Diana Marcum - The Tenth Island

Text copyright 2018 by Diana Marcum

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Little A, New York

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ISBN-13: 9781503941328 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 1503941329 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9781503941311 (paperback)

ISBN-10: 1503941310 (paperback)

Cover Illustration by Rebecca Mock

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

First edition

For Bev and Mark

CONTENTS

Caught in between all you wish for and all you seen.

Joseph Arthur, In the Sun

AUTHORS NOTE

There really is an Atlantic island where every summer, bulls run down the main streets and everyone has relatives visiting from California. Murphy (his real name) really ate those things. Moody (not his real name) really did break out in a cold sweat. The volcanoes, the history, the stories, the natural wonders, and the improbable coincidences in this book are true. Even though even now, I have a hard time believing it.

At home, in California, there is a box full of reporters notebooks, dutifully filled with last names, ages, and direct quotes.

But I didnt use them much.

Somewhere along the line, my intention of writing a journalistic book on the Azorean diaspora took a detour. So, despite my job as a journalist, this is not a work of journalism, exactly.

Conversations are from my memory and my point of view. I used first names or nicknames or changed names entirely, as well as some identifying details. Because even though everyone knew I was a writer, many of the people in the book had no reason to believe I would write about them .

This is in no way a definitive report on the ties between the Azores and California. But it is a most affectionate one.

Diana Marcum

PART ONE

A Barn Party

It seems impossible now, like trying to remember when I couldnt read or didnt have a scar on my shin from that time I toppled off a bicycle, but I had never heard of the Azorean Islands when a photographer at the Fresno Bee dropped a picture on my desk of a man plowing a field with two oxen.

In California. In the twenty-first century.

The man stood on a flat cart. He had a cell phone to his ear. He was gesturing wildly with the other arm as great clouds of dust swirled behind him.

I love this picture. I took it driving past, the photographer said. Do you think you could find a story?

Absolutely, I told her. How could there not be a story there?

A couple of weeks later, I was on my way to the plowers house for an interview. I drove to a ranch in Tulare County, a part of California where everything is big. Big trucks, big belt buckles, big dairies, big silos and tractors and loading docks. This was before the big drought in California, and even the unplanted fields were spring green. I could see the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. Later, when the snow went missing, I wished that I had looked at it harder. For a while, it seemed gone forever, and I wanted to be sure the memory would hold.

No one was home, so I stretched out on the lawn near a white ranch fence. Above me there was a wide swath of sky with shape-shifting clouds. Say what you will about the hot, flat valley in the middle of California the rest of the yearbut in April, after some good rains, I dont think you could find yourself lying in a prettier spot than in grass so green that you cant be sure whether the sky is really that blue or just looks brighter next to the blade youre twirling in front of your face.

It had been a tumultuous week, and it occurred to me that in all levels of crisis, it is a good idea to lie down outside and look up.

A truck pulled into the gravel driveway. The driver got out and introduced himself with wild arm waving, so I knew I had the right guy.

He was Morais, a wiry, exuberant Portuguese immigrant. If anyone has ever spoken in capital letters and exclamation points, it was Morais. The oxen were Amante and Brilliante. They shared a marked resemblance, both red Holsteins with white stars on their foreheads. They werent yet full grownat two years old, they were oxen teenagers, weighing, respectively, 1,940 and 1,860 pounds. Morais could tell them in Portuguese to turn right, turn left, and they did. He played Portuguese radio for them at night so they wouldnt get lonely.

I asked Morais to follow his usual routine while I watched. Vem para c Come here to me, he called to the oxen in Portuguese, and they came over. He heaved up a wooden yoke carved by one of his cousins and slipped it over them. He hooked that to a 1,300-pound platform set on six earth-cutting metal discs.

He held a stick high in front of him and marched off like a drum major, his bulls falling in step behind him. He hadnt trained them by hitting them with the stick or bribing them with food. Since they were calves, he had walked them, teaching them right, left, and stop, using the stick as a visual cue.

These animals is so smart, you cannot believe it! And they love me. These bulls love me. If Im ready to go, theyre ready to follow, he said.

Amante gave him a lick, as if to back up the claim.

Morais walked his field, stick in the air. The bulls dragged the discs behind him, kicking up clouds of dust that settled to reveal deep furrows. The sun glowed orange. Man, beasts, and swirling earth looked like a Depression-era work-project mural celebrating a lost farming past.

After a while, Morais stopped, ran to an ice chest, grabbed a beer, popped it open, and hopped on top of the platform to finish plowing.

He used his stick to tap brass tips that protected the oxens horns.

Levantem a cabea Lift up your head, he told them, and they did.

His walkie-talkie phone rang, and Morais rode behind the bulls, carrying on a business conversation and juggling a bottle of beer, a phone, and two oxen. Someone drove by in a pickup, and Morais waved with the hand holding the phone.

Morais and the bulls took three hours to plow what would take forty-five minutes with a tractor. That included a break to give the bulls a rest while he sipped another cold beer.

This is a lot harder. This is work. But Im more happy with my bulls, believe me, than I would be with a tractor, he told me.

When he finished for the day, he leaped off the platform like a gymnast landing a jump with arms stretched overhead.

This is my life! he shouted.

He said that in the mornings he hauled cattle for a living and made good money doing it. He could afford a tractor. But the oxen were his tie to the old country he had left as a teenagerthe Azores, nine Portuguese specks of land surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean for at least nine hundred miles in every direction. So he plowed the way they had during his childhood on the islands and, according to him, the way they still plowed there today.

He pulled a battered red photo album from his trucks glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer.

Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you wont believe it.