PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I came to the big curve 13 makes below Matfield, and I was thinking how this road seems to promise much but releases it slowly, letting its past seep out so that you must collect it drip by drip, a cup of old water shot through with the exudate of lives: the collecting and drinking of such seepings is one of the most human things we do, and it is the source of our hope for continuance. Even though I had not drunk from Perkins Spring, merely confronting its dark presence had started changes.

  About halfway around the road curve reflecting the bend in Mercer Creek is a stand of big sycamores; stacked among their sparse limbs, seventy feet up and clinging precariously to the higher forks and outer lateral branches, were a dozen blue-heron nests, some of them big enough to hatch a brood of human infants. This colony began in 1953, but it descends from a heronry a few miles east on the Verdigris that has been used for a century, its remote location once kept secret by cowhands. To the people of the upper South Fork, nothing shows the end of winter more than the coming of the massive wings of great blues and the courting clapper of their clumsy beaks, the heavy bills grasping and shaking sycamore branches as if to drive winter on north.

  I was walking, and now and then a pickup rolled past, driver staring, rarely waving. When I stopped once to see if a certain rise might be Og, a fellow pulled up and said, Trouble? by which he meant, Are you trouble? and I said I was heading to Matfield, and to indict me he said, Ain’t many to walk this road, and that was something I knew: walking here is eccentric; even when the citizens take an outing in the hills they go by truck, and to walk along a road is to suggest poverty or peculiarity.

  Matfield sits on the western side of the South Fork, against the brow where the uplands drop to the river terraces and then rise again a half mile eastward to run brokenly to the Flint Hills escarpment. The hamlet is snugged in enough to make me believe that, with a terrific heave, I could throw a rock up and out of the valley onto the uplands; it is this compression of river and trees and simple dwellings, hidden from the prairie sweep, that gives the village its unornamented, if decrepit, charm and keeps its name from being a hoax.

  Matfield Green, the words spelled out in rock letters high on the eastern slope, got its name from settler and first postmaster David Mercer of Kent, England, who remembered a place called Matfield, a collection of fine houses around a big green where he played cricket, just east of Tunbridge Wells. If by “green” you understand a mowed sward at village center, then the Kansas Matfield is green-less, but with the grasses around it for miles, a common here would be like a pond in Venice. The hamlet has burned several times, the last big fire in 1933 when, people believe, a windowpane concentrated a beam of sunlight in the second floor of a shop. Much of what has been here is gone, yet Matfield retains just enough structures to be picturesque in the prairie manner: a couple of old false- front stores, two closed brick schools, some empty and some occupied houses (the best a 1905 catalog kit house with restored fretwork), a steepled church, and a pair of old-style canopied Riling stations on 13, once known as Reed Street. The west-side station is shut up, but the other is now the Hitchin’ Post bar, appropriately run by an English woman who follows the country-pub and old West custom of putting the convenience out back; I don’t know where the last American tavern privy will be, but the Hitchin’ Post has a chance at national history.

  Things coalesce accidentally sometimes, and words end up saying more than they were meant to. The story of Matfield and the tenor of its life have been shaped by two things: murder and the long promise of a railroad. Wayne Rogler, a former state senator and the last of the three great families here, says he once counted up seventeen died-with-boots-on killings around early-day Matfield. From that, you can see how, without intending to, promoters celebrating the grandest moment of the town, on the last day of July, 1923, linked those forces in a newspaper headline advertising their awaited emergence and rise to urban prosperity:

  SEE MATFIELD GREEN AND DIE

  Matfield Green, the last great cattle town without a railroad, after waiting half a century, has realized her dreams and has a railroad and will celebrate the event by a rousing

  OLD TIME PICNIC

  After failed attempts by several rail companies to build through Matfield, the promoters were still cautious and hoped for the Lord’s mercy should the train come in sideways instead of endways. The promoters did not mention it, but the old town plats show that citizens had been ready for years to pick up their present streets running the due compass directions and set them down realigned with whatever angle the tracks might take.

