Federico's Ghost

		Federico's Ghost The story is that whole families of fruitpickers still crept between the furrows of the field at dusk, when for reasons of whiskey or whatever the cropduster plane sprayed anyway, floating a pesticide drizzle over the pickers who thrashed like dark birds in a glistening white net, except for Federico, a skinny boy who stood apart in his own green row, and, knowing the pilot would not understand in Spanish that he was the son of a whore, instead jerked his arm and thrust an obscene finger. The pilot understood. He circled the plane and sprayed again, watching a fine gauze of poison drift over the brown bodies that cowered and scurried on the ground, and aiming for Federico, leaving the skin beneath his shirt wet and blistered, but still pumping his finger at the sky. After Federico died, rumors at the labor camp told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night, growers muttering of vandal children or communists in camp, first threatening to call Immigration, then promising every Sunday off if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop. Still tomatoes were picked and squashed in the dark, and the old women in camp said it was Federico, laboring after sundown to cool the burns on his arms, flinging tomatoes at the cropduster that hummed like a mosquito lost in his ear, and kept his soul awake. from Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands