JULIAN SILVA

My mother’s entire economic policy could be summed up in two simple sentences: “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” and: “The children have to learn the value of a dollar”—as if the value of a dollar were one of life’s great immutables. And it pretty much was in The Great Depression: life then was a black-and-white movie without the redeeming silver light that lit up the real cinema’s screen. My mother also believed firmly in the virtue of physical labor and found an idle imagination at the very least morally suspect. She would have made a splendid mother to some future Spartan warrior, but she did not quite know what to do with me. I was soft—not physically, for I was wiry thin—but emotionally. And soft people need hardening. The Dryer seemed the perfect solution.
     Since money could not be harvested, every penny counted. My week’s allowance was 25cents, ten of which invariably went to Sunday afternoon at the movies: two features, a Loony Tunes cartoon, a serial with Buster Crabbe, preferably as Flash Gordon, a newsreel, and once a month, THE MARCH OF TIME announced by a portentous baritone voice with a long pause after the word “March.” And my day at the movies (the unquestionable highlight of every week) was always a Sunday, since Saturday was reserved for Sunday School conducted by two Dominican nuns from Saint Elizabeth’s in Fruitvale. Although the nuns themselves preferred to describe their lessons as Catechism Classes, Sunday School was Sunday School no matter how you tried to disguise it or on which day of the week it fell.
     Since 25cents minus ten for the movies left me with only fifteen cents to satisfy all the rest of the world’s vast store of temptations, an occasional root beer among them, I kept my eye focused on the main chance. It was thus I developed a strong and abiding affection for my godfather, Father da Cruz, soon to be Monsignor, a lean and handsome old man with fine aristocratic features and an enviably thick crest of white hair. He had been born in Lisbon to a mother who had vowed to dedicate her firstborn son to the priesthood as her reward for some answered prayer. His “vocation” was, thus, not truly his own, but his mother’s, so that his somewhat greater dedication to pleasure than to piety was understandable and scarcely a drawback in the eyes of my Silva grandparents, particularly since their cellar was always kept well-stocked with the best bootleg Canadian whiskey supplied by the priest’s innumerable connections from many walks of life, some of them not altogether respectable.
     He was the pastor of St. Louis Bertrand in Elmhurst and every visit to his well-appointed, sun porch, always accompanied by my grandmother, who was quite aware, and approvingly so, of the true source of my affection, ended with the priest handing me a shiny new fifty-cent coin. After all the pennies, nickels and dimes, it seemed immense, and since it was twice my weekly allowance, it made the priest a virtual Maecenas in my eyes. Unfortunately, he died while I was still young, leaving the munificent sum of $2,000 to his “godson, Claude Silva.” The ambiguity of this bequest created something of a dilemma. I was indisputably the priest’s godson, but I was clearly not Claude Silva; while my father, who was indeed Claude Silva, was just as indisputably not the priest’s godson. Since the sum was $200 more than my father’s annual salary from St. Mary’s College at the time, and the times, as I was all too frequently reminded, were “hard”, my father not unsurprisingly claimed the inheritance as his own, but with such an uneasy conscience I would years later, when it came time to buy my house, feel justified in exploiting his misgivings to my own financial advantage.
     The first of my mother’s economic principles I accepted as too obvious to dispute. It was with her second that I took exception. Like most children, I was not a natural-born democrat. Without being able to name the political doctrine I adhered to, I was a confirmed monarchist. The infant’s world is ruled by kings and princes, not presidents, and since my grandfather Smith was the richest and most powerful Portuguese in San Lorenzo, he was in my eyes the town’s indisputable king. There may have been other men among the Protestant minority richer than he, but there was no one who even came close to influencing the local economy as he did. If my grandfather was king, I was then a prince of the blood, and I felt the prerogatives and privileges inherent in that position keenly. Throughout my childhood, regardless of the indignities forced upon me by my unreasonable and dismayingly democratic mother, I never lost that sense of superiority, so that my grandfather’s dryer, where I was forced to work alongside what I considered my social and intellectual inferiors became for me what the blacking factory was for Charles Dickens, an enduring blight upon my childhood.