  On that Tuesday in July, from morning until dark, the people turned out to watch the Santa Fe crew lay track; they brought basket dinners and shared free watermelon, put their children in footraces, set sons to busting broncs, played against Elk for the county baseball championship; all day there were concerts and that evening a platform dance. Although citizens did not know it, Mat field was at its zenith of exuberant optimism: their hopes—the dream—was that material progress hauled in on trains a mile and a half long would be followed not only by money but also by civility. For a while, the railroad did indeed seem the harbinger of economic and moral progress: incomes rose, murders dropped. Then came paved highways and truck transport, and by midcentury the only thing Matfield could get from the Santa Fe was a whistle blast, and the Saffordville Syndrome began, and today Matfield Green, population thirty, has less than it had sixty years ago of everything except abandoned buildings. But it hasn’t seen a man shot down in years: maybe at least part of the dream has been realized; maybe some of the freight, if not the train, did come in sideways after all.

  En las Casitas

  In the narrow river vales of the county, the fields lie in squares and rectangles of row crops, fence lines darkly outlining them with small trees; from above, in autumn, the pattern is of strips of plaid cloth showing through long rents in the burlap of the prairie. Beside one of these tears, which is the South Fork Valley, and up on its western terrace high enough to give a view down on the vale road and the cropped grids, sits a low stone building, gray and grim like a barracks. It has eight rooms, ten doors, five chimneys, and is built like a double-footed L on its side, , and between the two longer end rooms is a roofed porch, and in front of it, a covered well. The stone blocks are, in fact, concrete cast to look like hewn rock. The place sits above old 13 just north of Matfield and a hundred feet east of the railway cut. Built without plumbing or insulation by the Santa Fe in the twenties, the building is the last of its kind in the area. I’ve heard it called the Mexican bunkhouse, laborers’ quarters, trackmen’s houses, section hands’ dormitory, company housing. No one has lived here in some years, but once five Hispanic families did, and now the ceilings are shucking off their plaster down to their thin lath ribs, dropping pieces onto a miscellany of piled junk; window lights are missing, doors tied shut with twists of wire, and dirt lies so caked to the floor that the cold wind stirs no grit as it haunts through and gives the place an occasional voice—a slapped gutter, a shaken door, a rattled pane. Once there were ten clusters of trackmen’s houses scattered somewhat regularly along the line, and from them every day, regardless of weather, men went out to tend the track, even on Sunday when a walker followed the right rail halfway to the next section quarters and returned on the left, all the way hammering down loose spikes, tightening bolts.

  Fidel Ybarra never lived in these Matfield quarters, and I have found no one still in the county who did, but he spent thirty-one years in the even cruder company houses at Gladstone, ones the inhabitants called las casitas and the Anglos Mexican shanties; sometimes still, even Fidel calls them that, but he pronounces it chanties as if they were pieces of some old folksong from the sea. Now he lives in Cottonwood on the corner of Pearl and State streets, two blocks west of the courthouse, in a white bungalow, the first place he’s ever had plumbing. It is late October, and in his small yard the long pods of the catalpa swing like pendulums in the slow wind, and the wahoo tree is about r
eady to split open its four-cornered berry capsules, and on the cramped front porch Fidel has stacked curious stones he has found along the Santa Fe tracks, and in the little bay window the morning sun warms the cockatiel into some whistlings and cage tapping. We sit at the dining table with its damask-patterned plastic cover.

