by Edna Ferber
“Jordan, what are those streams and streams of old broken-down trucks and Fords that go through town with loads of Mexicans? Men and women and boys and girls and even little children. Swarms of them.”
“Workers.”
“Workers at what?”
“Oh, depends on the time of year. Cotton pickers. And vegetables and fruit. In the Valley.”
“Where do they come from?”
“If they’re Mexicans they come from Mexico. Even a bright girl like you can figure that out.”
“And when everything’s picked where do they go?”
“Back to Mexico, most of them. A few sometimes hide out and stay, but they’re usually rooted out and tossed back.”
She tidied this in her orderly mind. Little bits and pieces marched obediently out of her memory’s ranks and fell into proper place. Coyote. Gomez. Fidel Gomez. Coyote. That’s a name the Mexicans call a chiseler a crook. He lives off of them he sneaks them across the border from Mexico to work as pickers…. Time he’s through with them they don’t have nothing left when they get through working in the Valley crops…. And he rounds up the Mexican voters and does a lots of dirty jobs….
“Where do they live while they’re here, with all those children and everything? What are they paid?”
“Leslie, for God’s sake!”
“I just want to know, darling. This is all an everyday bore to you but I’m brand new, everything’s different and strange to me. I can’t help it. I am that way.”
“I don’t know. Very little. Couple of dollars. Whatever they’re paid it’s more than they’d get home in Mexico starving to death.”
“Where do they live?”
“Camps. And don’t you go near, they’re a mass of dysentery and t.b. and every damn thing. You stay away. Hear me!”
“But if you know that why don’t you stop it! Why don’t you make them change it!”
“I’m no vegetable farmer, I’m no cotton grower. I’m a cowman. Remember?”
“What’s that got to do with it! You’re a Texan. You’ve been a great big rich powerful Texan for a hundred years. You’re the one to fix it.”
He shook his head. “No, thank you very much.”
“Then I will.”
“Leslie.” His face was ominous, his eyes stared at her cold with actual dislike. “If you ever go near one of those dumps—if I ever hear of your mixing into this migratory mess——”
“What’ll you do?”
“I swear to God I’ll leave you.”
“You can’t leave Reata. And to get me out you’d have to tie me up and put me in a trunk or something. And I wouldn’t stay put. I’d come back. I’ll never leave you. I love you. Even when you glare at me like Simon Legree.”
“And you’d look like Carrie Nation, barging around stuff that’s none of your business. Fixing the world. We’ll be the laughingstock of Texas if this keeps on. I’ve heard that women in your condition sometimes go kind of haywire but I never thought my wife would be one of them.”
He clumped out of the room, she heard the high-heeled boots clattering down the hall, the slam of the door, horse’s hoofs on sun-baked earth.
He’s gone. Where? Not far. Gill Dace. The Dietzes’. Old Polo. Anyone who is part of his kingdom. If Luz were alive he’d be rushing to her, his mother-sister. And she’d tell him he’s right, he’s always right. Should I do that? You’re a wife your uh individuality should be submerged in the I don’t believe it I can’t I must be myself or I am nothing and better dead. Now sit quietly here in the chair and think. What started this squabble that is one of a hundred we’re always having and then we make up in bed. Then in a day or two or three we are bickering again. Bick bickering now pull yourself together don’t be cute. What started this one? You wanted to know about those thousands of Mexicans piled into trucks like cattle where do they live while they are picking what do they earn but you must not know this is a state secret so many things are state secrets all the things I am interested in perhaps I am becoming a worthy bore like those Madam Chairmen Madams Chairman anyway those large ladies in uncompromising hats at Meetings with gavels and pitchers of ice water. Jett Rink. He’s the boy who could whirl me out to one of those camps and tell me all about the pickers. Put that out of your mind. Well then who else because I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to sit home and drink coffee and talktalktalk and play bridge in a Southwest harem the rest of my life Jordan was really furious this time I suppose I really am a kind of nuisance to him my darling Jordan. It is still early morning who will drive with me? Vashti? No. The new schoolteacher that Miss Minty, no. Besides, she has to teach school don’t be silly. Señor Oñate at the bank, no. I wish Adarene were here instead of way up in Dallas it would be wonderful with Adarene. Dimodeo could drive me or one of the men in the garage or the stables.
