The Velvet Room (13 page)

Robin and Rudy and Dad left the house together. Dad and Rudy had to be at work at six thirty. Dad was driving a mule sled. The sleds were used to bring boxes of apricots down from the hillside orchards on roads that were too steep for the tractors. Rudy was on a picking crew. Robin, of course, was on her way to Bridget’s.

When Robin arrived at the cottage, Bridget was getting ready to milk Betty. She put a pan of oats on the bench by the back door, and Betty jumped up onto the bench. With the little goat up so high, Bridget was able to sit comfortably on a stool to do the milking.

“So you’re starting work today,” Bridget said.

Robin nodded.

“How many hours a day will you be working?”*

“Well, we may get off a little early for a day or two, till more fruit gets ripe, but after that it will be from seven to five.”

Bridget frowned. “That’s a long time for a little thing like you to stand at a table.”

“Oh, kids a lot littler than I am do it. And sometimes the trucks are late, and we get some time off to play.”

Bridget shook her head. “What do you find to think about all that time, while you’re working? Do you talk with the other children?”

“Well, usually the shed boss doesn’t like you to talk much. It slows you down. The really bad part is that thinking slows you down too. At least it does me. Pitting wouldn’t be bad if you could think about other things. But if you want to earn much money, you have to keep your hands moving as fast as you possibly can all the time.”

Bridget shook her head again as she finished her milking. “Well, you’d best run along with Betty, dear, or you’ll be late. And stop by for a cookie before you go.”

When Robin got back to the Village, the family was almost ready to leave for the pitting shed. Shirley was clutching her rag doll, and her eyes were red. Theda was still combing her hair, and Cary was under the table with a book. Robin couldn’t understand why Cary always had to be under things or on top of them. She guessed it was because he just wasn’t an in-between sort of person.

Robin took Shirley outside. They sat down on the steps to wait for the others, and Robin gave Shirley half a cookie that she had saved for her. While Shirley ate the cookie, Robin made Annie, the rag doll, jump up and down and say, “Goodie, goodie, Shirley’s taking me to play at the pitting shed.”

It wasn’t quite seven when the Williamses left the Village, but the air had already lost its morning coolness, and smelled of heat and dust. As they approached the shed, there were other smells: the tangy smell of ripe apricots, and the biting fumes from the sulfur houses.

At one end of the shed there was a table piled high with pans and knives. Robin picked out a big pan and a knife that had been sharpened until the blade curved inward. She liked that kind best. She looked around for Gwen, but with no success. It would be best not to count on her. It was hard to believe she would really come.

Robin waited until Mama had picked out a table, and then she took one at the other end of the shed. She’d always had to work at Mama’s table before, and Mama was forever telling her to keep her mind on her work. Fred Criley, who was a shed boy, put a tray on her table and brought her a field box of apricots.

When Robin picked up the first apricot, her mouth watered. It was always like that at the start of the season. They tasted wonderful for the first day or two, but after that you were sick of the very smell of them. The apricot was still warm from the sun, and so ripe that the juice ran down Robin’s chin as she bit into it. She wiped her chin on her skirt and started to work.

It was almost fun at first. You filled your pan with fruit from the box. Moving as fast as you could, you ran your knife around the apricot, broke it open, pried out the pit with your thumb, and dropped it into the pan. Then you put the two bright orange halves down on the tray and reached for another. The first few rows looked so small compared to the bare expanse of the huge wooden tray that you always felt it would never be full. But after a long time it was. Then you called “Tray!” and the shed boys came and took it away and brought another. When your field box was empty, the shed boss punched your card and a shed boy brought you a new box.

That year, pitters at Las Palmeras were to receive ten cents for a fifty-pound box. It was better pay than last year, and Robin could remember when they had earned only five cents a box. She should be able to make eighty or ninety cents a day if she kept her mind on what she was doing. Of course some of the very best pitters earned twice that much, and even Theda could pit ten or eleven boxes in a day. But Robin daydreamed too much.

The pitting shed was a strange place. It had no walls or floor whatever, only poles holding up a roof above hard-packed earth. A track of metal rails ran the length of the shed to carry the little flat cars that took the tall stacks of loaded trays to the sulfur houses. On each side of the track was a long row of pitting tables. Outside the shed, near the road, was an open space where the trucks coming in from the orchards turned around and unloaded the boxes of fruit. Already, this morning, there was a huge stack of boxes, which meant that there would probably be no time off today.

Straight ahead of Robin, out beyond the end of the shed, were the sulfur houses. They were tightly built and had holes in the floor where pots of bright yellow sulfur were ignited. After about four hours in the sulfur fumes, the trays of fruit were spread out in an open field to dry in the hot July sun. At every shed where the Williamses had worked, children had told stories about someone who had been locked in a sulfur house by mistake and came out all yellow and shriveled and dead. But Robin didn’t think it had ever really happened.

At the other end of the row of tables Mama was frowning and saying something to Gary, and Robin could guess what. Cary, like Robin, had a hard time keeping his mind on apricots all day. And there was poor scary little Shirley, with Annie still clutched in her arms, sitting on a field box near Mama’s feet. At the next table Theda was working hard and steadily, as she always did. She’d been impatient for pitting season to start, and Robin had seen the list she’d already made of the new clothes and things she was going to buy.

When Robin finished her first tray of fruit, Fred Criley and Theresas big brother Jose put it on the cart. Apparently Jose was to be the other shed boy. Theresa always said her brothers were lazy, but Robin soon decided that Jose wasn’t going to get much of a chance to be a lazy shed boy. Fred Criley saw to that. All morning Fred swaggered up and down the aisle or sat enthroned on a pile of boxes and told Jose what to do. Only when two people were absolutely necessary to handle a full tray did Fred bestir himself.

