NOVEL: The Pecking Order on Hacienda Diana

From his perch under the intermittently shady canopy of the scalped plants the world slowed down a clip for Atanasio as he lost the noise of the plantation to his quiet work. The leaves needed moisture to merge with each other and maintain the shape of a ball so Atanasio would drag his collection of precious, sticky interior leaves behind him as he went from plant to plant where the rain waters from the previous night collected near the roots of the fat, enormous stalks.

The muddy water felt cool against the heavy, hazy October air. Occasionally, Atanasio would dive his hands straight through the water to the loose earth that lie beneath. The ball was built, layer by layer with a new, soaked leaf laid on the outside at which point he’d run his hand over the new surface with a soft and consistent method. Then, like a mother hen laying her wings over her threatened chick Atanasio would place the ball in his lap, wrap his arms over and hug it with his midsection for a few moments to make sure it didn’t peel.

For her part, Tita was a different woman when she was at work. Though not overly severe, she was always very demonstrative with her grandson: equally so when she was lavishing her grandson with love and castigating him with her words or a beating. At work, she worked. She shared the odd joke with the women on her line but was never the source of any new gossip on the line or sharing in a gripe about the bosses. She had been with Nolan foods long enough to know Mr. Evans could be anywhere.

Tita explained to Atanasio that Mr. Evans wasn’t a bad man. Tita had been working on the plantations many years and was known throughout Catarema to be a reliable employee he needed almost no management and never spoke of wages or unionizing. As such, Tita was never want for employment and had chosen the hacienda specifically because Mr. Evans allowed the workers to bring their children. No, Mr. Evans was not a bad man, at least not from Tita’s point of view but he was austere with the workers and rather ostentatious with his own lifestyle which many of the workers couldn’t stomach.

Often, when they sent down an American to run one of the plantations they couldn’t bear to witness the wild discrepancies of treatment between the upper management and labor. Oftentimes, the Americans would reach into their own pocket as inducements to their best workers. It served the dual purpose of assuaging their guilt and being a rather effective management strategy.

Not Mr. Evans. He was being groomed for the top position at Nolan Foods. He was putting in his years down south so one day he would have the credibility necessary to tell his stockholders that he had put in his years down south. Whereas many governors of the plantations would find ways to funnel extra funds to their workers, Mr. Evans prided himself on his ability to run an efficient operation that consistently avoided mass firings or any hint of uprising without one extra cent from American home office.

4 dollars a day, not a penny more. No one was ever fired for small infractions like lateness. No one ever made their full daily wage if they were late. No one was ever given a Christmas or Easter bonus but no one was ever asked to work on Christmas or Easter. Mr. Evans had a near preternatural ability to know when to press and when to be lenient with his workers. A truly great manager – no one hated him and everybody feared him.

Whenever Mr. Evans was about Atanasio always noticed his Tita stood up straighter as if someone had run an electrical current up through the bottom of her feet. Atanasio didn’t fear Mr. Evans the way the workers seemed to. He never, ever scolded the children – he left that to their caretakers.

Atanasio laid over his nearly formed and nearly finished wet ball, feeling for small imperfections on the surface and smoothing them over with more muddy water. As Atanasio leaned forward over his crossed legs, he laid his head on the ball like it was confiding in his a secret. Past a break in the plants he watched Miles cut down other plants and his friend Raphael gather up the leaves like two irregular satellites their constant motion highlighted the stillness of his place in the venture. He smiled as he thought about when it dried – there was nothing better than a new ball.

In the distance, though inaudible to him, Atanasio could tell Miles had heard something because he stopped in his tracks. Atanasio lifted his head up to look around but he couldn’t see – not without shifting around too much and ruining the ball. From the right side of the frame of his slightly immobilized eyes Mr. Evans appeared. He strolled up to miles pointed into the distance and struck up a conversation look an old friend.

Mr. Evans was always easy to spot. In theory he dressed the same as the other field workers, but his white sneakers were always a shade too white, his shorts always pressed and firm, and he his biggest identifier, his pastel colored polo shirts were always tucked in. The workers didn’t bother with such attempts at decorum if they wore it shirt at all. Sure, Mr. Evans helped carry the odd banana bunch here and there and just being in the fields would tinge anyone’s clothes but just like Jesus always dressed in bright white in the passion plays, Mr. Evans fundamentally stood apart in all manner from his workers.

No one ever talked to him more than Miles even the plantation underbosses. Miles wasn’t a manager in any official capacity (and he certainly wasn’t paid like one) but he did have a hand in maintaining the uneasy peace that had kept the Diana Hacienda so productive and free of acrimony over the years.

Years previous, when Mr. Evans predecessor ran the plantation, Miles caught word of a strike being headed up by a group of workers who had all recently found out their wives were pregnant. Having overheard a phone conversation Mr. Evans’ predecessor had had with the home office, Miles had gotten the impression that the managers had the authority to call in outside agents in the event the workers began to speak of unionizing. Hearing stories from the east of the force these agents were charged with using, Miles had been instrumental in convincing he group of new and repeat fathers to call off the strike. In the intervening years, Miles had become a de facto liaison between the managers and the workers and Mr. Evans, especially, had an unspoken reverence for Miles’ role on the plantation.

The men shared a bond, if not a disparate degree of payment for their similar capacities on the plantation. In the same way that Mr. Evans maintained order on the plantation through the force of his will, Miles avoided the usual brands of traitor through his genial affability and unstoppable work ethic.

