A high school senior, Jack Duncan dreams of playing college baseball and leaving the political turmoil of the agricultural town Delano behind. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died ten years earlier, he’s suspected that his mother has been hiding the truth from him about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. With his family’s property on the verge of a tax sale, Jack drives an old combine into town to sell it. On the road, an old friend of his father shows up with evidence that Jack’s father was murdered. Armed with this new information, Jack embarks on a mission to discover the entire truth, not just about his father but the corruption endemic in the Central Valley. When Jack’s girlfriend warns him not to do anything to jeopardize their post-graduation plans and refuses to help him, Jack turns to his best friend, Adrian, the son of a boycotting fieldworker who works closely with Cesar Chavez. The boys’ dangerous plan to rescue the Duncan family farm leaves Adrian in a catastrophic situation, and Jack must step up to the plate and rescue his family and his friend before he can make his escape from Delano. The Road to Delano is the path Jack and Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, their destiny.

Excerpt

Chapter 6

Ash Wednesday

onday at lunch, Jack and Ella settled on the grassy school quad. The morning haze, a gray dullness, hung over them. Ella in a long skirt and T-shirt printed with her favorite saying played her guitar. Jack ate slowly, as Ella gently strummed a Joan Baez song.

She let the last chord vibrate in the air. “You look far away today, Jack.”

“Just thinking.”

“Worried about the big game?” She strummed a C chord.

“Not really. I’m ready for those guys.” As crucial as the Arvin game was to his chances for a scholarship, his head spun with Herm, the sheriff, and lost combine. He needed to set all that aside.

But how?

“You’re worried about losing that combine, aren’t you?”

He shrugged and glanced off into the haze. Herm’s beat-up face filled him with too many questions, ones he would rather not ask.

“What do you think happened to it?”

Jack did his best to suppress a frown. He spent the next twenty minutes explaining how Sheriff Grant found Herm Gordon face down in the mud and how their combine had gone missing. Short of stealing someone else’s machine and selling it to pay the taxes, he didn’t have too many ideas about what he could do to save his mom’s place.

“Jack, you have to protest. Write to the newspaper. Make noise until the sheriff finds your combine. Someone knew you needed that money to save your property.”

Ella’s sense of urgency hovered over her, an impending sense of doom that required her to stand up and shout to drive it away. She had been this way since he first met her, always ready to protest. Vietnam had taken up most of her attention. But it was their trip to Berkeley a couple of years ago that had set her on fire, and had almost got Jack arrested in front of Sproul Hall.

Two years ago, their sophomore debate team had joined the junior and senior team on a field trip to UC Berkeley to observe a statewide competition. They left Delano before dawn and talked for the entire four-hour bus ride. That was something he had never done with any girl. They sat across from each other, an aisle between them. Her darting green eyes held his interest. Life shot out of them, beautiful and intelligent in the same instant.

They debated the war in Vietnam, who killed JFK, the likelihood of a gunman on the grassy knoll, the Selma march, the Freedom Riders, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers—she had an opinion on everything. Mostly, she made sense. The girl’s intensity at times unsettled him, but it mostly intrigued him.

During the debate competition in a Berkeley auditorium, shortly after the lunch break, Ella leaned into him in the dark. “Meet me outside on the steps in a few minutes.”

Without waiting for an answer, she rose and disappeared. Jack stewed in his seat, trying to figure out what she was up to. He wouldn’t miss much if he left. Besides, her sense of adventure piqued him. A few minutes later, he found her outside the glass doors on the steps. In the breeze, her brown hair, straight and long, riffled across her mischievous smile.

“There’s an FSM rally on the other side of the campus. Go with me. We’ll be back in plenty of time.” “A what?” he asked.

“You know, the Free Speech Movement. Please, go with me,” she pleaded with her green eyes. “Mario Savio is going to speak.”

From the way she threw out his name, he was someone Jack should know. He had never heard of the Free Speech Movement, or Savio, whoever he was. Jack glanced back to the doors.

“They’ll be in there for hours.” She took his hand. He marveled at her warm grasp. He liked it.

They made their way through a maze of buildings. She must have had this all planned out. She led him directly to a large plaza packed with students milling about. Some sat, most stood talking and smoking, and clouds of strange smelling smoke wafted over the crowd. A line of cops stood on the fringes of the crowd. They fidgeted with their batons.