Mr. Criley was a strict shed boss, who didn’t allow any loafing or playing, but he never seemed to notice what Fred did. He even laughed when Fred put a snake in Theresa’s pit pan. Theresa screamed like everything, and everyone stopped work to find out what had happened; but Mr. Criley acted as if it were a joke.

Long before noon, Robin’s legs and back ached from standing. There were two small cuts on her right thumb, and the apricot juice made them smart constantly. On the way back to the Village for lunch, all the Williamses were quiet. Even Cary walked along silently with his head down, like everybody else. Somehow, seeing Cary like that made Robin feel even more miserable. She couldn’t think why, though.

She stole another look at him, plodding along with his tousled head hanging, and the aching lump in her throat grew. She explored the feeling gingerly the way you look under a bandage, reluctant but curious.

He’d always been such an embarrassing little pest. Why did seeing him so beaten and ordinary make her feel so — so deserted, almost?

As she shuffled along through the hot dust, she decided that it had something to do with the day the family had arrived at Las Palmeras and Gary had hit Fred Criley with Dad’s shovel. She’d had a notion then — for the first time — that she and Cary were sort of alike. In some ways, anyway. Only maybe Cary was braver. Like using a shovel instead of…

She was suddenly too tired to think about it any more, but she did know that she wouldn’t like to see Cary change, at least not entirely.

Only Theda managed to be cheerful on the walk home. She picked up dirty, tearful Shirley and carried her on her back. When they caught up with Robin, Theda said, “It’ll be better in a day or so. Remember, it’s always like this till you get used to standing. Then it’s not bad at all.”

It really was better in a day or so, and on the third day Gwen came to work. She’d been away on a shopping trip to Los Angeles with her mother. Gwen said her mother had so many things to buy, it was lucky they got back before all the apricots were gone. “Don’t worry,” Robin sighed. “There’s plenty left.” She pointed to the stacks of boxes, row after row, as tall as a man’s head.

To Robin’s surprise, Gwen turned out to be a good pitter when she was trying. In just a day or two she was almost as fast as Robin; and on the days when she was interested in pitting she was steadier, so that her best day’s record was soon better than Robin’s. But on other days she was more interested in talking. And no matter how much Gwen talked, Mr. Criley never told her to “hesh up and pit,” the way he sometimes did the other children. But on the days when they talked a lot, neither Gwen nor Robin collected many punches on their cards.

They found they had many things to discuss They talked for hours about animals they liked — horses in particular — schools they’d been to, and movies they’d seen. They told about scary or unusual things that had happened to people? they’d known. And Robin told some more stories from the books in Gwen’s Junior Classics Library. Gwen was a very good listener. No one except Shirley had ever listened to Robin’s storytelling with such enthusiasm. Sometimes Robin would tell a story up to an exciting part, and then stop and say that it was Gwen’s turn.

So Gwen would read a few chapters that night and tell Robin about it the next day. She got pretty interested in some of the books. Once she said, “Gee, Robin. Nobody ever told me about the good things in those books. I always thought they were just for improving your mind and increasing your vocabulary, and stuff like that.”

Of course, working from seven to five seven days a week left no time at all for the Velvet Room. To Robin’s surprise, she didn’t even think about it very much, right at first. There was Gwen to talk to every day, and after work Robin was almost too tired to think at all. But during the third week of the season Gwen left with her parents on a vacation trip to Hawaii. Things were very different after that.

In the first place, it suddenly got hotter. Robin had thought it was plenty hot before, but now the east wind started blowing in from the desert, carrying heat and dust from thousands of acres of scorching sand. The fruit ripened so quickly that everyone was urged to work extra hours, and several more temporary pitters were hired. The too-ripe fruit was hard to cut, and left your hands so slippery that it was impossible to keep from cutting yourself.

To make matters worse, Robin now began to get her share of Fred Criley’s special attentions. While Jose was busy doing most of the work, Fred found time to torment a selection of favorite victims. Fred smashed ripe apricots in people’s hair, put dirt in lunches, and planted snakes and spiders where they’d be found by someone who was extra timid about such things. As long as Gwen had been at Robin’s table, Fred had left her alone. But now he made up for lost time. He smeared apricots on the back of Robin’s dress and flipped over her full pit pan on her tray. He took her good knife, leaving an old rusted one in its place, and put a very dead gopher in her box of fruit. Worst of all, he killed a baby mouse that she had just rescued from under a stack of trays.

There was no use complaining to Mr. Criley, so Robin just tried to pretend that it didn’t bother her. But after Fred squashed the little mouse, there were times when she couldn’t bear even to look at him. She hated him so much it made her feel sick.

She tried to tell Dad about it, but he only said what he always did: not to judge anybody until you knew what made him the way he was. He said that Mrs. Criley had once told Mama some things that sort of explained about Fred. The Crileys had lived on a farm in Oklahoma right in the worst of the dust bowl, and things had been very bad. Dad said that hunger and despair somtimes did strange things to people.

Robin could understand that. She could even feel sorry for the Fred Criley who had been a hungry boy back there on that dust-killed farm in Oklahoma. But how could anyone feel sorry for a big strong Fred Criley who strutted through the pitting shed looking for somebody to torment?

The days in the pitting shed passed slowly and more slowly. As Robin worked hour after hour, day after day, with the dust stuck to her sweaty face and chapped lips, and the dry wind whipping her hair into her eyes, she began to think more and more about the Velvet Room. She found that by concentrating she could see it almost as clearly as if she were there. With her eyes wide open, she could make a picture grow up like a wall between herself and her surroundings. Strong stone walls rose up through cool green air. Inside the walls were smooth shining surfaces and deep soft ones. There was no sound or stir, and the air was clean and still.