“I’ll go alone,” she said aloud. “Why not! Don’t be a sissy. After all, the Valley lies just the other side of Nopal, it won’t take more than two or three hours, the whole thing, I’ll be back in time for lunch.”
In her shining little car in her neat silk dress, exhilarated and slightly short of breath from excitement, she tooled along the wide bright road in the wide bright morning. Through Benedict, familiar now, past the fences and fences and fences that were still Reata, into the grey-white somnolent little town of Nopal. The office of Fidel Gomez. That was the thing. He was the one to take her to a camp. He brought them in in droves. Let him explain what it was what Jordan didn’t want her to see.
In her smart white kid handbag she had her little pocket Spanish-English dictionary. Spanish and English used in the Western Hemisphere, the cover read. Then neatly. Español e inglés (why the small i, she wondered always) del Hemisferio Occidental. Fair enough, she said to herself happily. She was enjoying herself immensely, full of success.
The streets were strangely empty, as before. A woman in a black rebozo came toward her. The street boasted no sidewalk, there was only a dirt path. Leslie stopped her car, she waited, she leaned out and called in her stumbling Spanish, “Oficina Señor Fidel Gomez. Favor de—uh—decirme.”
The woman looked at her she looked away she muttered Yo no comprendo, she walked on. A man then. A small dark man with a resigned suffering face and greying hair in the black. Favor de decirme Oficina Señor Fidel Gomez. The man stopped dead, his eyes swiveled past her, he shrugged, he hurried swiftly on.
Well. What was the matter with everybody! Or what was the matter with her Spanish, more likely, she decided. Perhaps he didn’t have an office. He had been hanging round outside that wineshop or whatever it was, that last time. Maybe that was the place. But Jordan wouldn’t like that, her going there. She would just park outside and blow the horn. Up one dusty little street and down another. Bodega. There, that was it.
At the second blast of the horn, as though this were an accustomed form of summons, a figure leaned far out of the doorway and it was magically Fidel Gomez. Leslie decided not to try a lot of favor de this time.
“Come here, Mr. Gomez.” Three faces appeared in the doorway peering behind Gomez’ shoulder. With a nervous backward glance he came forward, removing his great Stetson passing his jeweled brown hand over his hair, placing the hat again on his head and again removing it as he stood at the door of the car. And as before she noted that his eyes were wide with apprehension.
No nonsense. “I am Mrs. Jordan Benedict. Remember?”
“Señora, can you ask——”
“Yes, well, I was talking to my husband this morning and I told him I wanted to see one of the camps—you know—where the Mexicans work—the pickers I mean. Where they lived. So I drove over. Will you get in and we’ll drive to one. You’ll have to show me the way.”
He shook his head, smiling a little patiently as one would gently chide a child. “No, señora, you would not want to go there.”
“But I do. If you don’t take me I’ll go alone.”
“You cannot do that.”
“Don’t te
ll me what I can or can’t do! Is this the United States or isn’t it!”
“Oh yes, señora,” he assured her earnestly.
“Well, then, get in the car and we’ll go.”
“I will first telephone. I will call your husband.”
Briskly, “He isn’t home. He’s—he’s way out on the range or whatever you call it, somewhere. He left early this morning. Get in the car, Mr. Gomez.”
Fidel Gomez pointed to a large bright scarlet automobile blazing proudly under the ways of the Southwest sun. “My automobile is there.”
“Oh. Well?”
“If you will permit I will drive before you and you will please to follow me. We will stop at my house if you will honor me and my wife. We will drink coffee.”
“No! Really no. I can’t. I don’t drink much coffee——”
Very gravely, “It is ten o’clock. My wife will be honored. She will, of course, come with us.”
She looked at him standing there, so bland so obsequious so immovable so—I never knew how to pronounce it, she thought, but the word is imperturbable. He bowed now, he entered his car and preceded her, a small solemn procession, down the street.