     The entrance to The Dryer was on Ashland Avenue between Lewelling Boulevard, the street on which I was born (a misspelling, by the way, of one of the town’s early Welsh founders) and the Western Pacific tracks. The very word “Ashland” aroused such contempt I most often referred to the town as Ashcanland. Who, I wondered, would ever name his hometown the land of ashes, except as a sign of his own loathing for the place? That San Lorenzo’s redbrick grammar school was far superior to Ashland’s undistinguished stucco box was a matter of faith not subject to dispute. Nor, speaking of faith, did Ashland have a church of its own, so that those intent upon salvation were forced to attend San Lorenzo’s St. John The Baptist. Since neither San Lorenzo nor Ashland was incorporated, there was very little consensus about where one ended and the other began; but since my grandfather was clearly San Lorenzo’s uncrowned king, his dryer, as an important part of his kingdom, had to be in San Lorenzo. So for me the Western Pacific tracks formed the boundary between the two towns. Ashland Avenue was not Ashland itself, but merely the road to Ashland.
     The Dryer was an unprepossessing collection of open-air sheds, grim sulfur houses, red-painted outdoor privies, and in season, acres upon acres of spread trays filled with drying apricots of varying shades of orange, from the palest yellow of those fresh from the sulfur houses, to the brownish orange of those already dried and waiting to be scraped into a row of empty lugs. The Dryer, of course, threatened my amour propre only during high season, from the beginning of June through the end of August. For the rest of the year, when it was no longer a venue for slave labor (child labor laws being non-existent at the time), the place had a kind of abandoned spooky charm, with stacks upon stacks of sun-stained trays to climb and all manner of secret hiding places to indulge my wildest fantasies in unthreatened solitude.
     The main building, where the apricots were cut, consisted of dark-stained six-inch-by-six redwood frames anchored in concrete and covered with corrugated tin to protect the workers from the elements – which meant the sun, since a summer rainstorm was an almost unheard of phenomenon. The unwalled interior consisted of two long rows of trays set upon wooden saw horses. The concrete floor that supported them was bisected by a pair of iron rails with a trolley to carry the full trays to another pair of tracks outside of the shed itself and set at right angles to the interior tracks. There a second trolley low and large enough for the first trolley to slide onto it waited. The stacks of trays were then transported from the shed to the double row of sulfur houses, each one of which had its own pair of tracks to guide the trays into the windowless cell-like rooms in which the sulfur was burned to prevent the fruit from rotting before it dried. For me these sulfur houses were the most sinister part of The Dryer. Their gray, prison-like aspect, the metal doors coated with a sickly film of yellow powder, seemed something out of a nightmare gulag, a word that would at the time have been meaningless to virtually everyone. There was about them an air of unspeakable torture. They were also, I was convinced, a personally menacing setting for murder, for anyone locked inside one would surely never come out alive; and some of the unshaven, gaunt-cheeked workmen seemed to me quite capable of taking out their resentment against their cold-hearted employer by locking his grandson in one. The area was made more sinister still by the insistent odor of burning sulfur, which, I knew, was just another name for brimstone. The smell of hell itself. A place as real to me at the time as those other equally mythical place-names, Paris and Rome.
