Centennial (122 page)

Salcedo grabbed Tranquilino roughly, stared at him without recognizing him and snapped, “You? What’s your story?”

“I’m coming home from Colorado.”

“Where’s that?”

“North of Texas.”

“Where are you going?”

Tranquilino was on the verge of saying “Santa Ynez,” but he judged correctly that this might arouse suspicions or even a recollection of the insurrection which had occurred there. “I’m getting off at Guerrero,” he said, and Salcedo passed on.

The colonel’s men, however, identified three revolutionaries, who were lined up against a wall and shot. “Let that be a lesson to you men coming back to Mexico.” And after a while the track was mended and the train resumed its way to Guerrero, where Tranquilino left it, heading overland on foot for the beautiful Vale of Temchic.

As he passed the four guardian peaks and entered the southern end of Santa Ynez, children began to yell, “Tranquilino Marquez is coming home!” And a crowd surrounded him and boys yelled, “Victoriano! It’s your father!” And a shy, small child whom Tranquilino did not recognize stepped forward, wearing good clothes that his father had paid for with the giros postales, and the two stared at each other like strangers.

It was a prolonged, gentle visit. The children looked healthy; Serafina had spent her money wisely. In a box she had each of the envelopes from the strange towns: Alamogordo, Carrizozo, Taos, Alamosa. A neighbor who could read had deciphered the names for her, and she had said, They sound like towns in Mexico.”

Father Grávez was pleased to see Tranquilino and told him, “You are a man of some nobility—alguna nobleza—because for three years you have never once failed to send money to your family. There are others ...”

Tranquilino discovered that he enjoyed talking with the padre. “Is it true,” Grávez asked, “that in Estados Unidos you work only six days a week and have part of Saturday off?” When Tranquilino explained the working conditions and the availability of medical services for everyone ... “You have to walk four miles to the doctor and if you have the money you must pay,” he explained, “but when Guttierez lost a leg, nobody charged him anything and an Anglo woman in Alamosa gave him crutches.”

“It should be that way,” Father Grávez said.

Tranquilino asked the priest whether it would be a good idea to take Serafina and the children to Colorado, and Grávez said, “No, women and children should stay close to their church,” and Tranquilino argued, “They don’t blow up trains in Colorado,” and Father Grávez admitted with some sadness, “Perhaps the time may come when you will have to take your family north. But not yet.”

As the weeks passed, with only vague echoes of the trouble in the north, Tranquilino discovered anew what a jewel he had in Serafina Gómez. She had a disposition like the clotted milk he ate in Alamosa, gentle, lambent, always the same. In her youth she had worked in the fields like a burro, and now, even though Tranquilino supported her well, she continued to work as hard, but for different and larger purposes. She tended the sick and cared for children whose fathers were killed in the mines. She helped at the church and was called upon by Father Grávez in any emergency. Mexico had millions like her, if it ever discovered a way to release their energies, but for the present, they slaved in mining towns like Temchic or tended gardens in small villages like Santa Ynez.

She was embarrassed when she told Tranquilino that she was pregnant. “You won’t be here to see the baby,” she said, and in the intimate conversation which followed she whispered a secret to her husband: “When you were gone and no money had arrived and we were near to starvation, for everyone was afraid to befriend us, a man crept to the door at night bringing us food and a few pesos. Who do you think it was?”

Tranquilino named three of his friends, but it had not been they. “It was Frijoles,” she said. “He came to bless you for refusing to shoot his wife. I hid him for three days.” Nothing more was said, but now the revolution seemed very close to the Marquez family.

It was an easy trip back. He crossed the border in the last week of 1905, worked in Carrizozo a few days, then drifted up to Taos, then on to Alamosa, but when he reached there, he found that Mr. Adams had already hired a full complement, so he wandered north to Salida, where he tried to find work on a lettuce farm, but they didn’t need anyone, so he went over the mountains to Buena Vista, where he lodged with a Mexican family and worked on the road for a couple of weeks. After this he went on to the high town of Fairplay, where he tried to find odd jobs.

