A man learning how to fight is like a country getting ready for war because if you prepare to do something, you generally end up doing it. What usually holds people back after they prepare is a lack of courage. Their idea might be wrong, but if they go far enough to get prepared, fear of what could happen is the only thing that will hold them back.
I developed what they thought was arthritis in my right arm, but turned out to be “miner’s elbow.” That’s a little bone breaking and getting stuck the wrong way from the hammer twisting every time you use it. Hit a ball peen hammer on an anvil some time. It will twist and turn your palm up, and if you hit it a million times, it eventually breaks that bone in your elbow and makes it hurt too bad to Indian wrestle.
I sold the shop last March because I was partners with Havis for three years and got to where it was all I could do to keep from cold cocking him. He stayed busy on little jobs, and I always had the hard ones. I also liked to keep a bottle and take a few drinks during the day. He got religion the year he came to Victory from Terkel, and he decided he didn’t like me to do that. I asked him to come in with me because he was a good blacksmith. He even reminded me of Papa some in his overall manner. But we rubbed each other the wrong way. I offered to sell, and he finally scraped up the money and bought me out.
I thought about a lot of things: going back to the oilfield, working around Victory County on a portable rig or running a filling station. I talked to some people about the portable rig idea, and I heard Havis was telling it around that I was a drunkard and at fault for breaking up the partnership. That was aggravating. Then I realized some of the farmers sided with him. They believed him because he was the one popping off and he went to the same church. All of a sudden, he’s the good guy.
Adrianne has always told me I am unpredictable. I never thought so until I started looking back on this. We had three or four thousand dollars in the bank, and the house was almost paid for. Adrianne was making four or five hundred a month at the bank. I had a little time to think. For several reasons, I got to thinking about farm labor. It was probably because the braceros were in the news with that twenty-year program expiring. You might not have heard of the braceros, which means “manual laborers” in Spanish. You should if you lived in Texas or Arizona. They were Mexicans allowed into the United States during the summer and fall. Some aspects of it were controversial, but I say it was good because the farmers could depend on getting the labor they needed and the braceros got a guaranteed wage and decent living conditions. They have neither as wetbacks, which is what they’re called because some swim the Rio Grande to get into the States.
I wondered if the Negroes, Mexicans and whites in my area could be organized to work on farms. They’d make a little better money, and the farmers would have a labor pool. The trouble was that it would be a labor union, but I wasn’t very concerned if anybody liked it. I thought about it for two or three weeks and found myself planning it. I thought it would be one of those rare things that’s good for everybody. I knew I would enjoy it more than welding. It would be a big, tough operation and just right for me because nobody else could do it.
I figured on enlisting a black man, somebody all the farmhands knew and respected, and a Mexican-American of the same stripe to help me. We could set up whatever sub-groups we needed, but I thought three would be plenty to run things. The first one I went to, of course, was Luther. He lived five or six miles out of town toward Crosstie in an old ramshackle house on a sandy hill. Some of his kids were playing in the yard, and I knew he was home because his gray pickup was there. It was late afternoon and getting dark. I thought of the time I saw him put the unpadded butt of a double barrel twelve gauge shotgun to his chin and pull both triggers. I have always had a good chin, but I’m not sure it’s that good.
I knocked and yelled, “Luther, come on out! It’s the sheriff!”
“Come on, Sheriff Preacher,” he called from inside. Then he laughed high and long like he always did when something was funny. He was on the couch in his bare feet and khakis.
I said, “Luther, I got an idea I want to talk to you about.”
He looked at me in that flat way of his and said, “What?”
“Have you ever thought about getting together with some of these other colored men who work on farms and asking for more than the seventy-five cents or dollar an hour they give you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I want to help you do it. Have you ever thought about it?”
“Every time I run beer and whiskey and dodge the laws to get enough money to feed my kids and my old lady. We could still be slaves because we’re still slaving and starving if we don’t do something on the side. What I want to know is how.”
“Well, I want you to help me with the black men, and I want somebody to help with the Mexicans.”
“That won’t be me,” he said, laughing.
“Who?”
“Could be a big boy in Terkel named Chucho. I heard some of them were going to kill me, but Chucho told them not to because the sheriff would know who did it.”
“I might try him if you go in with me.”
“Sure you know what you’re getting into?”
“Maybe.”
“You won’t have some of the friends you thought you had. They’ll turn their back on you. They won’t like us not asking real nice for what we want.”
“I guess not, Luther. But I’ve got a reputation like a gunfighter. If somebody thinks he’s tough, he looks me up.”
“I know that. The reason we get along is because we’re the same way. But they could kill me, and nobody might not even care. Most black folk and Mexicans don’t bother me because they know I’ll take it as far as they want to push it. It’s different with white folk. What do you think would happen to me if I killed a white man?”
“I’ll be honest with you. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Think about it some more and if you still want me to help you, I will. If we go ahead, you go to promise me. If some of these white folk come after me, you got to try to get them off.”
“I’ll fight for you like blood kin.”