The two of them were so far back, they could hardly make out what the speaker was saying. Ella pushed her way toward the front, and Jack held on. Had she done this before? She stopped when they were about twenty feet from the speaker, who read a list of students who were being expelled. People were booing.

A new speaker came to the microphone, a tall wiry-haired student in a white shirt and sheepskin-lined jacket. Electricity seemed to shoot right out of his hair. The crowd around Jack murmured, likely wondering what this guy was going to say. Ella squeezed his hand tighter. He didn’t dare let go of her, afraid they’d get separated in the jostling crowd.

The crowd hushed when the man with the electric hair started to speak. He had a machine-gun delivery. His message burst from him with so much energy the entire crowd leaned in for more. His lips moved like waves, every word coated with fire.

I ask you to consider if this university is a firm…we’re the raw materials.

And we don’t mean to be made into any product…to be bought by anyone.

We’re human beings!

The crowd applauded, and Ella loosed her hand to clap and shout.

There’s a time the operation of the machine becomes so odious… you can’t take part.

You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears…upon the levers… and you’ve got to make it stop.…Unless you’re free, the machine won’t be prevented from working.

The crowd broke into more applause. Kids were yelling their agreement. Jack wasn’t clear what machine the guy was talking about, or what freedom he didn’t have, and what gears needed to be stopped. Then the speaker introduced Joan Baez, and the crowd went crazy with chatter and clapping.

She started singing a Bob Dylan song, and a hush fell over everyone.

How many times can a man turn his head And pretend that he doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind… Ella hopped up and down on the balls of her feet.

Baez started up another song, “We shall overcome…,” and everyone joined in, the crowd swayed with the words. Something great, something powerful was about to break open here. He took Ella’s hand, and she gave him a complicit smile. She held him tight as if she feared she would float away in the euphoria of the moment.

When the song ended, she pulsed forward. Jack dared not let her go as they slipped between applauding students who hovered around the famous singer. Ella ascended right up to the great Joan Baez, her long black hair draped over her shoulders, her guitar slung over her neck.

Ella tried to talk calmly, but she only stammered.

“Did you want an autograph, honey?”

Ella had a confused look as if the question she wanted to ask had slipped away.

“Do you go to school here?”

Ella shook her head. “Delano High School.”

“Look,” Baez pointed over Ella’s shoulder. “You guys got to get out of here. There’s going to be trouble.”

At the far end of the crowd, cops were forcing students to move. Cop cars with lights flashing swarmed into the quad forcing students toward them. Panicked voices, screams, and shouting rose in the quad. Police vans rolled into the quad, lights flashing, the short squawks of their sirens stirred up the crowd.

The man with wiry hair grabbed the microphone beside Baez. “Everyone sit down. Resist them. Don’t let them take you. You have a right to be here.”

Baez fished in her purse and pulled out a black pen. “Here, let me sign something, then you two split.” She hovered her pen looking for something to write on while Ella stood motionless. Finally, the singer reached up and scrawled her name in big looping letters on Ella’s forehead.

“Go!” Baez pointed off to her left.

Jack led Ella down the side of the steps, away from the surging crowd. Students were shouting as the cops swung batons, pushing and shoving them into the center. Jack ran along the front edge of the students sitting cross-legged on the ground. Several cops ran toward them from their right. Jack, with Ella in tow, sprinted away from them across the open plaza, heading for the shelter of a building.

“Hey, you two, stop!” Heavy footsteps gained on them.

Jack clutched her hand, nearly dragging her. He desperately wanted to reach their seats in the auditorium. They ran full out down the side of a building, between another two into a smaller plaza. They dodged students, dashed around a fountain, and then behind another building.

“That way,” Ella said, pointing over his shoulder to a long hall. The footsteps were still behind them. They made their way down the side of the long hall, into a parking lot where they ducked between two cars, then down a lane.

“There! There!” Ella said. Jack saw the auditorium in front of them. If they could just make the doors.

“You two stop now!” Jack ran with everything left in him through the lot, across a small plaza, up the steps, and into the lobby. They blasted through the double doors into the darkened auditorium.

“Oh, no!” Jack said, stunned. It was empty.

