Cinderella in Overalls
Read Cinderella in Overalls Online
Authors: Carol Grace
The sun was merciless in the Central Valley of California in July. Even Catherine Logan, who had spent every summer of her twenty-six years there, felt the dry heat sear through her cotton shirt and shorts. She walked quickly to a seat in the shade under a temporary awning the auctioneers had set up. There were familiar faces in the crowd, but she avoided them as they’d avoided her out of embarrassment or pity for the past six months. It didn’t matter.
She would never be able to look them in the eye again. Her parents had sold out. The drought drove people to desperate measures. There were divorces; there had even been a suicide in the next county. Her parents had only sold out. And they weren’t the only ones.
For the past three years Catherine had watched the fields she worked being baked dry and saw the worry lines etched in her father’s face as he borrowed more and sunk deeper into debt. When the foreclosure notice came, she went to the bank herself, pleading with them to extend the loan, to give them a chance, one year, one growing season to turn the farm around. But the answer had been no.
She swiveled around on the plastic seat of her folding chair. There he was leaning against the barn, conspicuous in a pinstriped suit. The man who had turned her down, old Cyrus Grant, loosened his tie and met her eyes with discomfort.
She turned around abruptly, unable to conceal her anger with him and his bank. It was his decision that had forced her off the land that had been in her family for three generations.
A few minutes later the pharmacist’s son and successor, Donny, slid into the seat next to hers. She felt his eyes on her, but she was determined not to let it bother her. If there was anything worse than being ignored, it was being pitied.
“Catherine,” he said, mopping his round face with a handkerchief, “why did you come? It’s just going to hurt more to see the old place broken up and sold off.”
She glanced briefly at his red face, the blue eyes round and curious. “The hurt’s gone, Don,” she assured him coolly. Replaced by resentment and shame, she thought, the shame of failure. The local girl who had “gone on” and earned a degree couldn’t save her parents’ farm.
“I had to come today,” she continued, “to see it for the last time. My roots are here. Were here.” She looked out across the dry fields, where stalks of wheat withered in the shimmering heat.
“I just thought it would be easier not to face everybody again.”
“I’m not interested in the easy way,” she said, her dark eyes blazing. “If I were, I wouldn’t have gone into farming.”
He nodded and glanced away. Catherine noticed it was that way with everyone these days. Either they stared or they looked away.
“Looks like a good crowd, though. With what the land brought...” He paused uneasily. “Your folks’ll be able to retire.”
Catherine didn’t tell him that they’d already retired, had bought a duplex in Sacramento six miles from her sister and her children. He must realize that as tired and discouraged as her parents were, they didn’t want to retire. Or did they? Had it been relief or regret on their faces the day they had signed the papers?
The auctioneer stepped up to a makeshift podium, adjusted the microphone and began his familiar spiel. The land had already been sold to a developer. Catherine didn’t dare look in the direction of the white frame house.
“The livestock brought a fair price,” Donny noted, “over in Fresno the other day.”
Catherine nodded. The last thing she needed was to think about the calves she had helped bring into the world, the pigs she had named and fed being sold off at the county fairgrounds. It was bad enough to hear the auctioneer describe the combine and the bailer and to hear voices behind her offer half what they were worth. Were the bankers disappointed? Probably not. For them it was just another foreclosure, just another auction, just another family driven off the farm.
She’d never forget Mr. Grant’s flat voice, dry as the land itself, as he’d explained why he couldn’t lend them any more money. She could still taste the humiliation as he’d explained it to her as if she were a child instead of an adult with a degree from the best university in the state.
She wiped the perspiration from her forehead as the auctioneer directed the buyers’ attention to the giant tractor standing in the field behind him, just where her father had left it after he plowed the field for the last time.
“What do I hear for Old Yellow?” the man called out, and Catherine’s heart sank. How many times had she sat next to her father on Old Yellow until she was old enough to drive the tractor herself? The metal treads were shiny from years of wear. Even from where she sat she could see the rust spots on the sides. Maybe no one would buy it.
“Don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” Donny said under his breath, and Catherine had to agree. The tractor was one of a kind, and she loved that machine. How she longed to climb up and take the wheel again and smell the rich, damp earth and watch the plow behind her scatter the clumps of dirt.
Someone did buy it, of course, but she didn’t turn around to see who it was. Her eyes were fastened on the next item—the flatbed truck. Next to her Donny smiled.
“Now that brings back memories, doesn’t it? I remember seeing you hauling fertilizer from the feed and fuel in town. Everybody said your daddy was crazy to let you drive it.”
“My father wasn’t crazy,” she explained softly. “He wanted me to know how to run a farm. Driving a truck or a tractor was part of the education.” The rest she’d gotten at the university, the part about hybrids and grain futures. She’d been ready. As prepared as anyone could be to run a farm. But she couldn’t fight the drought and the disease, and she couldn’t sit by any longer and watch the disintegration of her past and future.
