Peach Fuzz Summer

Harold Goldie Hurff, Jr., was the first boy I ever kissed that I hadn’t known since third grade. He was a college man—Rutgers—working for the summer for Sam De Cou on Sam’s truck farm outside Haddonfield, New Jersey. The orchards and fields and the sorting and packing conveyer system on the long tables at the back of the huge open market required a crew of fifty Puerto Ricans to do the labor. They came every year with their jefe Luis. Each year, Luis brought a Maria along. One year, it was Maria his wife. The next it was Maria his mistress. The summer I was one of the students who sold fruits and vegetables up front at Sam De Cou’s, the Maria was his wife.

Several other Marias and the few other women of the crew picked the small things. Strawberries, the tasteless beauties big as a plum that Rutgers was developing (and everyone wanted to buy) and the sweet tiny ones, less expensive and fragrant before the bite, that I guided favorite customers toward. Kentucky Wonder beans for snapping. Onions. They carried their harvest in flat baskets that rested on bandannas of paisley and plaid, a sway with each step for balance, one hand at the basket’s rim, the other on the hip over the long skirts, striped with the colors of the spectrum, they wore even in the fields.

Peaches were the main crop on Sam De Cou’s farm. Never, even in Georgia, did peaches grow sweeter. When the peaches came in, the shoppers multiplied. The pickers took to the trees with ladders and bushel baskets and brought the fruit in by truck to the sorting belts, where a row of Puerto Ricans lined each side to pluck out the bad ones (not many) and the most elegant (those for the market up front). Every night after the conveyor belt had hummed all day and the loaders had stacked it high, a truck as big as a moving van set out for Philadelphia with, they said, a load of fruit, graded by size, worth $2000. Not to be sniffed at, that, in the mid 1950s.

The market sales were small stuff by comparison. They were the lure for the customers who wanted a drive in the country for the best peaches in the world. As each one stepped under the roof, one of us—Ray, our boss, who had passed on the order to us from Sam, my old friend Katie, who had moved away from Ohio and whose family hosted me for the summer, Harold Goldie Hurff, or me---broke a peach in half. Juice rolled down our arms. In the summer heat and frenzy of passing out the treats, the fuzz of the peach soon followed the trail, and the itching began. All the long days of summer. Each day until the sun went down. Peach half by peach half, drip by drip, the peach fuzz clung. It moved to the eyes, the cheeks. In shorts, the legs began to gather the dusty fuzz.

Every evening at dusk, as we rang out the registers and covered the fruit, from along the fence beside the barn where the Puerto Ricans slept rose love songs. Louder and sweeter they came, as the Spanish words floated across the fields to Katie and me. We recognized some of the dark faces—Handsome One, we called the one who came at every break to buy a Pepsi and shook his head when we (always) gave him the wrong change. He knew his coinage. The two Joses. Jesus. Freshly showered, free of the dust and fuzz of the sorting belts, the chorus sang to us or to the setting sun, the crickets, the darting flashes of lightning bugs. To summer. To work. To the end of a day of work.

Sam De Cou had two sons. Sam, Jr., was Ray’s boss. His eyes were bluer than Paul Newman’s, and his blond pompadour was brushed back just so. He pulled up in his green Saab several times a day to check on us, though it was never clear what he was checking. We were splitting the peaches and offering them to customers. I was thumping the watermelons. “This is a good one,” I’d point,. My customers came back. They asked for me. “She can really pick a good melon,” they’d say. Melons, I found, must be treated like drums. Properly pounded, the thumps took on harmony. The boss was in the bathroom with a magazine, “pulling a Ray,” stretching a break into 20 minutes of reading pleasure after a quick splash at the sink over the itching arms before sitting down. Katie was making (the wrong) change for the Handsome One, who was grinning and shaking his head. She added an extra dime. He giggled at the profit he’d made. Sam , Jr., squealed out of the parking lot.

Four times a day—you could set your watch—little Richard De Cou flew in on his green Schwinn, stopping with a sideways lurch two feet from the cash register. He’d come to check the mint symbols on the pennies. He clattered through the drawer at top speed, pulled out the “D’s and “S’s” and checked the dates. He knew which ones were worth 2 cents, or 5, and he relieved the register of those. Without a word, he flung himself back on his bike and wheeled away. The next one of us who rang up a sale approached the cash drawer carefully. More often than not, Richard would have emptied a jar of bees into the tray, and they were none too pleased when we set them free with a register ring.

Sam De Cou himself rarely came to the market, and if he did, he headed to the back to watch the packing operation. He paid us 25 cents an hour, and he expected us to earn it with no supervision from him. Sam, Jr., was to take care of that. Once, early in the summer, he had come to talk to the three of us, to dangle before us the promise of a bonus at the end of the summer “for the best student worker among you.” All summer we wondered what Sam’s bonus would be. One hundred dollars? Two? We didn’t compete, not really, but we worked hard, and the bonus was always at the back of our thoughts.

The day the market closed down for the year, Sam De Cou came to talk to us again, and he gave the prize. The $25 prize. And he gave it twice, once to Harold Hurff and once to me. We took Katie out for ice cream.

And one night toward the end of summer, on the rise where the town kids went to neck, a flashlight shone through the front window of Harold Goldie Hurff’s green Ford, moving in circles. Police. A warning. We moved on. I went back to Ohio with a big bag of peaches. Harold went back to Rutgers.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer