“That’s probably right, wait till Monday for the word to get around,” I said. “Everybody in the country will know by then.”
On Saturday, though, I still hadn’t decided how to go at the employers of all these men. The obvious way was to get them to pick somebody for me to deal with. The disadvantage I saw there was that some farmers would be more cooperative if I approached them individually. I thought of putting an announcement in the Victory County Sun from Terkel but concluded that would only make them more resistant. I came to the conclusion that the best way was to go to them personally, at least the big ones, and state my case. Early Monday, after laying up Sunday to rest, I took off to see a big farmer I had known for years named Jal MacDougal. He was in his big yard full of equipment a mile from his brick house. I considered him not to be a bad guy. He got a city secretary fired one time when he was mayor because he spoke to her at church and she didn’t speak back. But that was the only thing out of line that I ever knew of him doing. He squeaked when he walked and didn’t pay his hands any more than he had to. When they put a quart of oil in a pickup or tractor, he made them hold the can till it quit dripping. I went to Jal first because we knew each other and got along as well as I got along with anybody I didn’t socialize with.
He was working on a cultivator on some sawhorses, and when he saw me coming he called out, “Hey, Preacher, I’ve been wanting to see you.”
I stepped out of the pickup, and he met me halfway and said, “I notice you’ve gone out of the welding business.”
“I got a little project going,” I said.
“I heard about it. Why don’t you let me in on it?”
“That’s what I came to see you about.” We sat on the sawhorses. “I want to find out what you think.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t mad or glad.
“There could be a labor shortage with the end of the bracero program. We could use an organization of farmhands for a dependable source of labor.”
“It’s a union,” he said. “What’re you calling it?”
“The Panhandle Farm Labor Group.”
“Are you asking for more money?”
“We have to keep enough hands. It’ll be better for everybody in the long run. Otherwise, the kids of the hands we have now will come up, finish high school and leave.”
“How much?”
“A dollar-fifty for hands with less than ten years in and two for the good ones with more,” I said.
“That’s not too bad for those who only work one hand, five hundred a year. With three or four, it would get expensive.”
“You can take it off your income tax.”
“I have all the deductions I need.” He stopped for a second, looked down, then up, smiled and said, “But I don’t know. If we have to have one, I’d rather have you doing it than most. Whatever possessed you?”
“I got tired of the shop and wanted something to do. It just occurred to me because of the braceros. I think it would be a service.”
“I guess it could be if it was run right and we don’t have strikes. You might not always be the head of it.”
“Who else could be?”
“Luther or that Mexican fellow could take it away from you,” he said. “Luther wouldn’t because you’re friends, but that Terkel fellow might. What happens then?”
“He might try, but he wouldn’t have enough hands. I think Luther brought me a solid bunch.”
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“Would you pay a dollar and half or two dollars?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“A man with your kind of money always has a choice.”
“I may be criticized, but I guess I would. Probably wouldn’t if it was anybody but you. We’ll pay more all along anyhow because of the government.”
“I won’t screw my friends, Jal,” I said. “Anybody who belongs will work and work right or they won’t stay. And it would fall apart without me. There’s nobody else that could get along with everybody involved.”
“I guess not.”
We shook hands, and when I started the pickup to leave, he said, “Good to see you, Preacher.”
MacDougal not actively opposing us helped some. Farmers are independent, and a bunch didn’t like the idea. But only a few said they wouldn’t go along at all. The reason was probably that a dollar and a half was not much of an increase, and some of the older hands were already getting that much. Knowing they would have somewhere they could get an extra hand made a difference, it seemed. The last thing and maybe the most important thing was that I was known to all of them and had a reputation for good work and a few other things. They knew I could finish what I started, and I told them all there would be no poor work or bad behavior from any of my people.
Two months after the meeting, we had all the men who signed up working at the new wages. We rented a vacant building on Main Street in Victory that had been a pool hall two or three times. A dime or two bits a game was always too slow for anybody to keep it going, so it had been empty for two years. Both front windows were painted a dark green. Part of one was broken out. We didn’t bother to replace it. We weren’t going to keep anything important there, just a desk and phone and a bunch of folding chairs. I didn’t put up a sign outside, same as the shop. Never had one there because everyone who might do business with me knew where I was or would find out without a sign. A Cola-Cola man came by once and said he would put one up for nothing if he could put in a Coke machine. I told him I didn’t want the Coke machine or the sign. I didn’t want to mess with a Coke machine.
What I said a minute ago about not getting a lot of opposition was not entirely accurate. The truth is that there were half a dozen farmers and a few people who didn’t own a farm or business, oddly enough, who hated the idea. One worked as a janitor at the hospital, and another was a white farmhand who lived with his wife and kids on a farm owned by an old man. Different friends of mine came by the pool hall and told me about them. A guy I had known for years who worked at a fertilizer company outside Crosstie stopped by in his truck just as it was getting hot in the early part of June. We talked for a while about one thing and another, and he took off his baseball cap, showing where he had gotten bald and the sun tanned him up to the white skin at the cap line, and told me, “Preach, I know you’re bullheaded, but you might ought to watch your backside till everybody gets used to this new job you got.”