“The buses are right outside. Over there!” Ella said, pointing to a side door down by the stage. They hustled down the aisle, both breathing hard, and turned to the door. Just as he reached for the crash bar, a shaft of light flooded in from behind them. Jack held up. A silhouette stood in the open auditorium door.

“As soon as I open this, he’ll see us,” Jack whispered to Ella, who was crushed up against him.

“We can make the bus.” Her breath was hot on his ear.

The door closed, plunging them into darkness. A beam of light flashed and began sweeping the seats, steadily moving toward them.

Jack pushed the bar, and they burst into the sunlight. A line of yellow buses, motors idling, were strung along the curb. Halfway down, Jack found the Delano High bus and pushed Ella up, then he jumped up the step. The two stood in the small aisle by the driver. Every eye on the bus stared them down. Every eye wanted to know where they had been. Heat seeped into his cheeks. He calmed his breathing.

“It’s about time you two showed up,” Mr. Thompson said. The only two seats left on the bus were in the front row next to him. Jack took the window, and Ella sat between them.

“Sorry, Mr. Thompson,” Ella said, demurely. “I was in the bathroom. I got lost, and Jack showed me where the buses were.”

He sighed and shook his head. “You can roll now, Howie,” Thompson said to the bus driver.

The bus door soughed close, and the driver revved the motor. Jack closed his eyes, letting all the tension out of his body. He wanted to laugh, but he dared not.

Just then someone banged on the door. It opened, and a cop stepped up into the bus.

“I’m looking for two demonstrators who ducked in here.”

“All of our students are accounted for, officer,” Mr. Thompson said. “We have to get on the road.”

“These two.” He pointed at Jack and Ella with his Billy club.

“They look familiar.”

“They’re with us,” Thompson said.

The officer squinted and inched closer, staring at Ella. “What’s that on your forehead?”

Mr. Thompson leaned over to have a look.

Before Ella could answer, Jack asked, “Are you aware of what day

it is, sir?”

“What?” The cop had an angry look.

“It’s Ash Wednesday.”

“Yeah, so?”

“We were at the church this morning.” Jack pointed vaguely behind him. “And that’s how they anoint now.” A few months before, Jack had seen a TV special on the changes in the Catholic Church.

“They don’t do ashes like that.”

“Everything changed with Vatican II.” Jack had been learning about the power of rhetorical questions in debate. Now would be a good time to test one out. “Are you at peace with your religion, officer? Is that why you’re singling her out?”

The officer looked as if he was gagging, trying to get an answer out of his mouth.

“Officer,” Mr. Thompson urged. “We have to get on the road.”

He backed out of the bus, the door closed, the motor revved, and with the grinding of old gears the bus haltingly rolled forward, gained speed, and headed home.

Darkness had fallen. Jack let his mind wander as he stared out the window at the passing cars trying to understand what had happened between them today. Holding Ella’s hand was like being captured by a tornado. He had to admit he didn’t want to let her go.

She rested quietly beside him. Mr. Thompson snored. They were still an hour away from Delano when Ella squeezed Jack’s hand. She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. She put her mouth to his ear.

“I’m a Presbyterian. But for one moment I was a Catholic. I will never forget that.”

Her words made him smile. He wasn’t Catholic, but that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t forget today either. When her parents heard about her meeting Joan Baez and hearing Savio speak, they never allowed her near Berkeley again.

After they arrived back at campus, Mr. Thompson took him aside. He said he’d let this episode slide, but only if he showed the same initiative and creativity in debate for the rest of his high school career. He felt himself in a squeeze. Ella was a top debater. This was her territory.

He’d be in her whirlwind. Then there were the ramifications of getting caught leaving the debate. He had far less to fear from a cute girl.

“Sure,” he told Thompson. They shook, and no one talked about it again, except for Ella just about every time they kissed.

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About the AuthorJohn DeSimone is a novelist, memoirist, and editor. He’s co-authored bestselling memoirs, The Broken Circle: A memoir of escaping Afghanistan, and others. He taught writing as an adjunct professor at Biola University, and has worked as a freelance editor and writer for nearly twenty years. His novel, The Road to Delano, is a coming of age novel set during the Delano grape strike led by Cesar Chavez. BookSirens said, “It’s more than a little Steinbeck, in a good way….” He lives in Claremont, Ca, and can be found on the web at www.johndesimone.com

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