There he met a fellow Mexican who was living in Denver—Dember the man called it—“best city in the world,” and in the wake of this man’s enthusiasm he continued his way east across the great mountains and came at last to that final ridge from which the traveler could look down on the city of the high plains.

Denver! What a mecca for the Mexican worker! Here, in the winter months when work in the fields had ended, men gathered from all parts of Colorado, and when the snow fell deep in the streets and avenues, the Mexicans huddled together with good songs and beer and dances and toasted tortillas and talk of home.

Denver! It was a city perched a mile high, loved by ranchers who brought their cattle to the winter show, loved by lonely men out on the drylands who came in for a good steak dinner, but loved especially by the Mexicans, who could lose themselves in the small streets where Spanish was spoken.

“This is ten times better than Chihuahua city,” Tranquilino told the men he was drinking with.

“You ever been to Chihuahua?” one asked.

“No. But this is better.”

He spent two months in Denver, earning money at eight different jobs. But life in the golden city was expensive, and he found himself with little left over to send south. Then one night in a cantina where there was much singing, he met Magdalena, a young woman of twenty-two who could have had any man she wanted, and she invited him to live with her. She had a job in a restaurant and together they could eat well.

“Why me?” he asked in real perplexity.

“Because you’re good-looking ... and kind,” she said “I’m tired of fighters. You’re like your name. It would feel good to come home to a man like you.”

She was altogether different from Serafina, whom he never mentioned. Magdalena had a turbulence of spirit, a wildness in her love-making. She liked to be with men, but she was afraid of them and was at ease only with Tranquilino. When it came time to pay the rent for their room, she discovered that he had been sending giros postales to his wife in Old Mexico, and instead of becoming angry, she kissed him feverishly, crying, “That’s why I need you, Tranquilino. Because if I was your wife and you were” away, you’d send me money, too.”

At times he grew frightened as to what might happen to them, because he could never do what some men did: they had one wife in Sonora or Sinaloa, but they got married just the same in Denver—part of the year in Mexico with one wife, part in Denver with the other. Father Zapata, who ran the mission on Santa Fe Street, came to talk with them one afternoon.

“It’s not right, what you’re doing,” he said gravely. “Magdalena, you’re a fine beautiful woman and you’re entitled to a home ... to children. Porfirio has sent me to ask you to marry him. He’s a good man, and he’ll make you a fine husband.”

To the priest’s surprise, the girl broke into violent sobbing. “I’m afraid,” she said.

“Of what?” the priest asked.

“Of what’s going to happen,” she said. “My father and brothers have gone to the mountains. They’re outlaws with Capitan Frijoles. All of Méjico ...” She could not continue. With a terrible clarity of vision she could almost foresee the nation in its madness, and she was afraid.

Father Zapata, who was a good priest working with almost no funds and little encouragement, brought Porfirio Menendez around to the house. He was a tall, silent man who worked on a farm north of Brighton, and he needed a wife. He said, “The farmer wants me to live there permanent. I have a house with inside running water.”

Tranquilino told him, “She’s the best woman I’ve seen in Colorado. She’s nervous but she’s a very good woman.”

“Will you have me?” Porfirio asked, but she would give no answer.

On his next visit Porfirio brought Father Zapata again, and the two men convinced Magdalena that she should marry and move to the farm, which she did, but three weeks later Porfirio was back, distraught and begging help from Tranquilino. “Did she come here?” he asked pathetically,

“Not to me,” Tranquilino said, and because he was concerned about this girl he accompanied Porfirio to the priest, who told them, “She passed through here a few days ago. On her way to the Sierra Madre to join her father and her brothers.”