     Less sinister but far more disgusting were the two red-painted privies beyond the sulfur houses on The Dryer’s outermost boundaries where the orchards began. As the season progressed the stench became ever more pervasive, mixing with the sulfur fumes to compound the foulness. I was always a finicky child, a not-so-distant cousin of the fussy princess with the pea under her mattress, prudish to a fault, and highly sensitive to odors. These personality traits, I was convinced, were the natural byproducts of my finer princely blood. The smell of cooked cauliflower was enough to make me gag, and an echo of that revulsion still lingers in age. I was, however, most fastidious about bodily functions. I could not even bear to hear them named, and took great pains to train my ever compliant grandmother Silva to reduce her blunt matinal queries about my daily bowel movements to mere initials. The privies were, thus, buildings almost beyond my power to enter. I did so only once and ever after would have suffered almost any indignity rather than ever again be forced to wipe my sore bottom with some page torn from a discarded magazine. Yet I was all too often in need of their services, particularly at the beginning of the season, since my passion for apricots, with their well-known purgative effects when ingested in excess, was as strong as my aversion to cauliflower. Fortunately our house was close enough to The Dryer to risk a quick dash through the orchards to the sanctity of my own bathroom with its roll of soft white paper; and if the need was too great, as it often was, I simply dropped my trousers then and therein the orchard and let go onto the dry earth, afterward, like a cat, covering up the traces of my waste.
     The trays upon which the fruit was laid were four feet by eight and made of thin slats from the cheapest pine or fir, varying in color from a light, yellowy tan to the darkest brown pock-marked with scars from the bleeding fruit, depending upon the number of times they had been laid out in the sun. Every tray had four boxes at each of its four corners, at which a woman stood, cutting the apricots, the halves of which were then spread onto the tray, cut-side up. The cutters were invariably women, something my mother failed to take note of, or at least acknowledge. Even the families that most needed the money would not have subjected their own sons to the indignity of cutting costs, any more than they would have expected them to darn stockings, so that I was (in memory at least) the sole male cutter among a bevy of females. My older brother, who was bigger and stronger, was allowed to work out in the field with the men so that from a very early age our different sexual orientations were at least subliminally acknowledged.
     Each cutter had a thin cardboard tag stamped with my grandfather’s name, J. J. Smith, pinned to her breast or waist. When she finished one box, she carried the pits and whatever residue of slop there may have been to the puncher at the north east front of the building. He then emptied the pits into another box, also stenciled on both sides with my grandfather’s name, the ubiquitous J.J. Smith above a garland spelling out San Lorenzo, like the territorial markings of a male lion taking out the full extent of his pride’s domain. The puncher finally deposited the slop in a container that would later be sold as swill to the local pig farmers. Nothing was wasted. The pits were dried in a huge tray on the edge of the dryer, where they were later sacked and sold for fuel. The puncher, invariably a man of irreproachable character since he held in his hands a string to my grandfather’s purse, then punched a gothic so ornate it was not easily reproduced by some cheap dime-store imitation on the ticket of the woman bearing the finished box. When all four columns of numbers had been punched, she could then redeem the ticket at my grandfather’s office across from his tank house for ready cash at the munificent sum of ten cents a punch.
     There was an accepted hierarchy in the allotment of tables. The first table was always reserved for Mrs. Harry Smith (whose first name I have long since forgotten), the wife of the number-one foreman, another Portuguese “Smith” though unrelated to my grandfather, and my next door neighbor, Mary Freitas, the robust wife of the diminutive number-two foreman. Who the other two women were I no longer remember, probably daughters or nieces. These two formidable women were the acknowledged stars of The Dryer, famous for the speed with which they worked. At their best they could manage to cut two fifty-pound lugs of apricots an hour of the smaller Brentwood variety, always the first apricots of the season, and at least three when the larger local fruit appeared. The greatest deterrent to topping their already astounding achievements was the necessity to pause between cuts to spread the fruit onto the trays. Even if the fruit was accumulated in a colander to be spread en masse, it took time from the cutting, and it was the cutting that earned them their coveted dimes. So my first job at eight was as a spreader for Mary Freitas at a penny a box. It was well worth the expense to her since with my help she could increase her output by at least a third. Under her tutelage I very soon learned that pennies, as well as dollars, did not grow on trees.
