Excerpt from Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Francisco
October 1929
Watsonville, CA

The Fog

The fog cloaks the orchard in the cold pre-­dawn darkness. It holds the Pajaro Valley close as a secret, reducing everything to a suggestion of itself. Muted shapes emerging, dissolving.

The hills on the horizon. The shallow-­rooted apple trees growing in straight rows. The silent brown men, young and old, shaking off dreams as they drift, unmoored, through the haze on their way to begin the day's work. Francisco Maghabol is among them, shouldering a heavy wooden ladder, with an empty burlap sack slung across his chest. Faded hat, worn gloves, threadbare clothes. Sixteen years old now, fifteen when he stepped into the belly of the boat that carried him from Manila to Japan to Hawai'i to California. Across the sea to where the streets were strewn with gold—­at least that's what the missionaries and the teachers and the ticketing agents and the leaflets and the Hawai'ianos had said. And it had seemed to be true from the faded and folded pictures sent home and passed around the villages from the returning pensionados flush with cash and American goods.

It turned out there was no gold. At least not for him or his kailian, not here, not by the time they'd arrived. Only a contract they had to sign before they could leave the steamship's hold. Only old-­timers asking to borrow money. Only blisters and calluses, sore muscles and bad backs, skin that never stopped itching from the fine dust of the fields. Only Go back to where you came from! and a dollar a day, not enough to eat—­despite picking the peas and beans and grapes and strawberries and cherries and apples and oranges and lettuce and asparagus and artichokes and garlic that fed this ever-­hungry nation. His nanang would say, Sasáor banbannóg no sabali ti aglamlámot—­useless labor when eaten by others.

As Francisco and the other field laborers reach the apple orchard, they hoist their ladders off their shoulders and position them against the trees. Silent and sullen, the men ascend into the branches. But Francisco hesitates. On mornings like this—­when he is near the world but not in it, near the others but not with them, near himself but not quite; when the fog has seeped through his skin and settled into his bones and he no longer knows where it ends and his breath begins, having already filled his lungs with too much mist—­he wonders if he should have listened to his nanang.

Maybe leaving wasn't the only way.

He had felt like such a man then. The eldest son venturing into the unknown to do what he must to take care of his nanang and sister and brothers after his tatang lost their land and left them for the woman with the mole on her right earlobe. The plan had seemed simple enough from a distance: work in America for three—­maybe four—­years, make enough money to pay his younger siblings' school fees and to buy back his family's land, then return to work it.

But now?

He isn't so sure.

Not a man. No longer a boy. Maybe more so a ghost, since duty dissolves as it absolves. 

Still standing at the base of his ladder, Francisco watches Lorenzo Tolentino in the next row over shake a pebble out of his glove. The same ship—­the President Jackson—­had carried them across the sea. They found each other in the crowded, swaying dimness of the third-­class hold after hearing home in each other's voices and discovering they hailed from neighboring villages in Ilocos Sur. Since then, they'd stuck together, following the planting, then harvesting seasons along the coast for one full cycle. Other Ilokanos would join them from time to time to form small temporary crews so it would be easier to find work. But they'd always peel away, one by one, until only Francisco and Lorenzo remained.

Excerpted from Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay. Copyright © 2024 by Randy Ribay. Excerpted by permission of Kokila. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.