Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “Well, quit doing it here!” Brumbaugh indicated, and they did. Each morning when they came to work and each night when they went home, the Takemotos carried a bag in which they gathered horse manure, or any other that had fallen, and their garden flourished.

  On Saturday afternoons and Sundays, Mrs. Takemoto, accompanied by her son, who was picking up a few words of English, trailed through town, offering her enormous vegetables for sale and accumulating cash, which the family deposited at the local bank.

  “They come in here every Saturday morning,” the banker told Brumbaugh, “and without saying a word they plop their money down and I give them a slip. He checks it and she checks it and then they check it a third time with me, and then they write something in their gobbledygook and they bow and go out.”

  What really frightened Brumbaugh was that on Sundays the Takemotos, all five of them, inspected farms in the region. He saw them first one hot day in September, the father kneeling in the soil of the old Stacey place, the mother checking the irrigation gate, the children playing with stones. In August they were up at the Limeholder place at the end of the English Ditch, inspecting the soil and the water. Later he saw them at the abandoned Stretzel farm, beyond Otto Emig’s excellent land, and in October, when the beets were topped and delivered and Brumbaugh was on his way to another championship, the ax fell.

  Takemoto and his wife, and the three children, appeared at the Brumbaugh ranch, bowing low. Mrs. Takemoto, who apparently handled-the money, placed a bankbook before Potato, and by means of gestures easily understood, indicated that they had decided to buy the Stretzel farm. They sought help from him in arranging the legal details.

  Brumbaugh was seventy-eight that October and he feared that he had not the strength to break in a new set of help or till the fields himself. He judged it terribly unfair that this family had stayed with him less than a year, and he needed them more now than he had in March. He was tired, and there had been frightening spells of dizziness. A prudent man would quit the farm and the irrigation board and retire to Denver to live in ease, but to Potato this was simply not an option. He loved the soil, the flow of water, even the sight of deer in the far fields eating their just share of the crops. He had taken this once-barren land and made a garden of it, plowing back year after year the beet tops which helped keep it strong. Some farmers, eager for the last penny, sold their beet tops to Jim Lloyd as forage for his Herefords, but Brumbaugh would not consider this. “The tops belong to the soil,” he told young farmers. “Plow them back and keep the land happy. Cart manure from the ranches. Everything depends on the soil.”

  It had been Brumbaugh who devised the clever system of importing boxcar loads of bat manure from the recently discovered deposits at the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. This new-type fertilizer was dry and compact and easy to handle. It was also preternaturally rich in mineral deposits; where it was used, crops grew.

  Because of his own preoccupation with manure and its relationship to land, Brumbaugh had followed carefully the efforts of the Takemotos to enrich their soil, and whereas he had not always approved of their methods, he did applaud their determination. Therefore, when Takemoto sought his help in finding a farm for himself, Brumbaugh was ready to assist.

  He loaded the family into a wagon and drove them to town. The banker, whose wife had for some time been buying vegetables from Mrs. Takemoto, said judiciously, “These people have a fine reputation, Potato. Look like top-quality risks. But they don’t begin to have enough money to make a down payment on the Stretzel place.”

  Of the Takemotos, only the six-year-old son had acquired any mastery of English, and now he stepped forward as the interpreter. Jabbering in Japanese, he explained to his father that the banker could not lend the missing funds, then listened as his father spoke with terrible intensity.

  Turning to the banker, the boy said, “He not want money you. “He want money him,” and the child pointed directly at Brumbaugh.

  “Me?” This was too much. The family was deserting him, and they wanted him to finance their flight. “No!” he roared. “You leave me alone ... helpless. Then you want me to pay ...”

  When the child interpreted this, it had a profound effect on Mr. Takemoto. Ignoring the banker, he turned to face Brumbaugh and his eyes misted. He spoke directly to Potato in Japanese, as if he knew the Russian would understand, and he made walking gestures with his fingers, and after a while the child broke in and said, “We not leave you,” and he made the same walking gestures across the banker’s desk, saying, “We walk thin beets you. We walk thin beets us.”

  Brumbaugh understood. This incredible family was proposing that for the next year they would work two farms—Brumbaugh’s during the good hours, their own during the dark—and to accomplish this they were prepared to trudge twice a day the miles between.

  This was in the fall of 1905, when the Russo-Japanese bitterness had not yet subsided, but in Centennial the two men looked carefully at each other, an aging Russian who had known great success in this land, a bulldog little Japanese who longed for a chance to equal it, and each knew he could trust the other. If Takemoto said he would tend Brumbaugh’s beets, he would, and after a while the Russian said to the banker, “Call Merv Wendell in here,” and in a few minutes the prosperous real estate broker joined them.

  “Merv,” Brumbaugh said, “two months ago you quoted me a price of four thousand dollars on the Stretzel farm. I offered you three-five, and you said you thought they’d take three-seven. Well, Mr. Takemoto here is offering you three-seven as of this minute, and, Merv, I don’t want him to suffer any fancy business at your hands.”

  “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 arriv
e: 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 I
ndian 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.