The Gomez house was a neat square white box. Mrs. Fidel Gomez was a neat square dark box. Mrs. Gomez spoke absolutely no English, the Coyote informed Leslie when she tried to assure Mrs. Gomez that coffee was not necessary and that Mrs. Gomez’ presence on this expedition was not necessary.
“My wife is happy to accompany us,” Fidel Gomez assured Leslie. “She is honored. She will come with us. First we will have coffee.”
In Mrs. Gomez’ round olive Latin-American face and in Mrs. Gomez’ round black eyes Leslie detected a faint flash of Anglo-American wifely resentment. She then vanished briefly while Leslie, in a quiet fury, and the Coyote in a pattern of correct Mexican etiquette sat on the edges of their chairs and conversed. A parlor set in a large-patterned combination of plush and flowered stuff. A large bridal photograph, gold-framed. And in a corner the household altar with its gaily colored images and its paper flowers, its candles and incense burners and the cross.
“I am interested in everything that is Texas,” Leslie babbled, feeling foolish. “And Mexican, of course. Whole families in those trucks. Even babies and old men and women. They can’t work, can they? Children of seven or eight, they seemed. And quite old old people?”
“Excuse me,” said the Coyote. “One moment only.”
“It’s no use your telephoning my husband. He’s not there.”
“Excuse me. One moment only.”
When he returned, “What are they paid?” she asked, relentlessly.
Mrs. Gomez appeared, carrying a tray. She had changed from her neat house dress to a tight and formal black. The ritual proceeded. They drank the strong black sweet coffee eying one another over the cup’s edge, crooking their little fingers, fuming and smiling. He is being correct, Leslie realized. He is following an absolutely correct plan of conduct for a coyote toward a Benedict. Click-click cup on saucer, sip-sip coffee on tongue, quack-quack voice on air. He is just trying to take up time for some reason. Jordan. Abruptly she rose. “I am going now. If you wish to come with me, come. But you needn’t. I can find a camp alone.”
At a word from him Mrs. Gomez gathered the cups and in stately silence carried them away. A moment later the three stood facing the two cars by the roadside.
“Would you and Mrs. Gomez like to ride with me? Or…?” She sensed there was some sort of protocol here.
The stiff and unconvincing smile still on his face. “It will be more comfortable for you if my wife and I we drive in my car to show the way. You will follow in your car. In that way——”
Uh-huh, she thought. He is not to be seen driving with the wife of Jordan Benedict. “Lovely,” she said, matching smile for smile. “But I want to see a camp. No nonsense.”
“Mrs. Benedict,” he said. At least he’s dropped the señora stuff, she noted.
Each in the burning-hot front seat of a car. Off. A mile, two three four. There was the Gomez hand flipping a stop signal at the left of the red car. And there was a desolate trampled piece of land by the roadside. And there were the broken camp shacks and the sheds; there were the crazy outhouses. A low-slung crawling dog, lean as a snake. No human thing moved in the camp.
Fidel Gomez came around the back of his car and stood at the door of Leslie’s car as it stopped. He leaned an arm against the sill and smiled. “It is not worth to get out,” he said. “There is no person there.”
“Why not?”
“What is here is working, picking. The season here is near the end.”
She looked at the barren field. No shade from the cruel sun.
“But I saw little children in those trucks and those old broken cars with the mattresses and the pots and pans. And old people.”
“They are picking.”
Sharply she jerked the brake, locked the car, dropped the keys neatly into her handbag. “I’m going to get out and see the place.”
Her challenging eyes met his flat depthless black ones and in that instant she saw two little red points leap at the center of his pupils. Two little red devils, she told herself. How strange. I’ve never seen that before. She stepped out, shook her rumpled skirts, adjusted her hat. “Mrs. Gomez?”
She was almost relieved to notice that he no longer wore the smile. “My wife will sit in the automobile. She will wait.”
She walked down into the roadside ditch and up the other side and into the smothering dust of the bare field. Now she saw that there were ragged small tents beyond the sagging sheds. She walked swiftly toward the nearest shed. She heard his footsteps just behind her. She peered into the splintered shelter. Empty. A mattress or two on the floor; blankets, too, spread there as though the sleepers had risen from them and left them as they were; some sagging collapsible beds. No one. Two or three rusty stoves, open and unlighted, stood incongruously in the open field. Here and there on the ground you saw the ashes of what had been an open fire.
