Centennial (119 page)

“Potato!” the real estate man cried in honest dismay. “Do you think for one minute ...”

“I know what you tried with Otto Emig,” Brumbaugh cut in sharply. “No fancy charges this time. Three-seven.”

“Of course, of course!” Wendell agreed. “And you’re getting one of the best farms in the area,” he said unctuously to Takemoto.

“He don’t understand English,” Brumbaugh growled. “But I do. And you see he gets it, fee simple, by tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Brumbaugh, yes, sir. And when you want to sell your place ...”

“That’ll be many years, Merv.”

“We aren’t getting any younger, are we?”

“I am,” Brumbaugh said, and before he left the bank he signed Takemoto’s note for three thousand dollars. Looking down at the six-year-old child who had negotiated the deal in a language he had first heard only eight months ago he thought, I’ve never felt safer about signing a note. If the old man can’t pay, the boy will.

Next morning he visited Kurt at the sugar factory and told him, “I want you to issue Goro Takemoto a contract for twenty-five acres of beets, and I want you to see that he gets some good seed.”

The sugar industry was an ingenious interlocking arrangement whereby many disparate elements were forced to depend upon one another in creating a sophisticated whole. The factory could not exist without assurance that farmers would supply it with beets, and the farmers had no alternative but to sell their beets to the factory; there simply was no other market.

The interdependence went further. Land produced the beets, but the tops were plowed back to enrich that land. Extracting sugar produced the by-products of pulp and molasses, which could be fed to cattle, whose manure came back to keep the land productive.

Because of this interdependence, the industry found it logical to operate on a system of binding contracts, and each January the farmers waited anxiously for a visit from the company field man to sign that precious slip of paper which guaranteed that all beets raised on the allotted acreage would be purchased as from October 1, with the first payment coming on November 15.

With this contract the farmer could go to the Centennial Bank and borrow the money he needed for seeds in March, planters in April, thinners in May and his general expenses through October. Come November 15 his first check would arrive: twenty-five acres of beets, sixteen tons to the acre, six dollars a ton equals $2400.

The check was never made payable to the farmer. Invariably it read something like this: “Centennial Bank, Mervin Wendell, Otto Emig,” a shrewd precaution which ensured that the bank would recover its loan, Mervin Wendell would collect on his mortgage, and Otto Emig would receive whatever was left over.

The system was a tribute to intelligence: procedures were spelled out clearly, financed with adequate capital, and administered justly. But what Potato Brumbaugh, with his philosophical inclination, relished was the higher intricacy of beet production, for to him this proved the limitless capacity of man. One night when the Russian farmers were bemoaning the growing number of Japanese in business for themselves, he grew impatient: “Keep your eye on the beet. A hundred years ago it was a little round red thing that weighed three ounces. It was an annual, which meant that each year it produced the whole cycle: leaves, root, stalks, seeds, and it gave damned little sugar ... less than one percent. Well, some smart Germans took that red thing and changed it to white. They multiplied the size until it weighed over a pound. They turned it into a two-year plant, big root this year. If replanted, seeds next year, which meant that all the first-year energy could go to making sugar. This increased the sugar content from less than one percent to fifteen percent and maybe pretty soon sixteen or seventeen. If men can do that to the beet, they’re smart enough to find us workmen to. help grow it.”

It was a pretty speech, and it told the Russians things they hadn’t known before, but as Otto Emig whispered to Emil Wenzlaff, “You notice he didn’t say where we’ll find men for stoop-work when our Japanese leave.”

Everything was under scientific control except the one element which determined success or failure: where could the farmer find a labor force willing to do stoop-work without wanting to buy farms or educate children to the point where they no longer wished to thin beets? The whole intricate structure, so vital to the west, threatened to collapse around this insoluble problem.

And then one day Potato Brumbaugh rode up to Venneford to sell his crop of hay, and he warned Jim Lloyd, “After this year there may not be any hay for your Herefords.”

“Where you gonna sell it?”