That night Tranquilino and Porfirio walked the streets together, and they came to the park which overlooked the new capital, and boys started to tease them because they were Mexicans, but Tranquilino said in his bad English, “You go away now. We are not happy.” This brought additional jeers, and after a while a policeman came and told the men, “You’d better move out. We want no trouble here,” and they continued to walk the streets, and finally Porfirio broke down and cried, right in the middle of Santa Fe Street, and when he regained control he said, “I’ll never see her again. She was going to have a baby. I think it was yours.” And the two men parted.

In the closing years of the last century the Union Pacific Railroad performed an outstanding service for the nation, and nowhere was its contribution more salutary than in Centennial.

It decided, in its own self-interest, that the easiest way to earn a profit was to acquire a large number of customers, especially farmers who might want to ship their produce by rail. Accordingly, it hired two groups of special assistants. One group traveled to Europe, extolling the virtues of settling in states like Colorado and Utah. These men did a splendid job of explaining American patterns of living and the opportunities for a good life- in the west. They were responsible for the immigration of many trainloads of Germans, Czechs, Poles and Irishmen, who settled the plains; they were particularly successful in enlisting people from the Scandinavian countries.

The second group was less dramatic in its operations, but in the long run, more effective. These men traveled through the west itself, issuing a flood of roseate pamphlets. always with photographs, showing what could be done by a hardworking farmer with forty or sixty acres of good irrigated land. Millions of these publications circulated throughout America and Europe, and if a man had even a shred of interest in the soil, his expectations were bound to be aroused, for the corn raised by Farmer Bigley, who had emigrated from Illinois, stood seven feet tall and the melons produced by Farmer Wright were so big they could scarcely be lifted.

The pamphlet for Centennial was one of the best, and much of what later generations would know about the town came from it. In thirty-two well-written pages this pamphlet provided a storehouse of information about the town and the rich agricultural land that surrounded it. Temperatures for each month were given, with rainfall to match. Length of growing season was spelled out, with the warning:

Crops which can be grown without concern in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania cannot possibly be grown in Centennial, for the growing season is restricted, but one glance at our photographs will assure even the most skeptical that crops of a much different kind and of greater commercial value can easily be grown.

The Centennial pamphlet was exceptional because the railroad had commissioned two atypical people to write it. The unadorned facts were provided by the elderly schoolteacher Miss Keller, who loved the land she was writing about and showed her enthusiasm. With no exaggeration she laid these facts before the reader; she built a portrait of a territory rich in history but even richer in promise.

The flamboyant salesmanship of the pamphlet came from a much different individual. When the railroad agent arrived in town, looking for someone to do the pamphlet, he had stayed at the Railway Arms of course, and while lounging in the bar, fell into conversation with a man of such outgoing enthusiasm and such an apparent knowledge of agriculture that he knew immediately that this was the man he sought.

The man was forty-nine years old, tall, handsome, well mannered and with the bearing of a gentleman. He expressed through a choice use of words a very lively interest in the visitor’s proposed project and a most sympathetic comprehension of what needed to be done.

“This, sir,” he said gravely, his finely chiseled face close to the agent’s, “could be the new Garden of Eden. Wherever I have been able to bring water onto the soil, my crops have flourished. I say flourished, sir, and I mean nothing less.” Here he reached out and with his left hand took the stranger by the arm. With his right hand he painted an imaginary portrait of largesse: “I see a land teeming with industrious peasants from Europe, each man a king in his new empire. If he will but apply himself to land as I have done, he will see it augment yearly ...”

“I don’t believe I caught your name,” the railroad man interrupted,

“Mervin Wendell, sir. Agriculturist.”

“You may be the very man I’m looking for, Mr. Wendell.”

“I would be honored to be of service,” Wendell said.

“We’re contemplating a real estate operation ...”

“You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name?”

“Norris. Omaha.”

“Mr. Norris. Let’s sit over here. Just what did you have in mind when you said
real estate
?”

From this accidental but auspicious beginning, one of the soundest Centennial businesses was born: MERVIN WENDELL.
Slap Your Brand on a Hunk of Land
.