“Why is that?” I asked him.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe no reason. A few people are unhappy.”
“Who?”
“I don’t need to tell you, Preacher. I bet you know.”
“Have you heard anybody say anything?”
“I don’t go around packing tales, but I don’t suspect they would have said it if they minded me repeating it,” he said. They know I don’t have no part in it.”
“What did they say?” I knew it was a couple of brothers who farmed north of town by the sandhills. They were always hard to get along with because their land was no good.
“We got to talking, and the subject of you and all the farmhands came up. I asked what they told you about it, and one of them said, ‘Not a damn thing. If that fat Preacher Byrd comes out here, I’ll have a shotgun waiting for him.’”
“If it’s who I think it is, I would have been to see them, but they do all their own work. Some of the others against us are the same way. They just use wetbacks or their own boys or a combination.”
“It shouldn’t amount to a hill of beans,” he said. “But you keep your eye on these old boys. They might be crazy as you and me.”
“I’m in bad shape if that’s true,” I said, and we laughed.
It wasn’t easy to fathom who all my enemies were, although some of those I talked to made it clear. One farmer took the trouble to have two wetbacks brought by plane from the Rio Grande Valley rather than use my men. One advantage with wetbacks is you can pay them half what you would a regular hand. Something I considered was that some of the one
s who went along might be worse enemies than those who hadn’t. A man who thinks he lost can be more dangerous than one who feels like he fought and kept his pride. I didn’t know of any who went along that really resented it. I certainly didn’t rub anybody’s face in it. Anyway, I tried not to. It was hard to sit there in that dusty pool hall and get an overall idea of what was going on. I’m not even sure I know all of it now.
A problem we didn’t have was the men. A lot used to tear up equipment on purpose because they didn’t like their jobs or they just wanted to get a Coke in town while I fixed it. There was not much of that after we started the union. Only two men, one black and one Mexican, had to be kicked out. They were both from Terkel and had no farm experience. They only wanted the wages, and they started telling this farmer outside Terkel how they would work any way they wanted to, that he better be happy with it or get in trouble. The farmer called me and was really upset, and Chucho and Luther and I went out there that afternoon. They were all sitting on the front porch. The farmer, an old man in his sixties, walked out as we came into the yard. “What’s the score?” I asked.
“These men say they’re working for you and not me,” he said. “They don’t know how to work.”
“What do you say?” I asked the men. The black man looked at the farmer and then us. He was about forty years old and looked like an ex-convict. “Where are you from?” I asked him.
“Philadelphia; where you from?”
“Here.” I remembered him. He said he could do farm work, so we signed him up and sent him out.
“Where are you from?” I asked the other one, a kid about twenty.
“Terkel,” he said. “Chucho’s my cousin.”
“You told me you’d work,” Chucho told him. “Did you think you could come out here and not work just because you’re my cousin? Go get in the pickup before I have to beat your ass.”
Luther didn’t say anything, but he had already faced the tough guy down. He had about thirty pounds on him and a hundred pounds more guts. “You don’t owe them anything,” I told the farmer. ‘We’ll have a couple more out here in the morning. Let me know if you have any more trouble.”
“Thanks, Preacher,” he said, shaking my hand and glancing at the two failures sitting in the back of the pickup. We dropped them off by a cafe in Terkel, and I took Chucho by his house and rode to Victory with Luther. We talked about some of the men and how they were doing and discussed the cotton and grain sorghum crops and the effect they might have on us. Then he said softly, “They’re starting in on me.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know. My boy Vernon works for Mr. Doyle, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He was taking down an electric fence by the road, and these two fellows he had never seen before came along and asked for directions, said they was lost. He told them where the highway was. One said, ‘Ain’t Luther Moore your daddy?’ Vernon said, ‘Yes, sir, he is,’ and the other one said, ‘He’s taking on too much. He ought to cut back to just one job.’ Vernon asked him, ‘Which one is that?’ and he said, ‘He ought to forget about Byrd’s union and be a regular farmhand. That kind of job makes an man old before his time.’ So Vernon said, ‘I’ll be sure and tell him that.’ They said, ‘Appreciate the directions,’ and drove off in a little green car. I don’t know if they were telling him to appreciate the directions they gave or what. Vernon came home and told me about it. I told him to forget it.”
“What did they look like?” I asked.
“Vernon said one was in his thirties, maybe forty. The other was maybe fifty. He had white hair and fat cheeks like one of them chipmunks. Vernon said he had little blue eyes like a pig and them pimple scars on his face.”
“How tall and how heavy?”
“He said the youngest was kind of short and stocky. The ugly one was over six feet and not as heavy as me.”
“I haven’t seen them. I wonder where they came from.”
“I expect somebody hired them,” Luther said. “I know most everybody around here. They might be out of Lubbock or Amarillo.”