     Mary Freitas was not one of my admirers. Despite my best efforts, she refused to be charmed, but took a wry—possibly sadistic—delight in employing the grandson of the man who so shamefully underpaid her husband. She proved, alas, every bit as pitiless a taskmaster as my grandfather ever was. Unstinting in her demands, she begged me on to keep up with her, scolding me in a voice loud enough for all the other women at the nearby trays to register the full extent of her contempt whenever I failed to spread the cots properly, in my haste to keep up with her, tilting the fruit so that the precious juice might run out. She always ended her scolding with some obviously derogatory commentary in Portuguese, not a word of which I understood, and all the nearby women joined in her mocking laughter.
     My feared and formidable grandfather himself made two appearances each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Whatever the temperature, he always wore a hat and a three-piece suit, usually tweed, with a silk tie neatly knotted around a stiff white paper collar and shoes with pointed-toes on his small feet. He acknowledged my presence with a silent ironic smile that could scarcely be called a greeting. He seemed, if anything, embarrassed by my presence, insofar as the great man could ever be subject to embarrassment. Still it was quite clear to everyone that he would happily have paid me twice my meager earnings to keep me well out of the place, but for that he would have had to convince his oldest daughter to alter one of her decisions; and my mother’s decisions, good or bad, right or wrong, wise or unwise, once made, had the weight of moral prerogatives. It was a lifelong battle, the war between my grandfather and his oldest daughter, and the only one he consistently lost.
     The greeting denied to me, he saved for some of the more favored women, occasionally doffing his hat and joking in Portuguese with a lucky matron. But he did not linger, for their silent deference cost both him and them money, and the demands of decorum always gave way to financial considerations. With a courteous nod to all, he quickly joined the men in the field, accompanied by his tall, black-hatted, lean and straight-backed namesake, who towered inches above him, and unlike most of the other workmen, never revealed the least tremor of obsequiousness. It was a manner my grandfather seemed to respect, and Harry Smith was the sole employee ever treated as if he too might be a gentleman.
     When a woman returned to her post after having her ticket punched, she called “Box,” and one of the strong-armed younger men, usually teenagers on summer vacation from Hayward High School, who worked in the shed instead of the field, carried a new fifty-pound lug of apricots to her station; and once a tray was filled, someone called, “Tray,” and the same men lifted the full tray onto the trolley and placed an empty tray on the saw horses. Between each tray on the trolley, two inch boards were placed at either end to raise the tray from its lower mate and create a space for the burning sulfur to penetrate. By mutual agreement, after a single year as spreader, I graduated to the rank of cutter with a box of my own, but compared to the indomitable Mary Freitas, I was a sluggard. My earnings never exceeded—and seldom achieved—ten cents for an hour of hard labor. There were certain tricks I soon learned to improve my performance, a sharp paring knife being one of them. The sharper the knife, the faster the cut. I was not, however, as skilled in the use of culinary weapons as my female counterparts and had frequently to rush to the large wooden trough that held the sulfur to staunch the flow of blood with a crumbling yellow rock. By season’s end, my left hand was a crisscross of tiny scars.
     Shortly after my twelfth birthday I was sent out into the field to work alongside the other men and everything changed. From the shade of the tin-covered shed I moved out into the open sunlight, and had I been allowed to view the scene as a mere observer rather than a worker, I would have been forced to acknowledge its beauty. But it was at the time a beauty so tarnished by my aversion to everything connected to the place it lay too deep for me to notice. The rail line from the sulfur houses extended all the way to the far border of my grandfather’s property along the Western Pacific tracks. Off this line, at right angles, ran two more lines into the field itself. As in the shed there was here also a hierarchy of workers. Those at the top moved the trolleys ladened with their precious cargo into and out of the sulfur houses, and later, to the fields for drying. There the trays were removed from the trolley by a lower echelon of worker and spread on the ground with two horizontal trays touching each other to form a sixteen foot row. Ten such rows formed a group, sixteen by thirty feet, separated by a narrow walkway of land to allow the workers access so that the entire field had a quilt-like aspect, regular in its pattern, but varying in color determined by the length of time the fruit had lain in the sun. The lowest level of workers, to which I naturally belonged, scraped the already dried fruit into a row of boxes (all stenciled, of course, with my grandfather’s name) with wooden paddles to free the dried cots from the gelatinous residue that sometimes glued them to the tray surface.