NOVEL: The Banana Leaf Ball

By the time Tita approached outer ridge that signaled the property line of the hacienda, Atanasio’s more ear-splitting wails had subsided. With his arms draped uselessly around her shoulders and his ostrich head buried deep within the sands of her shoulder, Atanasio’s shoulders shucked and danced to the irregular beat of his quiet remaining sobs.

The mordant charm of having to carry him was less lost on her than it had been on the boy. Tita raised the boy off her shoulder and dropped him hastily to his feet. She turned his shoulders towards her and lowered her body to his eye level.

“You’ll be a good boy, it’s time for work.”

Placing both of his hands inside her, Atanasio followed his Tita to the enormous, airplane hangar of an Aluminum building. The sun reflected a particular glare off the yellow and red Nolan Foods logo that hung enormous, even against the majestic backdrop of the mountains. The packing building had all of Orson Welles’ subtle proportion of design.

The track that ran across the middle interior of the hacienda was loaded with bananas from the overnight harvest and the pair stopped and waited for the dark green bunches to glide past like an endless train hanging from one of those harness gliders the gringos like to ride when they visit the Rainforest.

They slid through a quick opening and scuttled into the unnecessary 3 story mouth into the packing area. To one side was a harem of low faces in yellow smocks, placing stickers on the bunches, places and the bunches in the water tanks, sealing with a paintbrush the rinds of the bunches with an inorganic lime-green compound that came in bottles marked “chlorinated water.”

To the other side were a pair of slender-hipped, wiry middle aged men, hunched over to support the bunches of bananas like children with scoliosis; lurching forward with long awkward steps from the trucks to the main dispensation terminal in the middle of the room. “Room” being a generous term for an area that all the impersonal qualities of a 4 story warehouse with none of the pesky walls to keep out the elements.

Tita walked mournfully to her Mexican supervisor who calmly marked 6:02 on her timesheet. He furrowed his brow but never looked directly at her. With a single motion she rung her blotched, yellow smock around her neck, tied it in the back and set about to her day of cutting bunches of 5-7 bananas and packaging them for transport to Brazil, Cuba and America.

Atanasio sat knees to chest on the far side of the room away from the workers, waiting quietly. Within a half hour Atanasio could make out the silhouette of Raphael’s who jogged through the gate to the hacienda. At first Atanasio could not make out his friend and regretted the unsavory prospect of an entire day with no one his own age. As his mother made her way into the workroom, Raphael’s gleeful smiling peered over her shoulder as she came to an abrupt stop the left of Tita, Raphael’s feet appears behind his mother’s his knees bent to absorb the drop from his mother’s shoulder.

He giggled and gesticulated meaninglessly with his hands as his young mother swept his hair behind his ear, whispered inaudibly and kissed him. Raphael wind-milled his arm in the opposite direction of Atanasio and took off; Atanasio hopped onto his right foot and dutifully ran after him. At the edge of the room stood a huge barrel filled with circular blue and yellow foam separators. Each of the boys grabbed one as they passed and turned towards the crops.

Atanasio felt the wind in his large ears whip and increase in volume as the two ran out in the banana fields. The fields were a never-ending labyrinth of short, green palm trees with, ears hanging from the canopy. Every 5 yards an aluminum arch extended from the ground like a tunnel through the foot of a mountain. Raphael, slimmer and older than his companion remained always 6 steps ahead and called back to Atanasio.

“We have to hurry! They’re cutting them down now! We have to get the sticky leaves before the hit the ground.”

When harvesting bananas, the workers would pull the tops of the malleable plants down towards the earth. They would then cut at the root of the bunches and carry them to the truck or hang them on the pulley system to be slid back to the plantation. Another worker would then hack the remaining leaves off the top of the tree and leave them where they feel – like vela littering the floor of the fields.

The boys rushed to get those good, sticky leaves. The piece of the leaves that had been closest to the stalk. These leaves had a fantastically adhesive quality and if enough could be gathered, they could be molded together with the smooth outer leaves to make a weight, bouncy and very respectable soccer ball. The boys knew well that almost an entire days worth of leaves was necessary to make one and their last one had been destroyed as it was, by rain which insidious drips its way to the center of their makeshift soccer balls and like a virus, unravels them from the inside out.

They ran for what felt like miles to Atanasio, who could feel his wheezing heartbeat through his throat and out the side of his neck. Finally, he could make out the flatbed with the bunches resting on the road – a glint of light flashing near the short, obstructed horizon.

He could hear Raphael, who had already increased his sizable lead, call out to the workers.

“One minute sir! One minute! Don’t cut it down yet!”

Miles, the only worker at the plantation who ever would have considered any order from a little boy smirked and waited.

“I can’t wait forever, Raphael!” who shouted gamely. He pantomimed a cutting motion with his angled machete. “Oh! Oh!” she shouted, pretending he was about to take swipe. “Wait! Here I g…”

“Wait! No! One minute. Please!” Raphael sprinted under the plant and extended his arms in a “v” towards the heavens underneath the canopy of the leaves as if he expected to be washed in cleansing water. Miles chuckled softly and take one hard, impressive swipe at the top of the stalk and like slow falling early snow, the leaves dropped softly into Raphael’s waiting hands, who for his part immediately plopped to his bottom and began to break up the leaves in dutiful preparation for the task at hand. Atanasio finally stomped up to his friend and put his hands clasped on top of his head; breathing the wheeze out of his lungs.

“Catch yourself and follow Miles.” Raphael commanded gently. “And don’t forget, if you get dirt on the sticky part, we can’t use it.