“I may have to quit growing it.”

This improbable statement confused Lloyd, because he knew that a beet farmer had to grow hay; beets were so voracious in sucking minerals from the soil that no field could grow them continuously. If this was tried, the minerals would be used up, allowing sugar-beet nematodes and other insects to infest the field, stunting the beets or even killing them off. So when a provident farmer dug his beets in October, next year he planted that field in barley, then alfalfa for two years and then potatoes. Only in the fifth year would he dare to plant beets again.

This meant that a man would divide his farm into enough segments to practice this rotation, and the maximum land he could apply to beets in any one year would be one of those segments. The others had better be growing hay, or something like potatoes or barley. So if Brumbaugh intended to go on with beets, Jim knew he had to grow hay too, and he told Potato so.

“I mean I’m going to quit farming altogether,” Brumbaugh said. “I can’t find anyone to stay on the job, and neither can Emig or Wenzlaff.” He recounted for Jim his disillusioning experiences: “My Germans thinned beets two years, then bought their own farm. My Russians stayed eighteen months, and
poooof!
They had their own place. And those Japanese! they bought a farm in eight months. What we’ve got to find is someone who loves farming but hates farms.”

As Brumbaugh spoke these words, Jim was leaning on a gate to a field dotted with Crown Vee cows and their sleek, gentle calves. Even after all these years Jim was fascinated by the Hereford, constantly seeking to improve his herd, always trying to deduce why certain of these cows dropped strong calves.

“This bunch of calves from the same bull?” Brumbaugh asked.

Jim nodded. “That calf by the fence ... He never completed his sentence, because as he stared at the calf he remembered a day almost forty years before when he had known another calf—on the burning alkali flats east of the Pecos when he and R. J. Poteet were herding longhorns. A calf had been born and R. J. had ridden back to the drags and ordered them to kill it. Jim had been unable to do so. “I raise calves,” he had told Poteet, “I don’t kill ’em.”

And with the connivance of the chuck-wagon cook—what was his name, Mexican of some kind—he had saved the calf and later the cook had traded it to Mexican squatters farming land near the great Chisum ranch, and he could still see the joy shining in the eyes of those peons when they got their hands on that calf-the round, dark faces, the heavy black hair, the white teeth, the brown hands offering chili beans and chickens.

“I’ve got it!” he said “Mexicans!”

South of the Rio Grande, known in Mexico as the Río Bravo, lay the huge state of Chihuahua, with its capital of the same name situated near the middle. One hundred and twenty-five miles west of the city rose the steep, dark mountains of the Sierra Madre, rich in gold and silver.

Dropping out of the mountains like a slim thread of spun silver came the Falls of Temchic, graceful and lovely in themselves but made more so by the valley into which they fell. The Vale of Temchic ran eastward from the mountains, a delicate enclave surrounded on three sides by rocky forms so unusual they seemed to have been placed in position by an artist. North of the Rio Temchic stood the four guardian peaks: La Aguila, El Halcón, El León, El Oso—Eagle, Falcon, Lion, Bear. Along the south side rose great masses of granite, looking like ships or sulking prehistoric animals.

For some three thousand years this valley had been the home of the Temchic Indians, a tribe of the Tarahumare, those slim, deer-like people who occupied the mountains, living with a minimal culture, so primitive were they. Old accounts claimed that the Temchics had been a handsome, gentle tribe, but this cannot be confirmed. Unfortunately, the valley they had chosen for their home contained one of the world’s major silver mines, and although they never discovered how to mine the ore, Spaniards exploring the region in 1609 did, and the Temchics were promptly rounded up, forcibly converted to Christianity and pressed into an underground slavery so terrible that by the year 1667 not a Temchic existed, either above ground or below.

Legend said that the silver of the waterfall fell an equal distance into the earth, where it crystallized into a rich vein penetrating deep. Certainly the Temchic mines reached far down, and to bring the ore to the surface was always a problem. Long, slim tree trunks were let down into the bowels, and bare cross beams about three feet wide were nailed to the trunks, forming a suicidal ladder without railing or protection and rising almost vertically.

