Under the Same Sky Page 16

  I let my mind linger on everything that had happened the night before. And the strange thing was, once I really thought about it all, I felt great.

  When Dad got home and saw the ticket and found out what I’d done, I’d be in deep, deep trouble. I’d have to endure the look of disappointment on his face, watch him set his jaw to control his anger, listen to him say that he knew he should never have trusted me. We’d go to family court, where my father would have to promise to be responsible for me, since it was obvious I couldn’t be counted on to take care of myself.

  Mom would be all upset, and probably blame herself for leaving in the first place. LuAnn…I didn’t even want to think about the grief she’d give me, or the smirk on her face when she said, “Joe, I thought I told you not to do anything stupid.”

  It was going to be a big, fat mess, that was for sure, and I dreaded going through it. But, at the same time, I felt incredibly calm. I knew that what I had done was against the law, and that meant it was wrong. So why did it feel so right? That’s what it really came down to. It felt right to have helped Luisa and Rafael and Frank. If I had to pay the consequences, okay. It was worth it.

  That feeling of calm stayed with me for the next two hours, until the moment when Mom’s van pulled into the driveway.

  I heard all about the reunion while I helped my family unload their stuff. When we had everything unpacked, Mom announced that she didn’t feel like cooking and suggested we all go out for pizza. Ordinarily, I’d have been the first one in the car. But I didn’t want to go out and sit through what was supposed to be a happy, carefree family meal with all that was on my mind.

  “Mom? Dad? Before we go out, could we talk for a second?” When LuAnn turned to me, her ears perked with interest, I scowled at her and added, “Alone.”

  “Of course, Joe,” said Mom, and a flicker of worry crossed her face. She gave LuAnn a look.

  LuAnn sniffed and said, “Come on, Meg. Let’s go see if Luisa’s around.”

  I didn’t even try to stop them. They’d find out soon enough.

  As soon as the kitchen door had closed behind them, I said, “You guys probably ought to sit down.”

  They did, both of them looking really serious now. “What is it?” asked Dad.

  First I told them about Randy and Tony driving through the farm on Friday night.

  “What were they thinking?” Mom said, her eyes flashing angrily.

  “It was their idea of a joke,” I said, making a face. “I told them off. I don’t think they’ll do it again. And I won’t be hanging around with Randy anymore.”

  Mom looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, good for you, Joe,” she said. “That sounds like a very sensible decision.” She gave me a little hug.

  “But that isn’t really what I wanted to tell you,” I said.

  She looked surprised, and so did Dad. “It isn’t?” she asked.

  I shook my head and took a deep breath. Beginning with the appearance of the I.N.S. in the cabbage field, I told them the whole story, right through to the end. Well, most of the story, anyway. I left out the owner’s name and the exact location of the farm where we’d gone.

  They stopped me from time to time to ask a question, but mostly they listened. When I had finished, I placed the ticket on the table in front of them and waited. It was hard to tell from the expressions on their faces what they were thinking.

  They looked at each other, probably deciding who was going to talk first. Finally, Mom said, “Well. You’ve had quite a time, haven’t you, Joe?” She sounded kind of dazed.

  There was no good answer for that, so I didn’t say anything.

  She went on. “I guess the thing I’m having a hard time with is that you didn’t call to tell us—that you didn’t tell anyone. Why not, Joe? We could have helped you.”

  “How?” I asked. “You were so far away and it all happened so fast. And Manuel—” I was about to say that Manuel had asked me not to say anything. But I didn’t want to make it sound as if I was blaming him. “I mean, I figured that the fewer people who were involved, the better. See, the I.N.S. guy made it sound like if I knew where Luisa and Rafael and Frank were, I had to tell. I thought if you didn’t even know they were missing, let alone where they’d gone, there was no way you could get in trouble.” I spread my hands as if to display the logic of my thinking, so they could see it and understand.

  “I know it was bad to take the truck and drive at night and all that,” I went on. “I’m sorry about the ticket and having to go to court, too. I’ll pay the fine out of my wages.” I paused, then added quietly, “But I’m really not sorry about what I did.”

