent swallows of water. They were made of tidily rolled _tortillas_ (Mexican corn-cakes, paper-thin), stuffed with meat and onion and invitingly decorated with minced cheese and onion tops. They looked, smelled and tasted delicious.

In turn, Grandma sent biscuits, baked in the Dutch oven Grandpa had bought her. Grandma had always been proud of her biscuits.

In July the Mexican children took Dick and Rose-Ellen to the vacation school held every summer in one of the town churches. The Beechams were not surprised at Nico's dressed-up daintiness when she called for them. Grandma said she was perfect, from the ribbon bows on her shining hair to the socks that matched her smart print dress. But it was surprising to see Vicente come from the cluttered, dirty Garcia rooms, almost as clean and sweet as Nico, though with nails more violently red.

The Beechams found it a problem to dress at all in their chicken-apartment. Dick tried to get ready in one room and Rose-Ellen in the other, and everything she wanted was in his room and everything he wanted in hers. Their small belongings had to be packed in boxes, and all the boxes emptied out to find them. Clean clothes--still unironed, of course--had to be hung up, and they could not be covered well enough so flies and moth-millers did not speck them.

"I do admire your Mexican friends," Grandma admitted grudgingly, "keeping so nice in such a hullabaloo."

"They are admire-able in lots of ways," Rose-Ellen answered. "I never knew anyone I liked much better than Nico. And the Mexicans are the very best in all the art work at the vacation school. I think the Japanese learn quickest."

"Do folks treat 'em nice?" asked Grandma.

"In the school," Rose-Ellen told her. "But outside school they act like even Nico had smallpox. They make me sick!"

Rose-Ellen spoke both indignantly and sorrowfully. That very day the three girls had come out of the church together, and had paused to look over the neat picket fence of the yard next the church. It seemed a sweet little yard, smelling of newly cut grass and flowers. Trees rose high above the small house, and inside the fence were tall spires of delphinium, bluer than the sky.

"The flowers iss so pretty," said Nico.

"And on the porch behind of the vines is a chicken in a gold cage," cried Vicente.

Rose-Ellen folded her lips over a giggle, for the chicken was a canary.

Just then a head popped up behind a red rosebush. The lady of the house was gathering flowers, and she held out a bunch to Rose-Ellen.

"Don't prick yourself," she warned. "Are you the one they call Rose-Ellen?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Rose-Ellen, burying her nose in the flowers.

"I had a little sister named Rose-Ellen," the woman said gently. "You come play on the grass sometime, and we'll pick flowers for your mother."

"And can Nico and Vicente come, too?" Rose-Ellen asked. "They're my best friends."

The woman looked at Nico and Vicente with cold eyes. "I can't ask _all_ the children," she answered.

"Thank you, ma'am," Rose-Ellen stammered. When they were out of sight down the road, she threw the roses into the dust. Nico snatched them up again.

"I wouldn't go there--I wouldn't go there for ten dollars," Rose-Ellen declared. Vicente looked at her with wise deep eyes. "I could 'a' told you," she said, shrugging. "American ladies, they mostly don't like Mexican kids. I don't know why."

October came. It was the time for the topping of the beets. The Martinez family went back to Denver for school. The Garcias stayed; their children would go into the special room when they returned, to have English lessons and to catch up in other studies--or rather, to try to catch up.

"But me, always I am two years in back of myself," Vicente regretted one day, "even with specials room. Early out of school and late into it, for me that makes too hard."

Now Farmer Lukes went through the Beechams' acres, lifting the beets loose by machine. Rose-Ellen could not believe they were beets-great dirt-colored clods, they looked. Not at all like the beets she knew.

Topping was a new job. With a long hooked knife the beet was lifted and laid across the arm, and then, with a slash or two, freed of its top. The children followed, gathering the beets into great piles for Mr. Lukes's wagon to collect.

Vicente and Joe did not make piles; they topped; and Joe boasted that he was faster than his father as he slashed away with the topping knife.

"It looks like you'd cut yourself, holding it on your knee like you do!" Grandma cried as she watched him one day.

"Not me!" bragged Joe. "Other kids does." The beet tops fell away under his flashing knife.

From the beet-dump the beets were taken to the sugar factory a few miles away, where they were made into shining white beet sugar. ("And that's another thing I never even guessed!" thought Rose-Ellen. "What hard work it takes to fill our sugar bowls!")

