Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? by Mark Zwonitzer

Author:Mark Zwonitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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In the six years since Coy Bays and his family headed west out of Poor Valley, Virginia, a lot had changed. Even in the chill February of 1933, the Bays family had begun as a huge and hopeful traveling party: Charlie and Mary, their healthy children (Coy, Alma, Elva, and Stella), their tubercular children (Stanley and Charmie), and Alma’s two-year-old daughter, Anita. The day they arrived in New Mexico, Alma had given birth to a son, Johnny, which the family took as a sign of rising fortune. Then there were Charmie’s goats, the family bulldog, Caesar, and Stella’s kitty. But along the way, the party had dwindled, and the hope, as well. The Bays family had worked its way across New Mexico, Arizona, and then up into California’s Sacramento Valley, picking cherries and peaches, packing lettuce, cooking and cleaning at ranches. They lived under tents in camping parks or in abandoned houses given them for little or no rent, making their way with hard work and tiny kindnesses from produce foremen who kept the family employed even when there wasn’t much work. (The Bays girls were lookers, and the bosses liked to keep them near.) Even so, Charlie had to swallow his pride and apply for state aid to keep little Johnny and Anita fed. That was how the Bays suffered their first loss, their name. “ ‘Bays’ became ‘Bayes’—with an e—by accident in California,” says Elva’s daughter Barbara Powell. “They were filling out some Social Security or state-aid papers, and some clerk wrote it wrong. It would have cost money to go back in and change it, so they just left it be.”

That was the least of the losses. Stella was left behind in Linden, California, after the growing season of ’34 to marry one of the scions of the profitable DeVincenzi ranch. She was just eighteen when she got engaged, and as the wedding neared, Stella realized she wasn’t ready to be a wife. But the rings were bought, the wedding was planned, and she didn’t want to break her fiancé’s heart. Besides, if she married, it would mean one less person for her parents to worry about. So Stella said “I do” to give her parents a small break.

After Stella’s big ranch wedding in November of 1934, Charlie and Mary left the Sacramento Valley for the mountains of northeastern California. The party was lighter than ever. Elva and Alma had good-paying jobs in Stockton and decided to stay behind, leaving Alma’s children to be raised by Charlie and Mary. So Coy and Stanley piloted the Chrysler roadster and the big Cadillac north into the Feather River Valley, ascending more than three thousand feet from the little town of Oroville into Greenville. Greenville was next to nowhere, 180 miles from Sacramento, 250 from San Francisco, and ringed by seven-thousand-foot-high mountain peaks. But Charlie watched with a pang of recognition as the flatlands began to roll and climb and the scrubby chaparral and manzanita bushes gave way to a fragrant mix of pine, fir, and spruce.

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