The man in the cowboy hat carried the old wooden lettuce crate down the aisle with both arms, the way a man carries a sleeping child, and he set it at the foot of the casket of my grandfather. On the side, in black stencil faded to gray, was a single name: IKE. He was a tall, sunburned man of sixty or so, in a pressed white shirt, and he removed his straw hat and held it against his chest. His hands were scarred and thick. “My name is Cal Whitaker,” he said. “I own Whitaker Produce, which is eleven thousand acres of the Yuma Valley. And I am here because of your grandfather.”
A murmur ran through the room. My aunt Marisol, in the front row, sat up straight. The day before, in the kitchen of my grandmother, she had said in a tired voice that Papa Ike spent forty years bent over in the dirt of other people, and that the family had no need for a speech about it. “My father hired Ike in 1985,” said Cal. “I was eighteen, and I knew everything. Ike was the foreman. The second week, I told him to speed up the line. He looked at me a long time. He said, Mijo, you can pick a lettuce fast or you can pick it right.”
He turned the crate so the room could see it. “In March of 1993 a canal gate failed above the north field. Water came across the rows in the dark. My father was out there alone, checking the pumps. Ike heard the siren from the camp, a mile away, and he ran. He found my father in the mud and carried him out on his back. He never told anyone. When my father tried to thank him, Ike said, Señor, I did nothing a neighbor would not do.” Cal swallowed. “My father lived twenty more years. I had a father at my wedding because of Ike.”
A wooden lettuce crate with a stenciled name was carried in by a man in a cowboy hat and gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her aunt back to the fields.
“This crate was the first one Ike ever built. He made them from scrap pallet wood in the evenings, for the crew to sit on at lunch. He stenciled his name on the side so nobody would take it. When he retired, he left it in the packing shed with a note. It said, For whoever needs to sit down.” Cal ran his thumb along the grain. “It has sat in my office for six years. Every morning I look at it and remember that the man who taught me this business never owned one square foot of it. And he never complained, not once.”
I stared at the crate. I had heard the story of the canal as a child, in pieces, from my grandmother, and I had thought it was a family legend, the kind a woman tells to make her husband larger. I turned and looked at my aunt. She had her hand over her mouth, and her face had gone the color of ash. All my life Marisol had talked about the shame of the fields, the stooped backs, the cheap sweaters at the swap meet. She had wanted something better for us. She had never once asked what we were standing on.
“I have not come to say thank you with words,” said Cal Whitaker. “Words are cheap, and Ike never trusted them.” He drew an envelope from his jacket. “As of this morning, Whitaker Produce has opened the Ike Fund, which will pay the full cost of college for any child of any worker who has served this company ten years. Not a loan. A gift. Adriana, I understand you wanted to study nursing in Tucson and could not afford the second year.” He held out the envelope. “It is paid.” I could not speak. I only nodded.
Marisol rose slowly. She walked to the crate, a small proud woman in a black dress, and she knelt and put both hands on the splintered wood. “Papa,” she whispered. “I told them to keep the service short because I was ashamed.” Tears ran down her face and she did not wipe them. “I said you spent your life bending over. I did not understand that you were bending down to lift everybody else up.” She looked back at me. “Adriana, forgive your aunt.” I knelt beside her, and I put my arms around her, and we cried together on the church floor.
Afterward, the crew came. Not the owners, not the buyers, the crew. Two hundred farmworkers in their good jeans, with their hats in their hands, filed past the casket one at a time, and every one of them touched the crate. An old woman said that he had taught her to read the labels on the boxes. A young man said that Ike had lent him bus fare to the hospital the night his daughter was born. They spoke in Spanish and in English and in the soft Mixtec of the mountains, and the pastor let every voice be heard until the afternoon was gone.
We held the meal in the parish hall, on a long table of folding chairs. Cal Whitaker paid for all of it, quietly, and asked to sit at the end, among the workers. The men teased him about his hat. He laughed. Somewhere between the tamales and the coffee, my aunt found the old stencil tucked inside the crate, tin and worn, cut by hand with a knife, one letter at a time. She held it up to the light. Cal said that the Ike Fund would carry the same three letters on every check it ever wrote.
I am in my second year of nursing now. The crate sits in the hall of the family house in Yuma, where my aunt dusts it every Sunday. On the first of each month, a child from the fund comes to visit, shy in a new backpack, and Marisol sits her down on the crate, just as Ike meant, and tells her the story of the canal. At the end she always says the same thing, in a low voice, with a smile. This is a seat for whoever needs to sit down. Then she asks about school.