Sometimes at night now a skim of ice formed on the water bucket in the chicken-house. Goldenrod and asters were puffs of white; the harvest moon shone big and red at the skyline, across miles of rolling farmland; crickets fiddled sleepily and long-tailed magpies chattered. One clear, frosty night Grandpa said, "Hark! the ducks are flying south. Maybe we best follow."

7: THE BOY WHO DIDN'T KNOW GOD

Handbills blew around the adobe village, announcing that five hundred cotton-pickers were wanted at once in Arizona. The Reo, full of Beechams and trailing Carrie, headed south.

The surprisingly large grocery bill had been paid, a few clothes bought, Daddy's ulcerated tooth pulled, and the Reo's patched tires replaced with better used ones. The result was that the Beecham pocketbooks were as flat as pancakes.

"Yet we've worked like horses," Daddy said heavily. "And, worse than that, we've let Gramma and the kids work as I never thought Beechams would."

"But we can't blame Farmer Lukes," said Grandpa. "With all the planting and digging and hauling he's done, he says he hasn't a cent to show for it, once he's paid for his seed. It's too deep for me."

Down across Colorado, where the names were Spanish, Daddy said, because it used to be part of Mexico. Down across New Mexico, where the air smelled of cedar; where scattered adobe houses had bright blue doors and strings of scarlet chili peppers fringing their roofs; where Indians sat under brush shelters by the highway and held up pottery for sale. Down into Arizona, where Grandma had to admit that the colors she'd seen on the picture postcards of it were not too bright. Here were red rocks, pink, blue-gray, white, yellow, purple; and the morning and evening sun set their colors afire and made them flower gardens of flame. Here the Indian women wore flounced skirts and velvet tunics and silver jewelry. They herded flocks of sheep and goats and lived in houses like inverted brown bowls.

"We've had worse homes, this year," Grandma said. "I'd never hold up my head if they knew back home." Along the road with the Reo ran an endless parade of old cars and trailers. There were snub-nosed Model T's, packed till they bulged; monstrous Packards with doors tied shut; yellow roadsters that had been smart ten years ago, jolting along with mattresses on their tops and young families jammed into their luggage compartments. Once in a while they met another goat, like Carrie, who wasn't giving as much milk as before.

"All this great country," Grandma marveled some more, "and no room for these folks. Half a million of us, some say, without a place to go."

Dick said, "The kid in that Oklahoma car said the drought dried up their farm and the wind blew it away. Nothing will grow in the ground that's left."

"He's from the Dust Bowl," Grandpa assented. "Thousands of these folks are from the Dust Bowl."

The parade of old cars limped along for two weeks, growing thicker as it drew near the part of Arizona where the pickers had been called for. The Beechams saw more and more signs on fences and poles: FIVE HUNDRED PICKERS WANTED!

"They don't say how much they pay," Grandma noticed.

"Ninety cents a hundred pounds is usual this year, and a fellow can make a bare living at that," said Daddy.

Soon the procession turned off the road, the Beechams with it. The place was swarming with pickers.

"How much are you paying?" Daddy asked.

"Fifty cents a hundred."

"Why, man alive, we'd starve on that pay," Daddy growled, the corners of his jaws white with anger.

"You don't need to work if you don't want to," the manager barked at him. "Here's two thousand folks glad to work at fifty cents."

Leaving Jimmie to mind Sally in the car, the Beechams went to picking at once. Grandma had saved their old cotton sacks, fortunately, since they cost a dollar apiece.

Rose-Ellen's heart thumped as if she were running a race. Everyone was picking at top speed, for there were far too many pickers and they all tried to get more than their share. The Beechams started at noon. At night, when they weighed in, Grandpa and Daddy each got forty cents, Grandma twenty-five, Dick twenty, and Rose-Ellen fifteen.

When he paid them, the foreman said, "No more work here. All cleaned up."

"Good land," Grandma protested, her voice shaking, "bring us from Coloraydo for a half day's work?"

"Sorry," said the foreman. "First come, first served."

In a blank quietness, the Beechams went on to hunt a camp. And here they were fortunate, for they came upon a neat tent city with a sign declaring it a Government Camp. Tents set on firm platforms faced inward toward central buildings, and everything was clean and orderly. They drove in. Yes, they could pitch their tent there, the man in the office said; there was one vacant floor. The rent was a dollar a week, but they could work it out, if they would rather, cleaning up the camp. Grandpa said they'd better work it out, since it might be hard to find jobs near by.

