“I think you’ve had too many fights,” Chucho said. “You expect to fight all the time.”
“There’s no reason to blow this out of proportion,” I told them. “We’re not going to do anything different. Luther’ll be ready, but he had enemies before this anyway. I’m sure he was already for them.” I wished I had put that another way. “I’m going by his place every night at eight-thirty, and Chucho’ll be on the lookout for the guys who talked to Luther’s boy. I bet we never see or hear of them again.”
We broke it up about nine o’clock, and they each went out like the other was not even there. I remember thinking that a lot of the time blacks and Mexicans are even more prejudiced against each other than white people are toward them. I suppose it could have something to do with both of them being in more or less the same boat in society, which might make them turn to their own race too much. I sometimes wondered if Luther felt as friendly to me as he acted. I knew there were certain things he didn’t like about his life, especially after he told me his reasons for sticking with me. I know now that he was my friend, but it was not because he thought I was tough as him or anything like that. One thing many white people don’t understand is that the Negro people are basically gentle. I think he considered himself my friend because I was nice to him and treated him like a man.
Nothing happened for a month. We went on like we had been, gaining fifty new members from late-comers and people moving in, and nothing changed except my patrols past Luther’s house. I never saw anything, but I drove by every night with my twenty-two pistol and an old German eight-millimeter Mauser I got after the war from a veteran of the European theatre. I went by at eight-thirty and again at nine. I started wondering if it had been a joke but stayed with it like they drill it in you on guard duty. I was back to being a Marine. Luther was a real concern. I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to him. He had come in with me when he knew it could get rough. I wanted him to have a better living. I certainly didn’t want him hurt.
Those drives were different for me than they might have been for somebody else. I started out expecting to see our friends in the little green car and after a while was not expecting them at all. But I kept it up because I knew there can be complete peace a thousand times in a row and total war the next time. Once I started, I was afraid to stop. Luther’s kids took to waving at me when I passed. I had to tell him to make them stop. Sometimes I almost wanted somebody to show, and other times it seemed too unreal to get excited. Every night, though, I made my runs. It was getting dark after nine, so it became sort of an after-supper drive before bedtime. I never took Adrianne with me because of the nature of it and never told her what I was doing. Sometimes I said I was hunting rabbits and sometimes I said I was looking at the crops or going to see Luther. She must have known something was different. I imagine she expected as much before I started and saw no point in discussing it.
We called the men together and had a meeting at the pool hall. We just wanted to get them together and see that we had a clear overall idea of how it was going. We had three hundred and fifty members by then and put up three hundred chairs. The whole building was full of them. I had to borrow from city hall and the farmers’ co-op to get enough. A lot of men came, but there was nowhere near as many as at the first meeting, which was all right. I assumed they must be satisfied if they stayed home. We had maybe a hundred.
Chucho and Luther stood on either side of me. “We didn’t call a meeting to announce anything or ask for anything,” I said. “The dues will stay five dollars.” Two or three men clapped. “We just wanted to see if y’all have anything on your minds.”
A tall black man stood and said, “What do you have to do to get from a dollar and a half to two dollars? I been doing this work for nine years.”
“When you get to ten, we’ll go see the man and jack him up,” Luther said. “Nine ain’t ten.”
“How much do you lack to ten?” I asked.
“Next spring.”
“All right, we’ll go after boll pulling, four or five months early. How’s that?”
“Good,” he said.
We took a few questions about bosses and different ways they wanted work done and got finished in less than an hour. It appeared to be going better than I had thought. Have you ever noticed how good things and terrible things can happen in quick succession? I think we might do better to avoid the real fine things because they always get balanced out with something as bad or worse. Luther, Chucho and I split up in front of the pool hall at eight, and I made my runs by Luther’s house. It was August the fifth last year.
We had a resurgence of hot weather after a rainy spell, and I spent most of the day in the drug store and the domino hall down the street or standing outside to get what breeze I could because the fan I had in the pool hall was like a spoon stirring hot soup in a kettle. When the heat started breaking, I was ready to get in the pickup, make my runs and cool off. I went by Luther’s house, and the only thing I saw was a little gray car going the same way as me on the section line road to the north as I came out on the Crosstie highway. I could barely see it, and it turned the other way when I turned toward home. I knew because I pulled to the side of the road and waited. I still felt uneasy when I got to Victory, so I decided to go back ten or fifteen minutes before nine.
This time, I came in from the highway. I was nearing Luther’s house when the little gray car wheeled out of his yard and started toward me. My pulse rate doubled in about two seconds. I knew they must have done something, so I got in the middle of the road and blocked them. The driver was weaving. He oversteered one way and then the other, and I forced him to the left and into the ditch and bumped him hard. The ditch was fairly deep, and he rolled it coming out. I stopped and ran up with the Mauser. I could see Hazel and their littlest boy waving their arms and starting to run toward me. The big white-haired guy was in the car with blood all over him. He looked dead. The car had rolled once and stopped right side up. I ran for the house as hard as I could go. Hazel and the boy met me halfway, hysterical. She yelled, “Mr. Byrd! Mr. Byrd! Luther’s hurt! Vernon!”