“Well, load your guns, and I’ll load mine,” I said. “There’s no telling who they could be. They might be just the relatives or friends of somebody.”
We pulled into Luther’s yard and stopped under the trees. “I ain’t scared,” he said. “I done got ready for this a long time ago. They better be moving fast when they come in my yard.”
“I’ll come by every night around nine and see if I see any cars around or anything.”
“That’s probably about the time they’d come, all right,” he said.
“Why don’t you drop out for a while?” I said. “Won’t hurt anything.”
“No, I explained to you how I feel about it. I ain’t going to change.”
“Well, I doubt if anybody around here would go to the trouble of hiring thugs.”
“They may just hire them for one chore at a time,” he said.
“They’d probably go back to where they came from if it wasn’t a joke. They’d be noticed around Victory. A new tree sprout is noticed.”
“I’ll keep a lookout.”
“Remember, I’ll be by at nine every night, but don’t be surprised to see me other times if I take a notion to check on you,” I said.
He got out and looked from side to side, and I saw he was not scared. He was the scary one moving through the dark. I imagined how it would be if anyone did try to take him, and I thought they would come after me instead if they knew him as well as I did. They’d think he was just a black man who wouldn’t stand up to white men, but he had worked this up in his mind till he was ready for anything.
The news threw me. It was not completely unexpected, but I still had trouble figuring it out. I thought it could have been a couple of characters from a town thirty or forty miles away that somebody just put up to it to throw us for a loop. I saw no reason for a warning if it was the real thing unless they knew about us and wanted to avoid a fight. I leaned toward it being a real threat mainly because of the descriptions. They didn’t sound like good old boys. Anybody could have hired them, I realized. They would cost something, but thugs are cheap or they wouldn’t be thugs. Even after all I had been through in my life, I was surprised at the way things were heading. I had expected more like snotty remarks, maybe some harassment of the kids at school or a fistfight or two. I had considered it but didn’t really expect anyone to be brought in from out of the county. There was no point in trying to figure out who hired them. We had to go on like we had been and see what happened. The odd thing was that none of the things I expected happened. With the exception of the farmers and others I mentioned, everyone I came into contact with was as nice as could be.
On the way home, I wondered if they had talked to Hernandez. He might or might not tell me if they did, but I would assume for the time being that they were going to try Luther first. Chucho had been as good as I hoped. But I still didn’t feel like I knew him and didn’t know how much I could trust him. He could try to take over, or he could still be mad at Luther over the baseball fight. I also thought he was not as determined to stick as Luther. I decided to tell him, but not the rest of the men, what Luther had told me.
The next day was what had become a typical day of answering calls from farmers wanting hands, taking personnel forms and dues from two or three new hands, and shooting the bull with people who came by. Except for the pressure, it was the easiest job I ever had. I saw how easy white collar people have it in comparison to those who work with their backs and hands. There is no comparison, which might seem strange for me to say with what all I’m telling you about. But your mind does wander all the time no matter what you’re doing. I found myself thinking about all kinds of things when we were pinned down on the islands, and my mind went over a lot of unrelated things while I was working that day in the pool hall. One was old Windsor. I remembered what a good dog he was and wished I had him back.
Adrianne could have helped, b
ut I knew it was getting serious and didn’t want to upset her. They didn’t particularly like my new project at the bank she worked in anyway. I saw no point in making it worse for her when I was going to have to go through with it regardless. Besides, people in this part of the country think they have to do things by themselves as much as they can, and I’m the same as everyone else that way. It would have seemed weak if I had gotten Adrianne to console me.
That night, Chucho and Luther came to the house after supper to talk, which we had been doing a couple of times a week for a month or more. It was early July. We talked about hands and farmers and money like we always did, and then I told Chucho what was going on with Luther. I said we thought it could have been a joke but that we would probably be more careful about being on the road alone at night and so forth.
“I’ve been carrying a pistol,” I said. “You never know.”
“I don’t carry anything,” Chucho said. “I have some guns and other things at my house.”
“Have you seen any guys like that?” I asked.
“No, I haven’t. If I do, I’ll steer clear of them or take care of them, one of the two.”
“They probably won’t bother you,” I said. “Luther doesn’t think they’ll try anything with him, but I’m going to start going by his place every night as a precaution. I’ll go by at eight-thirty so I can see a long ways around before it gets completely dark. Luther can watch out for himself after that, can’t you, Luther?”
Luther looked around at me real slow and said, “I can do that anytime.”
“It sounds like somebody was just trying to throw a scare in us,” Chucho said.
“You never know,” I said. “But I found out a long time ago that the world is tough on a careless man.”
“I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Luther,” Chucho said. “Everybody knows your reputation.”
“That just means you don’t get much of a chance to defend yourself,” said Luther. “They’re scared, so if you’re not ready when they come, you won’t last long. Nobody rings no bell or blows no whistle. They just come.”
The Byrds of Victory Page 9