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Updated: September 1, 2025
After supper, Daddy sat hopelessly studying the "Help Wanted" column in last Sunday's paper, borrowed from the Albis. Jimmie looked at the funnies, and Grandma and Rose-Ellen did the dishes. Julie Albi, who had come to play, sat waiting with heels hooked over a chair-rung. The shabby kitchen was pleasant, with rag rugs on the painted floor and crisp, worn curtains.
Grandma joked, in her tart way, "I never looked to be touring the country in my own auto!" Rose-Ellen jiggled in the back seat. "Peekaneeka, Gramma!" she said. When it rained, the children scurried to fasten the side curtains and then huddled together to keep warm while they played tick-tack-toe or guessing games. For meals they stopped where they could milk Carrie and build a small fire.
The village girls gathered in groups by themselves and acted as if the oyster-shuckers' children were not there at all; and the boys did not give Dick even a chance to show what a good pitcher he was. Both Rose-Ellen and Dick had been leaders in the city school, and now they felt so lonesome that Rose-Ellen often cried when she got home.
Now Farmer Lukes went through the Beechams' acres, lifting the beets loose by machine. Rose-Ellen could not believe they were beets-great dirt-colored clods, they looked. Not at all like the beets she knew. Topping was a new job. With a long hooked knife the beet was lifted and laid across the arm, and then, with a slash or two, freed of its top.
Rose-Ellen yawned widely and went to sleep again. When gray morning dawned, she did not know which was worse-the sleepiness or the hunger. The angry man demanded over and over, "When we stop for breakfast?" They didn't stop. Grandma had canned milk and boiled water along, and with all the Beechams working together, they got the baby's bottles filled.
When they woke, mush simmered on the cookstove and a bottle of milk stood on the table. It took time to feed Sally and wash dishes and make beds; and then Dick and Rose-Ellen ran over to the nearest long oyster-house and peeked through a hole in the wall. Down each side, raised above the fishy wet floor, ran a row of booths, each with a desk and step, made of rough boards.
Then Sally's wail sounded, and Grandma's call: "Rose-Ellen! Jimmie! Dick! You all right?" Until dawn the Beechams could only huddle together in the small refuge Daddy contrived against the dripping, pricking blackness. When day came, the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but fitfully, as if they, too, were tired out.
Meanwhile the rest of the family had answered the whistle of the row boss, and were being introduced to the cranberries. Dick and Rose-Ellen were excited and happy, for it was the first fruit they had ever picked. Though the wet bushes gave them shower baths, the sun soon dried them.
It was lucky there was irrigation water, or the growing plants would have died in the heat, since there had been little rain. Rose-Ellen loved to watch the water moving through the fields as if it were alive, catching the rosy gold of sunset in its zigzag mirrors. She missed the Eastern fireflies at night; otherwise the evenings were a delight.
"I wouldn't go there I wouldn't go there for ten dollars," Rose-Ellen declared. Vicente looked at her with wise deep eyes. "I could 'a' told you," she said, shrugging. "American ladies, they mostly don't like Mexican kids. I don't know why." October came. It was the time for the topping of the beets. The Martinez family went back to Denver for school.
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