Even Rose-Ellen, even Dick and Jimmie, were excited over the laundry tubs in the central building, and more interested in the shower baths. Twice a day they washed themselves, and their clothes were kept fresher than they had been for a long time. Neighbors came calling, besides; and there were entertainments every week, with the whole camp taking part.

"Seems like home," said Grandpa. "If only we could find work."

The nurse on duty found that the sore on Dick's hand was scabies--the itch--picked up in some other camp, and she treated and bandaged it carefully.

Every day the men went out hunting jobs, taking others with them to share the cost of gasoline; and every day they came back discouraged. Even in the fine camp, money leaked out steadily for food. At last the Beechams gave up hope of finding work. They set out for California, the fairyland of plenty, as they thought.

At first California looked like any other state, but soon the children began naming their discoveries aloud. "Lookit! Oranges on trees!" "Roses! And those red Christmas flowers growing high as the garage!" "Palm trees--like feather dusters stuck on telegraph poles!"

"Little white houses and gardens!" crooned Grandma.

Soon, too, they saw the familiar posters: PICKERS WANTED; and the Reo followed the signs to the fields.

They were pea-fields, this time, but Grandma, peering at the pea-pickers' camp, cried, "My land, if this ain't Floridy all over again!"

"Maybe the owner ain't got the cash to put up decent chicken-coops for folks to live in," Grandpa sputtered, "but if I was him I'd dig ditches for a living before I'd put humans into pigpens like these."

"Let's go a piece farther," Grandma urged.

Grandpa fingered his old wallet. "Five dollars is the least we can keep against the car breaking down. We've got six-fifty now."

So for long months they worked in the peas and lived in the "jungle" camp, pitching their tent at the very edge of its dirt and smell.

Shacks of scrap tin, shingled with rusty pail covers, stood next to shacks made of burlap and pasteboard cartons. Ragged tents huddled behind the shacks, using the same back wall. Mattresses that looked as if they came from the dump lay on the ground with tarpaulins stretched above them as roofs, and these were the only homes of whole families who lived and slept and ate in swarms of stinging flies.

One of the few pleasant things was the Christian Center not very far away. Every morning its car chugged up to the jungle and carried off a load of children. Jimmie and Sally were always in the load. The back seat was crowded, and a helper sat in front with the driver and held Sally, while Jimmie sat between. He liked to sit there, for the driver looked like Her! Only short instead of tall, and plump instead of thin, and with curly dark hair, but with the same kind smile.

Here in California the other children were supposed to pick only outside school hours; but the school was too far from the camp and there was no bus. So Dick and Rose-Ellen picked peas all day with their elders.

"The more we earn," Dick said soberly, "the sooner we can get away from this place."

"The only trouble is," Rose-Ellen answered, "we get such an appetite that we eat more than we earn, except when we're sick."

The sun blistered Dick's fair skin until he was ill from the burn; and Rose-Ellen sometimes grew so sick and dizzy with the heat that she had to crawl into her pea hamper for shade instead of picking. There was much sickness in this camp, anyway. There was only one well, and it was not protected from filth. The flies were everywhere. Grandma boiled all the water, but she could not keep out the germ-laden flies. The family took turns lying miserably sick on an automobile-seat bed and wishing for the end of the pea-picking.

But after the early peas, they must wait for the February peas; and before they were picked, Jimmie complained that his throat felt sore. Next day he and Sally both broke out with measles.

Grandma had her hands full, keeping the toddler from running out into sunshine and rain; but it was Jimmie who really worried her, he was so sick. And when he had stopped muttering and tossing with fever, he woke one night with an earache.

"Mercy to us!" Grandma cried distractedly. "We ain't even got salt enough for a hot salt bag, or carbolic and oil to drop in his poor blessed ear!"

Indeed that night seemed to all of them like a dark cage, shutting them away from any help for Jimmie.

Next morning, Miss Pinkerton, the nurse at the Center, came to see Jimmie. She looked grave as she examined him. "If you belonged in the county, I could get him into a county hospital," she said. "But we'll do our best for him here."

Nursing in a tent was a bad dream for patient and nurses. Grandma kept boiling water to irrigate his ear and sterilize the utensils, Rose-Ellen told stories, shouting so he could hear. At night Daddy held him in strong, tired arms and sang funny songs he had learned in his one year of college. Grandma tempted Jimmie's appetite with eggs and sugar and vanilla beaten up with Carrie's milk, and with little broiled hamburgers and fresh vegetables--food such as the Beechams hadn't had for months.

The rest of them had no such food even now. Carrie was giving less milk every day, so that there was hardly enough for Sally and Jimmie. Grandma said she'd lost her appetite, staying in the tent so close, and she was glad to reduce, anyway. Grandpa said there was nothing like soup; so the kettle was kept boiling all the time, with soupbones so bare they looked as if they'd been polished, and onions and potatoes and beans. That soup didn't make any of them fat.

But Jimmie grew better, and one shining morning Miss Pinkerton stopped and said, "Jimmie's well enough to go with me on my daily round. He needs a change."

After she had carted two or three loads of children to the Center, she went to visit the sick ones in the camps for miles around. First they went to another "jungle," one where trachoma was bad. Here she left Jimmie in the car; but he could watch, for the children came outdoors to have the blue-stone or argyrol in their swollen red eyes. The treatment was painful, but without it the small sufferers might become blind.

The next camp had an epidemic of measles, and in the next, ten miles away, Miss Pinkerton vaccinated ten children.

By this time, the sun was high, and Jimmie began to think anxiously of lunch. Miss Pinkerton steered into the orchard country, where there was no sign of a store. He was relieved when she nosed the car in under the shade of a magnolia tree and said, "My clock says half-past eating time. What does yours say?"

First Miss Pinkerton scrubbed her hands with water and carbolic-smelling soap, and then she unwrapped a waxed-paper package and spread napkins. For Jimmie she laid out a meat sandwich, a jam sandwich, a big orange-colored persimmon, and a cookie: not a dull store cookie, but a thick homemade one. The churches of the neighborhood took turns baking them for the Center. Jimmie ate every crumb.

In the next camp--asparagus--was a Mexican boy with a badly hurt leg. He had gashed it when he was topping beets, and his people had come on into cotton and into peas, without knowing how to take care of the throbbing wound. When Miss Pinkerton first saw it, she doubted whether leg or boy could be saved. It was still bad, and the boy's mother stood and cried while Miss Pinkerton dressed it, there under the strip-of-canvas house.

Miss Pinkerton saw Jimmie staring at that shelter and at the helpless mother, and she whispered, "Aren't you lucky to have a Grandma like yours, Jimmie-boy?"

When the leg was all neatly rebandaged, the boy caught at Miss Pinkerton with a shy hand. "_Gracias_--thank you," he said, "but why you take so long trouble for us, Lady, when we don't pay you nothing?"

"I don't think there's anything so well worth taking trouble for as just boys and girls," Miss Pinkerton said.

The boy frowned thoughtfully. "Other peoples don't think like that way," he persisted. "For why should you?"

"Well, it's really because of Jesus," Miss Pinkerton answered slowly. "You've heard about Jesus, haven't you?"

"Not me," the boy said. "Who is he?"

"He was God's Son, and he taught men to love one another. He taught them about God, too."

"God? I've heard the name, but I ain't never seen that guy either."

"Like to hear about him?" Miss Pinkerton asked.

The boy dropped down on the running board with his bandaged leg stretched out before him. Other children came running. Sitting on the running board, too, Miss Pinkerton told them about Jesus, how he used his life to help other people be kinder to each other. The camp children listened with mouths open, and brushed the rough hair from their eyes to see the pictures she took from the car. The boy's mother stood with her arms wrapped in her dirty apron and listened, too.

But it was the boy who sat breathless till the story was done. Then he scrubbed a ragged sleeve across eyes and nose and spoke in a choked, angry voice. "I wish I'd been there. I bet them guys wouldn't-wouldn't got so fresh with--with him. But listen, Lady!" His dark eyes were fiercely questioning. "Why ain't nobody told us? It sure seems like we ought to been told before."

All the way home Jimmie sat silent. As the car stopped, he got his voice. "Miss Pink'ton, did he mean, honest, he didn't know about God and Jesus?"

Miss Pinkerton nodded. "He--he didn't know he had a Heavenly Father."

"And no Gramma either," Jimmie mumbled. "Gee."

8: THE HOPYARDS

Through February, March, and part of April, the Beecham family picked peas in the Imperial Valley.

"Peas!" Rose-Ellen exploded the word on their last night in the "jungle" camp. "I don't believe there are enough folks in the world to cat all the peas we've picked."

"And they aren't done with when they're picked, even," added Daddy. "Most of them will be canned; and other folks have to shell and sort them and put them into cans and then cook them and seal and label the cans."

"What an awful lot of work everything makes," Dick exclaimed.