I told Adrianne what I was doing, and she asked how I was going to get any money out of it. I told her the members would pay dues, and I’d take a salary from that. I said it would begin to pay in a couple of months.
“How do you know it’ll pay then?” she asked.
“If it doesn’t pay, I’ll start working off a portable rig.”
“I don’t care how you earn a living, Preacher. I just wanted to see if you thought it through.”
“I have,” I said, but I was going more on instinct than logic.
The next day before dark, I drove to Terkel to see Chucho Hernandez. I had met him a couple of times. He was the straw boss at a butane company. They called him Big Chucho because he was over six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. I found out where his house was from the phone book, a white frame house on the east side, the mostly Mexican part of town. There were two or three cars in front and several boys and men around them. I parked on the other side of the street, walked across and said, “Where’s Big Chucho?”
“What do you want him for?” one asked me.
“I want to talk, make a business proposition.”
“What’s your name?”
“Preacher Byrd. I’m a blacksmith-welder at Victory.”
“I’m Chucho,” another one said. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to start a union for farmworkers.”
“So would a lot of people. What makes you think you can?”
“Because I can whip any man who tries to stop me.”
“Can you whip me?”
“I might, but I don’t figure you’ll try to stop me,” I said. “I have in mind for you to help.”
“Why should I help?”
“To get wages up and get the Mexican people treated better.”
“Cesar Chavez can’t do that in Arizona or California. I d
on’t see how we can in West Texas.”
“They don’t have the labor shortage we do. Something else out there is opposition from other unions.”
“Maybe so, but why ask me?”
“For the same reason I asked Luther Moore, a colored man over at Victory. You’re a leader, and I’m not so sure I could whip you. I know I’d hate to have that chore.”
“I know who Luther Moore is,” Hernandez said. “He killed somebody.”
“He knows who you are. As a matter of fact, he suggested you.”
“I won’t give you an answer tonight, Mr. Byrd,” he said. “Ask me again in a day or two.”
“You or Luther neither one would have to quit your jobs, but there should be enough dues money to pay us something,” I said. “You could work nights and weekends. I need to go full-time, I think.”
“How did you get a name like Preacher?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody thought I should be one.”
“Preachers have to believe in a cause. Maybe that’s you.” He and the others chuckled.
“Maybe that’s both of us.” But I didn’t believe in it as a cause. I doubt if anybody much believes in causes. You do what you do because of what you are.
I spent the next three days thinking about what I was getting into. I needed to tell Luther if I wanted to go ahead. The more I thought about it, the more complicated it got. I thought we could avoid a lot of that anti-union stuff by keeping it low key, not arguing or making threats, just organizing and telling people they could have guaranteed labor and good work for a little more money. I planned on asking a dollar and a half for average workers and two for men with ten or fifteen years’ experience. We could move it up later.
I decided to talk to a farmer friend, a lanky fellow named Baldie Roston. When I was a kid, I went to watch the men play one Sunday, and Baldie had the bases loaded when he came up. He caught one and knocked it way over the center fielder’s head. He was slow-footed. He usually had to hit it a long way just to get on base. But he walked around that day. They had no fence to stop the ball, and it must have rolled the length of two football fields across a hard-packed gin yard. Baldie and I were drinking buddies off and on. I found him plowing above his house, stopped my pickup and walked across the rows. He shut the tractor down and got off.
“What’s going on, Preacher?” he asked.
“I came to see what you think about a little project I got going.”
“Well, what is it?” He was smiling because he probably thought I had something cooked up that was typically me.
“This may sound unusual, but I think it would help everybody.”
“Unh hunh?”
“I’m thinking about getting all the farm laborers together so the farmers and everybody can get help when they need it.”
“We could use that. What else?”
“I have to promise a little more money.”
“You’re talking about a labor union.”
“You can put a bad name on anything,” I said.
“That’s the name everybody will use.”
“They can us whatever they like. What do you think?”
“The only reason these hands are halfway decent now is because they don’t have anything to hold over us,” said Baldie. “If they had a union, we’d get nothing but trouble, like strikes.”
“Well, if a man wouldn’t work, he’d be kicked out.”
“You might not always control it. Somebody could take it away from you.”
“You really think so?”
“You might get sick. You can’t tell what would happen.”
“Aw, nothing will happen,” I said, “except everybody will be better off.”
“We’re still friends, but I won’t be on your side.” He grinned and said, “This ain’t a joke, is it?”
“Afraid not.”
I shot the bull with him for a minute and left. He waved from the tractor when I reached the pickup. He only said what he thought, and you can’t blame a man for that.
I drove by Lake Rust, which got its name because it was cut out of a caliche pit in the 1930s when they were building a road. Rusty brown, it was about a half-mile across. I was fishing there with some guys by a camp fire one night and watched an old boy win a case of beer by dog-paddling across it drunk. I expected him to drown, but he came up laughing on the other side. It was too deep to stop swimming in except close to the banks because the caliche was good and it was dug out deep. It wasn’t anything to see, but I liked to drive around it sometimes.