  There was a long silence, and my heart sank. They didn’t understand. I guess I shouldn’t have hoped that they would. I turned around, thinking I’d go to my room before I was told to, leaving them to talk over how they wanted to handle my punishment.

  “Joe, wait.” It was Dad. “Sit down.”

  I did.

  “Give us a minute here,” he said. “This is a lot for your mother and me to take in all at once. You’ve had more time to think about this than we have.”

  Well, that was the truth.

  After what seemed a long pause, he said, “There’s no getting around the fact that you broke the law, Joe.”

  Here comes the lecture, I thought.

  “And as the sergeant said, we can’t condone that.”

  “I know,” I said glumly.

  “And that puts your mother and me in a hard place.”

  “I know,” I said again.

  “Because the thing is, laws made by humans aren’t always perfect. Sometimes there’s another law, a higher law, that we feel we have to answer to.”

  I nodded, feeling a tiny prickle of hope. What Dad was saying was exactly what I’d been trying to get clear in my own mind.

  “The immigration laws are a mess—harmful and misguided in some instances, and just plain silly and contradictory in others. That’s my opinion. However, they’re still the laws of the land and, as a citizen, I’m bound to obey them. Just as,” he added, surprising me with a little smile, “we’re bound to obey the rules of the road, even if we don’t agree with them. Although in that case, I’m with the powers that be: fourteen-year-olds have no business on the highways.”

  I had to smile back at that. If he’d seen me the night before, he’d know he was right.

  Dad sighed. “Anyway, Joe, the point I’m trying to make is that this is a very complicated thing. As we get older, we realize that there aren’t always easy answers when it comes to right and wrong. I can’t look my son in the face and say it’s all right to break the law. On the other hand, I can’t tell you what you did was wrong, either. The fact is, I don’t think Luisa and Frank and Rafael belong in jail. I’m glad they’re safe.”

  “I am, too,” Mom added softly.

  I opened my mouth to breathe a deep sigh of relief. I’d been prepared for their anger and their disappointment, but I hadn’t been prepared for this.

  “If you had asked my permission ahead of time,” Dad went on, “I’d have told you, absolutely, positively no. But you didn’t ask. Part of me wants to get upset about that, but I can’t quite seem to.” He stopped and shook his head. “You made your own decision, and I don’t imagine it was easy.” Then he reached across the table to grasp my shoulder. “Now that it’s all said and done, and you and everybody else are safe, I’m going to say this, Joe. I’m proud of you.”

  28

  We were shorthanded the next week, and the crew—what was left of it—and I busted our tails. As I worked, I wondered if the I.N.S. would come back, and one day one of them did. He came to the house, not out to the fields, and talked to Mom and Dad.

  The guy told them he didn’t make a practice of coming onto people’s land and looking for trouble. But in this case, a couple of Mexicans he described as “bad apples” had been involved in a fight at a bar. Somebody had tried to break it up and had gotten badly hurt. The Mex
icans had fled, and the I.N.S. was looking for them. It was suspected they’d found work on a local farm in order to stay out of sight for a while. That was why the I.N.S. had first stopped at our place and others, too, hoping to catch them unaware.

  Then, when the “bad apples” weren’t found, the I.N.S. was under pressure to follow up on every possibility, which was why they came back.

  Mom told the officer she was sure Luisa, Rafael, and Frank weren’t the ones involved, but that they’d been so scared they’d run away, too. Mom and Dad both were able to look the guy in the eye and say they didn’t know where Luisa, Frank, and Rafael were now, because I had never told them.

  We hoped we’d seen the last of the I.N.S. for a while.

  On the following Sunday, some new workers arrived. Manuel arranged it, don’t ask me how. A guy named Silvino came with his wife, Carmen, and her sister, Teresa. A couple weeks later, Hector, Victor, and a guy whose name really was José showed up for the apple harvest.

  All of them had papers to show to Mom and Dad. Maybe they were legal papers, maybe not. Maybe they had left another farm the same way Luisa and Frank and Rafael had left ours. Who knew? In the meantime, the fruit and the vegetables ripened and had to be picked.

  Mom and Dad and I went to family court, where I promised to be good and they promised to keep an eye on me. I paid the hundred-dollar fine out of my wages.

  Not too long ago, forking over that much money would have really bummed me out. I’d have sat down and figured out how many more days I was going to have to work before I could order the Streaker, and how many days that would leave me to ride it.

  But the funny thing was, I didn’t think about the Streaker anymore. I didn’t even want it. The X-treme Sportz catalog sat on my bureau for a while, but finally I threw it out. I knew I wouldn’t be riding with Randy and Jason and, anyway, I had other stuff on my mind.

  I got a raise to $5.50 an hour, which was pretty cool. Dad said Manuel told him that my work had improved and I deserved it. Knowing that was almost as good as having the extra money. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it all, but I liked knowing it was in the bank and that I’d earned it.

  I thought about Luisa all the time. I spent the long working hours trying to picture her in her new life. I imagined her up on a ladder picking apples, or playing tetherball with the milk jug that hung from the pole in the yard of her new home, wisps of hair falling in her eyes and her long braid flying.

  Once, I looked up Alderman Farms in the phone book and dialed the number. When a lady answered, I hung up, feeling foolish.

  One evening near the end of July, I was cutting the grass when I saw Manuel walking across the yard toward me. I shut off the mower.

  “I thought you like to know,” he said, “I have heard from Luisa.”

  “Really?” I said eagerly. “She called?”

  He shook his head. “No, I hear from Ginny. She saw them—Luisa, and Frank, and Rafael.”

  “So how are they? Are they okay?”

  “Yes, Ginny says so. She says their new bosses are nice. Luisa and Frank and Rafael will stay for apples, until the middle of November. They send their greetings to everyone here.”

  I waited. “That’s it?” I asked, wanting to hear more, wanting to hear anything about Luisa.

  “That’s it,” Manuel said, and started to go. Then he turned back. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. There is a message from Luisa for you, also.”

  “What?” I said.

  Manuel started to laugh, and I saw that he had been teasing me by holding the news from Luisa until last. “But it doesn’t make sense,” he said apologetically. “Maybe you no want to hear.”

  “Just tell me!”

  “You sure you want to hear?”

  “Tell me!”

  “Okay. She said”—he drew his words out slowly, tantalizingly—“to say to you that she is looking at the same sky.” He gave me a puzzled frown and shrugged. “But you see? I told you. It makes no sense.”

  I didn’t tell Manuel that to me it made perfect, beautiful, wonderful sense. I couldn’t have spoken right then, even if I’d wanted to, because my heart felt as if it had risen right up to fill my throat. Instead, I looked at the sky, at the sun that was also shining on Luisa in Sodus. I closed my eyes and let it warm my face.

  Later that night, I sat under the maple tree and watched the stars come out, and then the moon, and felt Luisa watching them, too.

  Also by Cynthia DeFelice

  The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker

  Death at Devil’s Bridge

  The Ghost of Fossil Glen

  The Ghost and Mrs. Hobbs

  Nowhere to Call Home

  The Ghost of Cutler Creek

  The Missing Manatee

  Casey in the Bath, a picture book illustrated by Chris L. Demarest

  The Real, True Dulcie Campbell, a picture book illustrated by R. W. Alley

  Old Granny and the Bean Thief, a picture book illustrated by Cat Bowman Smith

  Copyright © 2003 by Cynthia DeFelice

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeFelice, Cynthia C.

  Under the same sky / by Cynthia DeFelice.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While trying to earn money for a motor bike, fourteen-year-old Joe Pedersen becomes involved with the Mexicans who work on his family’s farm and develops a better relationship with his father.

  ISBN: 978-0-374-48065-3

  [1. Farm life—New York (State)—Fiction. 2. Migrant labor—Fiction. 3. Mexicans—New York (State)—Fiction. 4. Father and son—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D3597 Un2003

  [Fic]—dc21

  2002025014