Every frozen puddle between the parallel rows of orange groves shines blue in the moonlight. Ramona just watches as her baby sister dips her finger in the pool beside her tiny white tennis shoes. Hardly any pressure is needed to break the ice’s surface.
“Stop fooling around,” Ramona whispers after she comes to her senses. As Candelaria finger paints a blue streak of mud across the leather tongue of her shoe, Ramona checks to see if any of the white foremen are lurking in the dark, watching, documenting.
“Do you hear them?” Candelaria blurts out.
“Hear who?” Ramona says. She marches over to Candelaria and guides the child back over to the tree they are supposed to be picking from. They’d only picked two trees in their row so far. They were quickly falling behind.
“Listen,” Candelaria whispers. She tucks her gloved hands into her armpits and shivers. She waits for Ramona to acknowledge her. When Ramona finally does, Candelaria closes her eyes. “I think there’s four of them,” she says.
“Four of what?”
“Peacocks.” Candelaria stands still, with her eyes shut tight. “Wait, maybe there’s five! Can you hear them?”
Ramona keeps her eyes open. All she can hear are the sounds of the other couple dozen pickers trudging through the mud, crunching through patches of ice. Ladders squeak, leaves shake, and citrus falls to the ground. Papa is picking in the row next to them. She’s sure he knows they’re the only ones not working. I don’t care if she wants to help. And I don’t care if you think she should be, he’d said to her the previous night after she put Candelaria to bed. This is only a temporary solution.
“We don’t have time for this,” Ramona says as she walks off to retrieve the rusty ladder resting at the base of the previous navel they’d been picking. The cold metal bites her bare fingers as she lugs the thing past her sister.
Candelaria ignores her. “They live across the river,” she says. “In the canyon behind the Petersons’ ranch. Papa told me that a couple years ago, they’d bought some as pets and got annoyed pretty quick because of how loud they were. They’ve been living in the canyon ever since.”
Ramona keeps her back towards her sister as she drops the ladder in the mud in front of their new tree. She curses as she cups her hands over her mouth in efforts to warm them back up. “Candy, cállate,” she says. “Just give me a hand over here, will you?”
It takes her a second or two, but eventually Candelaria sprints over. The little girl hardly carries any of the weight once she’s got a hold of the ladder, but to Ramona, it’s about the principle really. She’d been five when Papa had taken her to uproot her first strawberry from a field. Candelaria was seven now. He’d had ten years between his two daughters to figure out a way to keep his baby girl from the fields. On the drive out that morning, Ramona had seen it in her father’s face, even in the dark. How in his mind, he’d failed. Ramona didn’t blame him. Ever since her little sister was born, she’d known it was only a matter of time.
Ramona wipes the blue mud on her hands off on her jeans after they’ve propped the ladder up onto the orange tree. “Hey,” she says once she sees her sister finger painting her tennis shoes again, “Focus.” Ramona double checks that the ladder is braced within the mud. The clumps clinging to the bottom of her boot cause her to almost slip and hit her chin as she makes her ascent up the ladder’s first step.
“Are you okay?” Candelaria says.
“I’m fine right now,” Ramona says, peering over her shoulder. “I won’t be though if you don’t get your butt over here. C’mon. Grab a hold of this thing.”
Candelaria trembles as a breeze courses through the groves. The flat soles of her tennis shoes cause her to slide across the mud when she walks up to the ladder. “Okay,” she says as she anchors herself to it. “Ratty, you still haven’t told me if you can hear them or not.”
The ladder slips slightly as Ramona takes a few more steps up the ladder. She’s sure it’s fine. What pleases her more are the tiny sinews in Candelaria’s wrists, buzzing up through the ladder. “I need more than just okay!” she shouts as she makes her way up. “You know, on the last tree, you stopped holding halfway through. Good partners don’t let their partners fall. I could get hurt.”
“Ratty, I think we should set the ladder up again!” Candelaria calls out from below. The buzzing intensifies. “On second thought, I think I got it! Tell me if you can hear the peacocks up there!”
“Enough with the damn peacocks!” Ramona yells when she reaches the top.
Now that she’s above the treeline, the full moon almost blinds her. Off in the distance, beanied field workers are getting yelled at by a foreman for congregating around a lit smudge pot, attempting to warm their bodies before descending into the cebolla fields. In the row to her left, she sees Papa a few trees ahead, hunched over the top of his own ladder, sucking blood out of the thumb he’d pricked on the branch he’d been picking from. When Ramona looks back down, she sees Candelaria, staring up at her intently. The child is waiting patiently for Ramona to report back to her.
“Pinche kid,” Ramona says underneath her breath. She picks a few oranges from the tree and shoves them in the linen bag she has strapped across her chest. When she peers over her shoulder again, Candelaria is still looking up at her. Her little sister’s two buck teeth look to be whittling down her bottom lip. All Papa has to do is turn around to see how slow they’re going. Ramona goes on picking, determined not to be wrong. She speeds up to a clipped rate.