There was a stray dog in Victory in the late Thirties that some boys taught to catch a baseball. That dog could really catch. You could throw it hard or easy, high or low, right or left, and he caught it. Boys played with him every day. He caught the ball, ran it in and ran back out for more. He could even catch a high fly and probably could have played center field for the Yankees as a defensive specialist. The games ended up not so funny. Some guy that could throw real hard would start throwing fastballs, and the hound jumped and caught them in his teeth if they were a hundred miles an hour. All of his teeth were eventually knocked out. He got to where he couldn’t catch the ball, and nobody played with him anymore. I don’t know what happened to him. Some big dog probably jumped on him and chewed him to death.
I drove around the lake for a while, went back to Victory through Terkel and decided to see a friend named Billy Rahoon, who lived in a trailer house seven or eight blocks down the street from us. Billy was a painter, and there was a bunch of five-gallon paint cans in the yard, if you could call it that. He always drove an old Dodge or something with the back seat out for his equipment. He was there; I could see when I drove up, from the light off his TV through the curtain. Billy was a mean-looking character, mean enough to brain a fellow who was drinking wine with him, a guy twenty years younger than him named Jack Belker. He hit Jack with a ball peen hammer and put him in the hospital. Billy was sixty-something years old and wiry with little black eyes, a thin, bony face and a nose clobbered long ago. But he could screw that face around enough to sort of smile whenever I came to see him.
“What’s with you, Preacher?” he said through the screen.
“I came to rob you, you old fart, but I can’t see anything worth having.”
“You got here too late,” he said.
I came in and asked, “You been doing any jobs?”
“A few. I’m doing a house on John McKnight’s place for a bunch of wetbacks he has coming in. What have you been up to?”
“Thinking about that subject, as a matter of fact. Now that they’re illegal again, there’s going to be a labor shortage.”
“Do you think we should go to choppin’ cotton?”
“I’m going to organize all the farmhands and get their wages up so the farmers will have enough labor.”
“That oughta be fun. You got anything to drink?”
I had a fifth of whiskey I had been sipping on, and we sat there and finished it. We didn’t discuss my big plans any more. We just drank and shot the breeze. It was only nine o’clock or so when we ran out, so we voted to go see a bootlegger Billy knew. The bootlegger was a guy named Jerry Joe Dale who lived outside Terkel on a little farm. He must have been a renter and needed extra money. I knew him. I just got mine around Victory.
We started back on the main highway but decided we would cut off and take the dirt roads because Billy had been picked up for drunk driving the year before. He went to cross the railroad tracks about three miles out of Terkel, understeered and the car went off the crossing and straddled the tracks. He goosed it back and forth, but it wouldn’t budge. I got out and tried to scoot the rear end over. I was thinking we could jack it up and push it over, but I looked north and saw that bright, clear light burning like a star.
“Billy, we got to git,” I yelled. “Train’s coming.”
“I’m gonna lose my car,” he said.
“You’ll lose your ass if you don’t move.”
We ran into the
field and laid down in some young alfalfa. The train was farther off than it looked, so it took longer than I expected. The engineer blew the horn and tried to slow down, but pulling eighty or a hundred cars, he would have needed a mile or more to stop. It was going over sixty miles an hour and just exploded the car. We saw it clearly in the train lights. Glass and dust blew up in a cloud, and the train mashed the car down and in and scooted it along with the metal screeching and sparks popping up and out like tracer bullets. It was the worst noise I had heard since the artillery barrages during the war. The train ground to a halt about three hundred yards from the crossing. The car was wrapped around the front but still right side up. We could only see about a quarter of it, and what we saw was crumpled, white metal not recognizable as a car.
“See, Billy,” I said, “I knew we’d get that car moved some way.”
“They’ll check the license plate and know it’s mine,” he said. “Might as well go up and plead idiocy.”
“Let’s wait and see what happens.”
The highway patrol and sheriff got there in a short time and started up and down both sides of the track with lights, looking for bodies. More cars and a pickup or two, the railroad people, helped look for victims.
“They’ll start looking for live bodies next, Billy,” I said. “Think I’ll go for a hike.”
“Go on, Preacher,” he said. “I’m too old to walk that far, also too drunk.”
“They’ll find you. You might go to jail.”
“I’ll give them a story about a bum I didn’t know doing the driving and runnin’ off. I’ll do okay. They’re going to find me anyway.”
“Hit them up for a new car. That’ll throw them off balance.”
I looked back from a half-mile away and saw them shining lights in the field. I didn’t want anybody to shoot me for a prowler, so I went through the fields most of the way home, eight or ten miles. I used the roads a little but kept having to detour because of farmers in pickups or kids out shooting rabbits or loving it up. It was the only time I walked and didn’t want a ride. A field dog went for me a couple of miles from Victory, and I hit him with a rock I had picked up in case any dog’s bothered me. I reached the house about two in the morning, came in the bedroom door, shucked my coveralls and got in bed. I had dirt and grass burrs on me even with my coveralls off.
The Byrds of Victory Page 7