Story cannot be silenced, especially a story of sorrow.
Sorrow has gripping presence.
If ever there is a picture of sorrow, it is this.
The story I endeavored to write in my novels (Mending Stone, Catching Rain, Seeding Hope) appeared in a dream in the winter of 1995. Two women, two lives filled with sorrow. I did not know the women, where they lived, why they cried. Many years I tried to capture their lament in the way I felt it. This picture of cracked stone, a part of a massive gravestone found in a cemetery in Oaxaca City in 2005, spoke to me. If ever an image in cold stone could hold emotion, it was this.
I don’t know why I dreamed the women as I did.
I grew up in a small town on the Columbia River of Oregon. The somewhat mild winters and long hot summers provide the perfect climate for commercial growing of fruit. Especially cherries. The summer I turned 16, my parents let me work in the orchards for a family where my younger brother also worked. It was my first job. By my age, my older sister had worked strawberry fields and picked cherries and held down a summer office job. But I had been needed at home to help with children my mom looked after for working mothers. It was thrilling to finally be allowed out of the house for a few weeks to pick cherries that summer!
I had no definite financial goals: only wanted some spending and gas money as I was soon to get my driver’s license. I had no idea how to pick cherries, how hot and dusty it would be in the orchard, or how tiring it would be climbing ladders, picking for hours, carrying and dumping heavy buckets of fruit. I’d told some friends about the job. They were also hired and we were assigned a corner of the orchard away from the “serious” pickers, many who were migrants from Mexico.
My friends and I probably did more talking and laughing than picking. At least, that’s what I remember most. We were soon scolded by the owner for our slowness. He said some experienced pickers would come help us learn to work faster.
We were surprised when a big dusty sedan drove up. Three men got out. One was probably in his late 20s, two might’ve been a few years older than us. And they were cute! The young ones spoke some English. And they were eager to help us. They set ladders next to ours. They leaned in close to show us how to properly and quickly pick the lush dark red cherries. It was fun working beside these men and talking while picking. But the older man became irritated by the talk. He chastised the others in Spanish. We understood little of what he said except he was there to make money and wanted them to work faster. He moved to an adjoining tree and the others followed.
It was hot. I needed to take a pause. On the way by the sedan, I was surprised to see a teenage girl sitting in the dust beside the back tire and weeping. She hid her face in her hands. I felt terrible for her, but did not know what to say and she did not look up so I went on to the outhouse. Coming back by the car, I glanced at the girl with dark hair who had wiped her eyes and now looked back. I tried talking to her with my limited Spanish from junior high. My friends came over. Somehow we determined why the girl had been crying. She was about our age, and the wife of one of the cute guys. They’d been traveling and working for more than a month. She was tired and homesick. And more than that, her heart ached for her young baby she’d left in the care of her mother in the south of Mexico!
I was mortified, and felt silly, white, privileged. I had only my smile to offer, a few kind words. My friends and I went back to work on our trees. The three men greeted us but kept their distance. Our hands worked fast picking. The boss came by with a truck to pick up fruit. We were surprised when the men poured some of their buckets into our boxes. It was astoundingly generous, undeserved.
We left at the end of the afternoon in my friend’s car. We had plans for swimming to wash off the sweaty dust clinging to our pale skin. The men and the girl waved goodbye. They would pick until much later in the evening. They’d sleep in their car or the small plywood “cabins” supplied by the orchard owners.
Cherry harvest finished a few days later. I don’t remember if we saw the men and the girl again. They’d follow the fruit and vegetable harvests all over the western United States before returning to Mexico. I passed my driver’s test, started dating a cute guy a few years older, bought new school clothes, and vowed to look for other work in town: maybe in a store where it was not so hot and dusty. (I didn’t work cherry harvest again as the next summer our family moved to Walla Walla, Washington where I did work graveyard shift a later summer in a Birdseye Foods plant on the asparagus belt.)
Through the years, After graduating high school and college, I married and had my own two babies. They were about teenagers that winter I had the strange dream. I was healing from abdominal surgery to re-suspend a drooping organ and remove several others I’d no longer be needing now that my family was complete. I did not feel sorrowful letting go of all possibility of making more babies. But maybe that loss stirred something in me. Maybe my missing parts cried in my dreams for me to birth something else.
The women in sorrow hatched a story in my mind and heart. I raised the story up like a child gaining skill and confidence in words written and rewritten over the next sixteen years – the age I was that summer. As I look back now, I see the girl with face in her hands…her sorrow reaches me across time and distance.
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mending stone sharon duerst author 