  Fidel is a compact man but not stout, his face nicely rounded, and he has a small, meticulously cut trapezoid of a mustache that resembles a silhouette of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, a place he has never seen although he was born a few miles south of it. His right eye is glass and seems fixed in a way that makes him appear to look through and beyond you, but it is the left that you must follow to read his meaning, his passions. He is sixty-three, and he and his wife, Teresa, an attractive woman whom he calls the Missus, have seven children, all living out of the county; they are clerks and businesspeople who have only the rudiments of the Spanish language. He is eleven months retired from forty-four years as a Santa Fe section hand, two decades of which he worked alongside his father, Nasario. Fidel ended as he began at eighteen, a trackman, and it’s the only real job he’s ever known. In 1927 when Fidel was a year old, his father brought him and his mother from Mexico City to Laredo, Texas, where they waited until Nasario saved up forty-six dollars for passports; then they caught a ride to Plymouth, Kansas, just across the Chase line. After fourteen months there, Nasario got drawn into some kind of scuffle and began going by Fidel Almanza, his father’s first name and his mother’s last; to get beyond the trouble, he moved the family to Glad stone, to the “little houses,” and that’s where Fidel grew up. He liked to watch the old locomotives blow off steam, but, since it was impossible for a Hispanic, he never wanted to become an engineer. In 1948, he brought his bride, born in the Mexican barrio of Emporia, to Gladstone, and eleven years later he became an American citizen.

  Fidel and I are talking about those times, and his answers are ever so lightly gilded with Mexican rhythms and tones. He says, Those houses at Gladstone were made of one-by-twelves, and the gaps between the boards were covered with thin wood strips. Tarpaper over the roof. No insulation except my mother’s wallpaper. We had two rooms, about fourteen by twenty—that was the whole house. After the kids come along there was twelve of us in there. No electricity, no running water. There was six other chanties, some just one room, and all we had was one outhouse with two doors, a men’s and women’s, and just one seat in them: thirty people and two seats. We had a pump for water. But Santa Fe didn’t charge us nothing to live there, and in the winter the company sent in a car of old track ties and pieces of depots and boxcars, and we’d unload it and chop the wood up for our stove, but the place was still cold. Teresa calls in from the next room, Oh yeahhh. If we went to Emporia to visit overnight, when we came home everything was frozen.

  Fidel smiles at that and says, Then in the summer, when the reefer cars come through and throwed off the old ice on the siding, we broke it up and put it in our icebox. And one day thirty-six reefers of potatoes derailed at Gladstone.

  I ask did he like living in those little houses, and he says, I didn’t mind. A lot of farmers around us didn’t have no plumbing neither, and I say, but they had more than two rooms, and he answers, When my kids complain, I tell them, “You should’ve lived when I lived back then.” After the war we still just had kerosene lanterns, so I went to a company boss and told him if the houses were fit to live in they were fit to have electricity, and after a while we got it. And in 1950 I went and asked for propane stoves, and later we got them too. If I’d thought about it, I should’ve got Santa Fe to put an electric pump in the well. And Teresa calls, Look around and you won’t find any fireplace in this house—I’m not going through that again—the dirt, and Fidel says, No more busting up wood.

  I ask just where in Gladstone the houses were, and Fidel takes the back side of a ten-million-dollar sweepstakes entry blank and draws a map, but the page is too small, so he goes to the kitchen and returns with two sheets of typing paper precisely taped end to end like a scroll. He lays a yardstick on it and draws twin parallel lines across the top that are train tracks and then freehands in curving parallels that are the diverging routes, and he begins talking as he draws in sidings, bridges, the control tower once at Elinor junction, cattle pens, the Strong City hotels (one an old Fred Harvey House), the section hands’ houses there (putting roofs on each one). He labels every item and gives measurements and distances, even the mileposts around Gladstone and Matfield, and he lists the trackman’s tools and defines them:

  Spike maul—to drive spikes

  Claw bar—to pull spikes

  Lining Bar—to use to raise track also to line track and other various uses

  and so on through wrenches and hammers and jacks, and he writes how rail sizes in his years went from eighty-five pounds per three feet to 140 pounds. The houses at Gladstone he labels with arrows pointing to each one:

  Dad lived here

  I lived in Middle one

  We didn’t have no Electricity till 1945

  Went to Miller School there Grade 1–8

  As he limns in Gladstone, he X’s the house where a younger brother, during some horseplay, threw a toy hatchet into his right eye. Each time he tells of an incident about a chanty, he touches his pen to the building and leaves a mark, and soon they are full of inky points like little residents.