“You see,” came the voice of Fidel Gomez, always just behind her, “there is no one, they are all busily at work in their jobs. A good thing.”
Now she heard a low murmur of talk. Gingerly, and feeling somehow embarrassed, she peered into one of the ragged pup tents. A woman lay on a mattress on the ground. Squatting on her haunches at the side of the mattress was an old woman. The two looked wordlessly, without a sign of resentment, at the chic silken figure that held aside the open tent flap.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Please excuse me,” Leslie murmured idiotically. And stood there, staring. Then, over her shoulder to Gomez, “There’s someone here. Please tell them in Spanish I’m sorry to have—I mean intruding like this——” as if she had blundered, unbidden, into a formal dwelling.
“I speak English,” said the girl on the mattress.
“Oh, how nice!” Leslie said. “Are you ill?”
“I have had a baby,” the girl said.
“How lovely!” Leslie said.
“He is dead,” the girl said.
Leslie took a step forward and let the tent flap fall, so that she stood within and Gomez outside. The heat under the canvas was stifling. “When?”
“Last night.” Then, at the look in Leslie’s eyes: “They took him away this morning, early, before my husband went to work, and the others.”
“Let me help you. Let me—— Where is your home? Are you Mexican?”
“I am American,” the girl said. Now Leslie, accustomed to the half-light of the tent, saw that the pinched and greyish face was that of a girl not more than seventeen. She felt her own face flaming scarlet. There! she said to herself. Take that!
“I have my car here. If you’re able—could I somehow take you home? I’d be glad to help. You and your—mother?”
“My home is Rayo. Near the border. There is no one there. We are all here, working. This”—with a little gesture of formality—“is the mother of my husband.”
“Working,” Leslie repeated dully. She began to feel strange and unreal. Then, to her own horror, “Who?”
“All of us. Tomorrow I will work, or the next day. My husband and my brother and my husband’s brother and my sister and my husband’s mother.”
She had to know. “How much? What do they pay you?” She heard a little stir outside the tent.
The girl did not seem to find the question offensive or even unusual, she answered with the docility of one who never has known privacy. “Together it is six dollars a week.”
“Six!”
“Sometimes seven. Sometimes five.”
“All?”
“Sure all.”
Leslie opened her smart white handbag. Sick with shame at what she was doing. A crumpled little roll of bills there—ten—twenty—she didn’t know. Miserably she stepped forward, she stooped and placed it on the mattress. “Please,” she said in a small wretched voice. “For the baby. I—please don’t mind.”
The girl said nothing. The old woman said nothing. They looked at the money, their faces expressionless. Abruptly Leslie turned and stumbled through the tent flap into the blinding sunshine, she bumped into the man standing so close to the flap but she went on unheeding until a stench that was like a physical blow made her recoil. She opened her eyes. There were the open latrines, fly-covered, an abomination beneath the noonday sun.
The early morning quarrel, the drive, the hot sweet coffee, the shock, the heat, the stench now gathered themselves tightly together like a massive clenched fist to deal Mrs. Jordan Benedict an effective blow to the diaphragm. She was violently sick on the dust-covered scabland.
Delicately Fidel Gomez turned away.
17
No, he had not come in at midday, they told her. But then, he rarely did. White and shaking she put herself to bed. No, no coffee, she said in her halting Spanish to Lupe; and put her hand quickly to her mouth. She lay there in the heat of the day, quivering a little now and then with an inexplicable chill. The sounds of the great house and of the outdoors came to her with curious remoteness as though filtered through a muffled transmitter. The hammering and clinking of tools wielded by the workmen busy with the remodeling of the Main House. Far-off voices from the Mexican quarters. Cars coming, going. As always there were guests here at the Big House, half the time she scarcely knew who they were, or what their purpose there. Hoofbeats. It was one of the sounds she loved. She dozed a little. Words drifted through a mist. I have had a baby. How lovely! He is dead. Leslie turned over on her elbow and began to cry, ceased to cry and fell asleep.