When Andres transferred to the Indiana University from Texas Southmost College, his father, working as the head gardener at a trailer park for snowbirds in Brownsville could not help him with money, only his goodbye and his blessing.
The only way that Andres was able to attend the Midwest school was because his family had worked in the fields there picking tomatoes and cucumbers every summer for as long as he could remember. They would return to Brownsville in October and enroll in the migrant school that started in October and let out in April, just in time for the families to start their annual northward trek.
It had been the same when he had volunteered for the military years earlier. He had a brush with the law after he and his neighbor got nailed knocking over vending machines and he had to start working at a local used clothing warehouse making bales of ropa usada. When he tired of it, he enrolled for GED classes and passed. Then he enlisted and was gone for four years. His father had seen him off at the Trailways station and gave him a hung. That's was all he had to give him.
But now, after two years in Indiana paid by the G.I Bill and in-state tuition for his migrant status, he came home for Christmas and was looking forward to graduating with his B.A. in business in May. He had called his parents, who still lived in the home they had bought with their field work, that he would be home in two days. The road in front of his home was a dirt road still coated with caliche and it was just across a small concrete irrigation canal from his father's workplace.
The morning after he arrived from Indiana, his mother said his father wanted to see him. She said he was across the street at work. Andres walked out and saw his father, wearing rubber boots since he and the crew were using water from a small resaca to water the plants around the trailers, waving at him. There was a portly white man standing by his father looking Andres over.
As a kid, Andres used to see his father, muddy and wet, come in after a nightlong riego session in the cotton fields as a blue northern struck the hinterlands in Olmito. The steam from the coffee his mother gave him framed his face as he fought off the chill.
"Que paso, papa?," he asked. his father.
"Nada, quiero que conoscas a Mr. Katzenbaum, mi patron."
Katzenbaum spoke to him and said: "So you're Andres, Jose's son?"
"Yes sir," Andres said, extending his hand.
"And you're going to get a B.A. from Bloomington?," the man asked. "I'm from Indiana, too."
"Well, a pleasure to meet another Hoosier," replied Andres.
The Katzenbaum turned slightly away from his father and asked Andres in a lower voice: "You're going to graduate from Indiana University? And you claim him?," he asked, nodding slightly to his father, whose boots and pant legs were coated with mud.
It took a bit for Andres to fathom what the man had told him. But when he did, bile rose in his gut and he said firmly.
"Yes, of course I do. He is my father. Good day, sir."
Andres walked away and as he jumped over the concrete ditch, he glanced backward and saw that
his father, proud of him and his education, was smiling at Katzenbaum, totally unaware of the insult the other man had heaped upon his humble station.