Chapter 10: Harvest Day

Every Harvest Day the pepper goes up on a rope.

We stake her to the bed of Eloy's flatbed at the corner of the farm stand lot.

I light the burner and let her rise thirty feet over the roasters.

The children line up for a ride in the basket.

By ten o'clock on Saturday I had given forty of them a minute in the sky.

The line still went to the road.

Three hundred neighbors stood in the smoke with their paper sacks of chile, eating tamales out of foil.

The foreman's grandchildren ran under the basket in a pack, shouting up at me in two languages.

For an hour I forgot the text on my phone.

Then Corina Lovato arrived with a cameraman, and I remembered.

She wore a cream dress and her best weather smile.

She had hosted Harvest Day for the station for two years.

Nobody had had the heart to tell her to stay home.

Behind her, in a clean shirt, came Nestor.

Corina stepped onto the little stage by the roaster and lifted a microphone.

"Good morning, neighbors," she said. "We're live from the Armijo Harvest Day."

The crowd went quiet in patches, and heads turned.

"I want to say something about healing," she said. "This valley has had a hard week."

I handed the last child down out of the basket and stood with my hand on the wicker.

Eloy had come up beside the flatbed.

He didn't touch me.

He stood close enough that I felt his sleeve.

"Smile," he said very low.

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