"For God’s sake Peter, enough already.”
Both of them had been too exhausted for the argument when they started it, now it was just a case of acknowledging the row they would have had if they’d have had the energy.
Filling the final shed had taken everything they had. It had been Peter’s idea and his brother had gone along with it because that’s what brothers do. Just going along with each other to see where this particularly path goes. Well, it had taken them here. To this shed with row upon row of jars stretching away into the distance.
The low wattage bulbs couldn’t properly light the shelves beneath them but did at least mark the distance. Every twenty feet a bulb cut a cone of light through the darkness and then another and then another and then and then. Michael glanced to his left and right, at the rows stretching off on either side running down from the back wall of the shed, each one of them filled with identical glass jars, clear with a green metal lid. Inside each: peppers. Peppers beyond count. Some jars of red peppers, some orange, some yellow, some green others had brown or black or purple in every shade imaginable and every combination possible. An entire row had been devoted to Chinese capsicums, warm and orange and whole. The rich deep green of the poblano rows became overwhelming quite quickly; they seemed black in the poor light and made Michael think of death’s heads tattoos. He’d had to leave it to Peter to finish them off while he sought out the warmer and friendlier shades.
They’d started off harvesting at a peck a day – more than nine litres of peppers is a surprisingly large amount of picking and sorting and processing. After a month though they were averaging a peck an hour and now, now he had no idea – there were just the peppers, they picked, they plucked they preserved and they pickled.
What Michael had never understood – and it was becoming increasingly clear Peter had simply not thought about – was what came next. Peter had thrown himself into pepper picking when their mother had died, it seemed to be his way of dealing with the grief. He’d invited Michael to join in with the promise of payment once they were sold. Their parents’ home – the home they’d both grown up in – had been remortgaged to pay the bottling plant and the Mexicans they’d ended up hiring to help with the final push before the peppers spoiled on the bushes.
Michael had busied himself with the logistics, sorting out the buses for the workers and dealing with immigration in the era of President Trump’s ’virtual wall’, negotiating a line of credit with the bottling plant, fire insurance, licensing for food processing all of the details that needed to be handled to allow Peter to focus relentlessly on picking the crop.
Of course he’d wondered who their client was and had asked about it and, thinking back, Peter had never lied, he just hadn’t gotten around to the details. “Oh I’ll show you once we’re back in the office” he’d say or, “we should talk about that” but the conversation never quite happened. They’d end up in a bar instead, talking about Ma and the evening would slip by until night and then the next day would explode into an endless round of sunlight on primary colours.
Only now had they gotten into it. An hour ago – two hours after the last jar was placed with due reverence on the last spare foot of shelf space had it come to light that there was no buyer. There was just Peter’s need to pick and pick and pick. That had been an hour ago. Now he just stood and stared at what they’d done.
How many tonnes of peppers were there here? He had no idea. Lots, for values of ‘lots’ where ‘lots’ is a very big number.
“Well, okay.” Replied Peter, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. We need to start planning next year’s harvest anyway so I’ll see you at seven?”
“Let’s call it nine, Pete. I could do with a lie in.” Michael said with half a heart’s enthusiasm.
Mostly he was in no hurry to tell his brother that there wasn’t going to be a next year. This was it and they’d both be working until they dropped to pay off the debts they’d run up over the last four months. It could wait. Peter looked happier than he had at any point since Ma had died and they’d fought already.
It had always been like this. Pete had played in the backyard when they were kids while Mike read and did his homework like a good boy. Pete had stayed home working shifts as a casual labourer on local farms while Mike went off to Princeton and then Harvard Law. They’d fallen out of touch but Pete seemed well enough when they’d seen each other last Christmas. He’d been taken on as a foreman on one of the local farms and seemed to be making a career in-state. But Ma had been sick, real sick and most of the holidays were about just spending time with her.
When she died, Mike had agreed extended leave with the firm in New York and headed back to New Mexico to help out. In the four months since then, he’d got to know his brother in a way that hadn’t been true since they were teenagers. Now they met as men, sufficiently different from each other that there was no need for competition any more. They could just talk about nothing, about nonsense and about the past. Only today had his mind really turned to the future. Well, that would wait another day at least.
Pete headed for bed and Mike headed for a bar, a beer and a burger.
The bar could have been any one of thousands across the state. Plastic signs of the Old West fought for wall space with replica number plates and posters for the Lobos and the Thunderbirds.
The beer was cold and the room was dark and after the heat of the day, that was all he required. He sat quietly, turning things over in his mind but with no real hope of a solution. The problem wasn’t, he felt, so much the money – although that really was a problem – it was how to get out of this without breaking Peter or trampling down their relationship, which had somewhat unexpectedly begun to push out healthy shoots through the sun-baked earth.
In the end it was his fault. It was always his fault. He shouldn’t have assumed Pete had worked this through – nothing in the last forty years suggested that would be either likely or a good idea.
The image of that enormous shed, one of a dozen, filled with apparently endless rows of jars. They’d scoured New Mexico like locusts and when they’d exhausted the state, they moved on to California and Arizona and even Texas. Sure there were other peppers in other states but they’d scoured a red, green and yellow strip across the from El Paso to the Pacific.
His burger arrived. Smiling he asked, “Got any pepper sauce?”
“Pepper sauce is five bucks, that okay?” Said the barman.
Five bucks! For sauce.
“Who the hell pays five bucks for a splash of sauce?”
The barman looked nonplussed for a moment, “You been living under a rock? There’s no peppers to be had for love nor money – especially money.”
It was only now he noticed the TV screen over the barman’s shoulder had a picture of a capsicum pepper (specifically a red Capsicum frutescens he thought before he could stop himself) with an image of a spiking graph laid over the top. The barman was saying something about a pepper blight in Florida and the floods in southern California have something to do with global warming and how he’d voted for Hillary. It all washed over him.
“See that fellah over there? Frank’s been sent down here by some New York company to go buy up the peppers in folks’ backyards. Paying top dollar. Comes in here most nights to drown his sorrows, someone’s been buying up every scrap of chilli from here to Texas.” The barman concluded before looking expectantly at Mike.
“What?”
“Five dollars?”
“Oh, yes. That’s fine, that’s absolutely fine.”
He started at the tiny bowl of red sauce that was placed in front of him. He could even identify the tiny chunks of fruit in the jelly. “Five dollars is absolutely fine,” he said to himself.
He picked up his beer and sauntered over to the man at the end of the bar. “Excuse me, Frank? Would pickled peppers be of any interest to you?”
“Pickled, dried, powdered, mulched, I’ll take anything you’ve got. Mr …?” Inquired Frank with the expression of a man who’s just made a new best friend.
“Piper. Mike Piper. Do you buy by the peck?”
List of illustrations
Pepper in the Sun was created by Nicholas_Demetriades and is available on Pixabay.
Sea of Red Peppers was created by Ricardo Gomez Angel and is available on Unsplash.
Yellow and Red Peppers was created by Randy Fath and is available on Unsplash.
Green Chilli Pepper was created by Tom Hermans and is available on Unsplash.
Single Yellow Pepper was created by ericamccaig and is available on Pixabay.
Floating Peppers was created by Katherine Lenhart and is available on Unsplash.
Capsicum frutescens 'Hidalgo' was created by Llez and is available on Wikimedia.