Collection 6: "One Last Time" by Gary Soto

She drove in silence while I rambled on how everything was now solved, how I was going to make enough money to end our misery and even buy her a beautiful copper tea pot, the one I had shown her in Long’s Drugs.

After ten minutes of groping for grapes, my first pan brimmed with bunches.

“No, but I got a sliver from the frame,” I told her. I showed her the web of skin between my thumb and index finger.

I recounted in my mind the whole morning of bend, cut, pour again and again, before answering a feeble “thirty-seven.”

Along with my brother and sister I picked grapes until I was fifteen, before giving up and saying that I’d rather wear old clothes than stoop like a Mexican.

In his old Volkswagen, which was more noise than power, we drove on a Saturday morning to West Fresno—or Chinatown as some call it—parked, walked slowly toward a bus, and stood gawking at the...blacks, Okies, Tejanos with gold teeth,...Mexican families, and labor contractors shouting “Cotton” or “Beets,” the work of spring.

Finally when the contractor banged his palm against the side of the bus, the young man at the wheel, smiling and talking in Spanish, started the engine, idled it for a moment while he adjusted the mirrors, and started off in slow chugs.

Except for the windshield there was no glass in the windows, so as soon as we were on the rural roads outside Fresno, the dust and sand began to be sucked into the bus, whipping about like irate wasps as the gravel ticked about us.

“Leave one plant and cut four—and cut them! Don’t leave them standing or the foreman will get mad.”

I worked intently, seldom looking up, so when I did I was amazed to see the sun, like a broken orange coin, in the east.

I looked around in amazement, scanning the eastern horizon that was a taut line jutted with an occasional mountain.

By 11:00, our lunch time, my ankles were hurting from walking on clods the size of hardballs.

Working side by side, we talked and laughed at our predicament because our Mother had warned us year after year that if we didn’t get on track in school we’d have to work in the fields and then we would see.

The Tejano had quit laughing but was smiling broadly, occasionally chortling tunes he never finished.

People leaning against car hoods stared, their necks following us, owl-like...Chinese grocers stopped brooming their storefronts to raise their cadaverous faces at us.

The Tejano, who was dirty as we were, stepped awkwardly over the side rail, dusted himself off with his bandana, and sauntered into the club.