     This should have been for me a far less onerous task than the unending monotony of cutting apricots, but it proved to have its drawbacks, which led eventually to my rebellion, the first open defiance of my mother’s authority, and my twelfth year proved to be my last year at The Dryer. I had grown used to the women, who, once they had verified I was not to be granted any special privileges, came to accept me. Though the words of their jocular comments about my person and my performance were meaningless to me, I had become adept at measuring the amount of malice intended by the tone with which their remarks were spoken, registering the slow alteration from mockery to something closer to affection. The men were a different matter. The vast majority were indifferent to my presence, a small number were tolerantly contemptuous, but a few of the scruffiest despised me with an intensity that shocked me, for I had never before come face to face with adult hatred.
     Initially their contempt was based on two things: first, I was my grandfather’s grandson, a matter of blood for which I could never entirely be forgiven, and secondly, the wages I earned were for me little more than pen money, and not, as theirs, a matter of life and death, literally the price of their daily bread. Though the clothes I wore in the fields differed very little from theirs, at Sunday mass they could not have failed to note my white shirt, my striped blazer, my class-defining knickerbockers and my cotton argyle stockings, as well as my buffed shoes. I must have looked to them like a different species. Their contempt may have been nothing more complicated than envy disguised. It didn’t matter. What mattered was not the motive but the resulting cruelty, which became increasingly more personal as the summer wore on. They despised me for my accent, they despised me for my vocabulary, they even despised me for my syntax, but most of all they despised me for what the world still calls, for want of a better word, my “innocence.” I prefer to call it “ignorance,” for there was nothing the least innocent about my gross and virtually incomprehensible ignorance. Like any healthy thirteen-year-old male, I had my erections and my nocturnal emissions, and more to the point, I masturbated with all the fervor of a dedicated virtuoso playing Mozart on his Stradivarius. But what all that sperm was intended for, besides a goodtime in the shower, I did not know. I didn’t even know it was sperm. Lear’s gilded fly did lecher in my sight, but I read its cavortings as choreography, and all those slender blue dragonflies performing their looped arabesques in the open air I saw as nature’s winged ballerinas. The cruelest among my detractors soon took care of my educational shortcomings. Though their methods were crude, even brutal, and in one case, at least, sadistic, they performed a necessary task my parents had failed to perform. And despite their cruelty, I must thank them for that, since even sullied knowledge is better than no knowledge. Time washes away the sludge, but the knowledge remains.
     This brutal lesson in the physiology of sex compounded the hatred I already felt for The Dryer. I hated the look of it, I hated the smell of it, the sulfur and the shit; I hated the aching muscles and the scarred hands, I hated the contempt and the cruelty, I hated everything about the place. Nor do I for one instant believe that working in The Dryer instead of playing in the fields made me a better person. Least of all did it teach me the value of a dollar. Quite to the contrary, it turned me into the family spendthrift. When I want to buy something I buy it, without, like my mother, searching for bargains or making do with what I already have until the year-end sales. Nor do I haggle with merchants over the price of some coveted bibelot, and even on the sunniest mornings my hall is ablaze with lights, and to hell with the electric bill. Yet when I recall The Dryer today my hatred succumbs to other fonder memories. What I remember most vividly are not the dreary sheds or the foul privies or even the mocking workmen, but the acres upon acres of drying cots spread out in the brilliant light, so many tiny suns burning orange in the afternoon heat with all the glory of a Van Gogh.

for Irene Blayer    

January 2012