Up these dreadful ladders the Temchics had been forced to climb, lugging enormous baskets of ore. Year after year they lived underground, and their death knell sounded in vanishing screams as they plunged one after the other, weak and unsteady, from the tall ladders. “The last Temchic died yesterday,” the report of 1667 related, “but we have the consolation of knowing that they all died Christians.”

The vale was lovingly referred to as Temchic plateada—Silvery Temchic—and when the original Indians were gone, the Spanish operators of the mines corralled the gentle Tarahumare from the Sierra Madre, but they perished at an appalling rate, so that it was scarcely economical to continue using them. One Spanish engineer reported to Madrid: “They take one look at the deep pit and the ladders and fall to their death. I do not believe they fall through vertigo. I believe they throw themselves into the pit rather than work in darkness when they have been accustomed to the mountain peaks.”

Their place in the valley was taken by that strange and often beautiful race of mestizos—part Indian, part Spaniard—which would come to be known as Mexican. By no means could they be called Spaniards, for that blood had been seriously diluted, but on the other hand, they were not Indians, either, for a semi-European culture had displaced the Indian language, the Indian religion and the Indian way of doing things.

They were Mexicans, a new breed and a stalwart one. They were people capable of enormous effort when they saw it was needed, capable of either a compelling gentleness when generously treated or savage retribution when outraged. Many bloodlines converged in them: in Mexico’s colonial period the land contained about 15,000,000 Indians; among them came 300,000 Spaniards and 250,000 blacks from Africa, and out of this mix arose the Mexican. Since the Spaniards were dominant, and since only they had the guns and books and churches, the culture quickly became predominantly Spanish: language, military organization, religion, ways of doing business were all Spanish, so it was understandable that the new people should boast, “Somos españoles,” but they were not. They were Mexicans, and often the Spanish blood was a mere trickle.

On the other hand, since the Spaniards killed off a large percentage of the Indians and since they subjugated the blacks unmercifully, in large parts of Mexico a Spanish culture did prevail, and it was not preposterous for people there to claim somos españoles. But it was more accurate to speak of the entire population as mestizo. Certainly, in the Vale of Temchic in the year 1903 the thin, underpaid workers were considerably more Indian than Spanish.

They worked like mules. Some of the miners would be underground for days at a time. They ate little, for they were paid little. They were lashed and beaten as few workers in the world were in this relatively humane period, and when in desperation they went to the authorities for relief, they were repulsed by rural police, who took positive delight in shooting them, and by the parish priest, Father Grávez, who explained that it was God’s will that they should work in the mines and that if they agitated for higher wages, they would displease both God and Don Luis. The latter was the more important.

General Luis Terrazas owned Chihuahua, not only the city, but the entire state. Starting in 1860, he had led a minor military assault against an undefended building, and as a consequence, had ordained himself colonel. With four thousand dollars he bought himself a ranch comprising seven million acres on which he ran cattle ultimately worth twenty-five million dollars. With this as his leverage, by the year 1900 he owned three banks, four textile mills, numerous flour mills and sixteen other critical businesses with a cash value of more than twenty-seven million dollars. He also owned the Temchic silver mine, and his managers would be very angry if the miners interrupted production, thus causing him to lose income. The managers, therefore, instructed the rural police to gun down any troublemakers, and warned Father Grávez that Don Luis expected the priest to keep the valley peaceful.

It was by nature peaceful. On each side of the tumbling Rio Temchic, small huts, not much larger than doghouses, lined the stream. Up the slopes, set well back from the mule trails, stood the commodious white houses of the German and American engineers who operated the mines for General Terrazas. As a result of some historical accident, all the American families came from one small region in Minnesota, and they were treated so generously by Terrazas that they came to think of themselves as his chosen agents and fell into the habit of brutalizing the Mexican workmen almost as severely as did the rural police.