  He draws and loses himself in the map, and he forgets to speak, sometimes only nodding an answer, sometimes writing it as part of the drawing:

  I went to work for A.T.S.F. in 1944–1988

  Section Hand—Tamp Track

  I watch his large hands, hands for a spike maul, labor their history onto the map, and I ask whether he has driven a spike in every mile of track in the county, and he pauses and calculates and says, Way more than that, and he pens in the laborers’ quarters at Matfield, and says, I could take you out and show you just about every place I drove a spike, and the idea is that it was a hard task, the kind of work you remember. He says a mile of track has 3,200 ties (we figure 300,000 in the county) and that he’s done something to every one including replacing many of them.

  I watch his map fill in. Artless and accurate but for its scale, it is a portrait of sixty years spent along the skinny rail corridors of the county, but it is a trackman’s picture: bridges without rivers, curves without trees, villages only sidings with labels like trackside signs, and Chase without hills, a level place of inclines you can’t perceive. And he draws on and turns it into a picture, chart, chronicle, handbook. The clock has struck off the hour again, and he keeps drawing. Then he seems to begin to rise out of his cartograph slowly, and he speaks more and nods less, and something between us, a caution, has disappeared, the way it will between people who travel some distance together.

  Teresa passes by, looks at the map, and lays a finger on the middle house at Gladstone where she lived next to Fidel’s parents, and she says, It was okay there, but it was lonely, and there was no privacy, and she is not self-contradictory. She says, The tracks were so close that the engines shook the house, and cinders blew in, and sometimes pieces broke off trains and crashed by the houses: Fidel’s little brother got hit by a loose wheel cover. Then she leans close to the drawing, and she too seems to enter it, and she says as if from some distance off, In summer, I pumped water into a tub and let it sit in the sun all day, and when the sun went down and the water was warm, then I started washing clothes. Fidel says, The only running water we ever had was the flood in ’51, and Teresa draws out a long Ohhh. It came up so fast, and all the men were gone except a neighbor, a colored man. He was on vacation. He came up to help, and I passed him my baby out the window, and he held him above the water and took him to higher ground, and when we all got out, I saw how scared the man was, and I thought, “Oh God, I gave him my baby.”

  Fidel says, At first the company wouldn’t let us have gardens, I don’t know why—nobody asked in those days—but later it was okay, and we grew green beans, tomatoes, corn
, sweet peppers, hot peppers. And if a hobo come down the tracks, my father gave him tortillas and beans.

  I ask, were you poor? We knew we were Mexican but we didn’t call ourselves poor because we had jobs.

  I say, you knew you were Mexicans? In Cottonwood or Emporia, Topeka too, we couldn’t get served in restaurants, but at some places you could take food out or go around to the back to the kitchen. We couldn’t get no haircuts neither. Then one day when I was in high school in Cottonwood, I guess in 1941, I was walking down the street past the old bank, and the barber come out of the basement where his shop was, Jim Venard was his name, and he starts talking to me, and he says, “Who gives you your haircuts young man!” and I said, “My dad—nobody here will cut it,” and he says, “You come to me. I’ll cut it. Bring anybody else.” That was a breakthrough. During the war things changed, especially afterwards: guys figured if they were good enough to fight for the country, they were good enough to eat in a café instead of in the alley. But we never had it as bad as the colored people. Whites let us in earlier. I ask him about the war. I couldn’t enlist because of my blind eye, so I worked on the track then: seven days a week, ten hours a day, sixty cents an hour.

  Several times he uses the word breakthrough, and his idea, unarticulated, is that whatever changes have occurred came about one person at a time—a barber giving a haircut, a café owner offering a table, a foreman asking for electricity, all of them bucking the wind on their own and not waiting for jurists to catch up with justice. Fidel says, Things were like that, and we went along with them, but it was hard on us. I ask how life is now besides having insulation and a toilet, and he says, Some older white people remember the way things were, but they keep hush, but I remind them. I tell them, “It isn’t like the old days when you had power over us—now it’s going to be the other way around. In time, the Caucasian race will be the one dominated.” I tell my kids, “We had to take it back then, but you got the Discrimination Board in Topeka.”