It doesn’t quite click when Ramona hears the peacocks for the first time. At first, she assumes it’s one of the foremen’s radios, but after a minute of listening to them, she can no longer stand picking with bated breath. She tells herself she’ll only close her eyes for a second, just a second, to see whether or not she can confirm them. It takes her five to reassure herself they’re definitely there: the caws, the random eruptions akin to a group of mariachis blaring on tinny brass. As the calls of the peacocks grow sharper, Ramona remembers the one she’d seen at some random summer carnival over two hundred miles away from home when she was a kid; Papa had taken her to the carnival as a reward for going with him to pick almonds up in Stockton and Merced during the school year. The sheeps and goats of the carnival’s petting zoo had roamed free. The single peacock on display was boxed and caged.
When it becomes too much, Ramona retreats back to the peacocks of present. It’s comforting, picturing the large mesa only these fowl could’ve laid claim to, the swathes of lupines running wild, swaying with one another, dancing in the night. The peacocks themselves are perched upon the branches of a jacaranda in full bloom. They bear witness to the orchards, the plain, the valley—Papa trying to protect this child, Papa trying to hide Candelaria from the lie that somehow and someway, a life working without her hands had been her God-given right. He’d earned that, he reckoned. Ratty reckoned they all had. The thing was though, she knew it was a farce. Her grandparents had been poor laborers in Mexico. And the only thing that’d changed in the thirty years their family had been in America, was that now, Papa got to spend most of his free time trying to convince white people to let him patch their walls, repair bad sheetrock.
It’s when one of the peacocks takes flight that Ramona feels the ladder slip out from underneath her feet. Candelaria screams as Ramona opens her eyes. Her sister darts off to the side so she isn’t crushed by the hunk of metal. Ramona comes crashing down with it.
“Ratty, your left foot is pointed the wrong way,” Candelaria whispers after she crawls over on all fours next to her.
Ramona had been lying on her back, staring up at the full moon, avoiding having to survey the damage. When she sits up, her heart races once she sees the blood sopping through the left cuff of her jeans. The wound bleeds a dull purple underneath the moonlight. Her left foot is pointed completely inward.
“Close your eyes,” she tells Candelaria before she pulls her jeans above her ankle. She waits until Candelaria’s eyes are shielded. Ramona hardly pulls the left cuff up when she sees what she’d anticipated. There is a bone sticking out, just above her ankle.
“Are you okay?” Candelaria says, with her hands still glued to her face.
Ramona gently brings the cuff back down. She writhes in pain as her jeans graze the bone. Overall, the pain isn’t sharp yet, but her entire leg is throbbing. “No,” she says, quietly.
Candelaria removes her hands from her eyes. “Ratty, I swear I was holding the ladder. It just slipped and I—I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s fine,” Ramona says. She lays back down in the mud. Tears stream down past the corners of her eyes as the throbbing intensifies. “It’s not your fault,” she says.
Candelaria is crying when she stands up. “I’m going to go get Papa,” she says. She stands over Ramona with her fists balled up, waiting for her sister’s permission.
“Why don’t you just stay here for now?” Ramona says, knowing how it will all unfold. “Somebody will bring him. Eventually.”
Candelaria looks lost for a few seconds, but it isn’t long before she shuffles back over to her in the mud. She sits criss-cross applesauce next to Ramona’s shoulder, and begins painting on her tennis shoes once more.
“So now you listen to me?” Ramona laughs weakly. She grimaces as her adrenaline wears off.
Candelaria looks up from her painting and attempts to wipe the mud off her sister’s cheek. She ends up smearing it even worse.
“It’s fine,” Ramona says.
“No it’s not,” Candelaria says. “I hurt you.”
Ramona waves her off. “You were right by the way. About those stupid birds.”
Candelaria doesn’t say anything. The top of her head and shoulders are steaming in the moonlight. Ramona reaches up to dry the tears collecting on Candelaria’s cheeks. She accidentally leaves a smudge of mud of her own on Candelaria’s face in the process.
“Look at that,” Ramona says as she takes stock of the blue streak on her sister’s cheek. Somewhere close, a foreman is yelling at one of the pickers. “Don’t worry about him,” Ramona says when Candelaria peers up in fear. “Look at me.”
Candelaria nods and Ramona dips her finger in the mud underneath her. It distracts her from the pain, finger painting the plumes of a peacock on her baby sister’s warm face. The leaves crunch louder as the foreman approaches. Candelaria keeps her eyes locked on her sister.
“Okay,” Ramona says once she’s finished. “Now do me.”
Contributor Notes
Vincent Chavez is a Chicano writer from Santa Paula, California. His work has been supported by the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Tin House, and the Macondo Writers Workshop. He is a 2021 Tin House Scholar. His work has appeared in the Masters Review. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University.