She swallowed hard and stood up, turned and walked past friends and strangers without seeing them, her chin held high and her eyes dry. Let them stare, let them whisper. She could imagine what they were saying. “Poor Catherine... nothing left... where will she go? What will she do?”
She walked faster as the auctioneer’s voice rose to a crescendo. “Going, going, gone,” he called as she rounded the empty barn. He could have been talking to her as well as the flatbed. They were both going, but where? She only knew she had to get as far away from Tranquility as she could.
Catherine leaned against the front fence and gave in to the pent-up emotions she had suppressed all morning. Her eyes blinded with tears, she heard the voice echo through the air once more. “Going, going, gone.”
The diesel truck bounced up and down on the rocky dirt road, and Catherine Logan gripped the edge of the passenger seat to keep from hitting her head on the roof. Behind her in the long flatbed, where she usually sat, a dozen
Mamara
Indian women were wedged between burlap sacks bulging with lettuce, parsley and mangoes. She was proud of the harvest, proud of what they’d accomplished with no machinery, and proud of the
Aruacan
women who worked so hard for so little. So little that at the end of a grueling market day they ended up with no more than a few pesos to show for it. The money the women earned went right through their hands and into the pockets of the workers they depended on to bring the crops to market. Catherine smoothed her layered skirts and turned to face the driver.
“Tomas,” she shouted over the roar of the diesel engine, “can’t you lower your price for us? These are poor women who can’t afford your fees.”
Hunched over the wheel, he spoke without looking at her. “And what about me?” he asked. “Do I not have to make a living, too? Do you know the price of a truck these days?”
Catherine shook her head. She had no idea of the price of a truck in Aruaca. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer for eighteen months and she knew the prices of potatoes and bread and shoes, but not trucks. She tapped the driver on the shoulder. “How much,” she asked, “for a truck like this?”
“Too much,” he replied with a glance over his shoulder, “for them. But for a rich American like you...” He shrugged. “Maybe not.”
She grimaced. Despite the fact that she lived in a small house as the other farmers did, dressed like the women in a fringed shawl and wore her hair in a long braid, there were still some local people who thought she must be rich. They didn’t know that except for the living allowance the Peace Corps gave her she would be penniless.
As they bumped along the road, Catherine was convinced the village would never rise out of its cycle of unending poverty unless the villagers owned their own truck. But how? Borrowing the money was out of the question. Or was it? The truck swayed as they rounded a narrow curve, and Catherine braced her feet against the floorboard and looked out the window into the steep ravine below. She had never driven on mountain roads like these, but if they had their own truck, she would do it. She would do anything to help these people.
Her eyelids drooped and she stifled a yawn. The women had been up since 3:00 a.m. and only now were they approaching the outskirts of La Luz. By the time the truck rumbled up the hilly streets of the capital, it was six o’clock and the Rodriguez Market was teeming with activity. As soon as Tomas parked the truck, the women trudged from the street to the market, doubled over by the weight of the produce on their backs. Catherine, with her colorful
ahuayo
filled with lettuce, wove her way through the crowds to their stall, a structure of vertical two-by-fours that supported a patched roof of corrugated tin and plastic.
Doña Jacinda, her small face browned and wrinkled from the years in the fields, surveyed the young woman from California and sighed. “Ah, la Catalina.” She shook her head in mock despair. “What is to become of you buried here among the burlap sacks with only farmers for company? When I was your age, I was married and the mother of six already.”
Catherine straightened her bowler hat and smiled. “But, Jacinda, it was you who taught me that ‘Women’s faults are many, but men have only two. Everything they say and everything they do.’”
A shopper arrived and silenced the unspoken retort in Jacinda’s throat. While Catherine watched her haggle over the price of parsley, she surveyed the early-morning bargain hunters. She seldom saw tourists at the market, but over the babble of Spanish came the sound of English, of Americans speaking English. She leaned over the wooden crates to see a small group of men approaching, wearing suits and ties. She hadn’t heard a word of English for weeks, not since the last Peace Corps meeting in La Luz. The man in the middle of the group seemed to be the center of attention.
He would be the center of attention anywhere, she decided, with his dark, close-cropped hair and rangy good looks. He moved easily through the throngs of morning shoppers, his suit coat slung over his shoulder. His blue eyes swept the stalls as if he were looking for something special. Guava? Papaya? Hand-woven baskets? As he drew closer, he caught Catherine’s eye, and she looked away quickly, embarrassed to be caught staring.
Jacinda nudged Catherine with her elbow. A woman wrapped in a tattered shawl with a baby on her back was asking the price of mangoes. Catherine had been so busy watching the man that she hadn’t noticed her.
“Do not go lower than three pesos a piece,” Jacinda whispered urgently.
Catherine flushed and bit her lip. “Three pesos,” she said softly. She could plant, she could plow and she could pick, but she couldn’t bargain. For months she had tried to learn, but she always came down too low too fast, or stayed too high too long until her customers shook their heads and went elsewhere. Maybe today, with Jacinda at her side, she could finally get it right.