I ran to the house and busted in. Nobody was in the living room, so I turned right for Luther’s bedroom. People were down, and I saw blood on the floor. But I ignored that because Luther was propped up on the bed against the bedstead with holes in his belly and chest, trying to raise himself because a man in a green plaid shirt was on the bed with him. The man was also hurt and was cutting at Luther’s pants with a knife but moving so slowly that I took careful aim at his head before I shot. Luther had been hit three or four times and was half-conscious. He said, “Preach, cuttin’ me.”
“He didn’t get you,” I said, getting up in his face. “I killed him.”
“I know you help me.”
“I’m sorry, Luther. I doubled back.”
“Okay. You got him.”
Luther’s big leather belt was cut in two, and his pants were split to the crotch where the guy was going to castrate him. I came back to myself and swung around to see who else was in the room. There were people on the floor and against the wall below the foot of the bed. One was the guy Vernon had described as being with the white-haired man. He was full of bullet holes from one end to the other. The other was Vernon, who had been stabbed in the belly. He had a bloody hunting knife in his hand and both eyes open. I yelled at him, “Vernon!”
He looked at me with his eyes glazed and said, “No.” He was in shock. I saw that the back of his leg had been cut. The one I shot had stuck him in the belly and then hamstrung him so he couldn’t help his dad. I went back to Luther, but he passed out. I took the knife out of Vernon’s hand, pulled him out of the room and laid him on the living room couch, then went to the phone and got the operator to call the sheriff.
“We had trouble at Luther Moore’s,” I said. “Y’all get over here and bring the ambulance. Luther’s shot.”
Hazel and the kid were starting to come in. “Y’all stay out,”
I said. “You’d be better off.”
They went in anyway, of course. Two of the boys came in from working somewhere, and I put my rifle across my knees and sat on the porch. I thought about carrying Luther into town myself but decided not to because he was in bad shape and might die from a rough ride. It seemed like a long time before the law showed up. Deputy McGovern and a highway patrolman got there. The sheriff came from Terkel and arrived thirty minutes later. They called an ambulance for the guy in the car and for Vernon and Luther. McGovern rode in with them.
“He really was going to cut old Luther, huh?” the sheriff, an old guy named Ralph Halstead, asked me.
“That’s what it looked like,” I said.
“He probably expected an easier job. Old Luther’s rough as a cob.”
“Had two thirty-two automatics,” the patrolman said. “Emptied both of them.”
The sheriff said, “Looks to me like they all came in at once, Luther cut loose and got two, and the third one got him when he ran out of shells. Probably the white-headed one in the car let him have it and thought he was got for good and took off. The woman tells us Luther had her and the boys run out back when the car came up. The big boy went around to the front and hid behind a tree. The one you got must have knifed him when he came in the bedroom. That one was hit two or three times and was probably just getting back up. Luther nailed the other one. He has about seven or eight holes in him.”
The J.P. (justice of the peace) arrived and asked the sheriff, “What is it, Ralph, bootlegger shootout?”
The sheriff said, “We don’t know yet, judge. Looks like something to do with that union. This is old Preacher Byrd in here.”
The J.P. nodded and went on, apparently not surprised.
“Was the colored man just lying there when you came in?” the highway patrolman asked me.
“Yeah, he was hurt too bad.”
“Looked like he took one in the shoulder socket,” the sheriff said. “There was a butcher knife on the floor by the bed. He must have got it out and then got hit where he couldn’t hold it. I can’t figure out why he was on the bed.”
“I imagine he stood up on it,” I said. “There wasn’t anything to get behind. That let him shoot down on ’em.”
I was walking around the yard crying when one of the other boys, Reggie, came up to me with tears all over his face. “It’s your fault!” he yelled at me. “You got him in on it!” He was cussing and screaming, and I only called his name a couple of times. He pushed me as hard as he could and went away.
The sheriff came over and said, “You can go home if you want to, Preacher. You don’t have any idea who put them up to it, do you?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” I said.
“You might think we won’t try as hard since it’s a nigger bootlegger,” he said. “But a crime’s a crime as far as I’m concerned.”
“I don’t know who it was,” I said, and walked down the road to my pickup. I knew the sheriff would try because it was a damn big case whether Luther was a bootlegger or not. I went home and told Adrianne what happened. We let Benny stay and sent Belle to bed.
“You’ve got blood all over you,” Adrianne said. “Why don’t you get your clothes off and take a bath? I’ll run a tub for you.”
I felt like a turd taking a bath when Luther was in a funeral home or somewhere. There was no satisfaction about the one I shot. It was like I had novocaine all through me. I got to imagining what it was like when they came in on him. I thought the one I got was the rockiest and the first one in. Luther shot him and knocked him down. The second one stopped and stood and took the worst of it. I figured what threw Luther off was expecting only two. The white-haired guy probably waited and then came in. I still didn’t know where they came from. I assumed they got the third guy, who had a nose like a rat and light brown hair, because he was even worse than them. Had to be Lubbock, Amarillo or maybe Dallas or Oklahoma City. They’d trace the white-haired fellow soon enough. I didn’t really bathe. I sat there in the water and sloshed Luther’s blood out of the hair on my chest. I saw the red water again. I started drinking that night and made a hand at it for the next several days. Luther laid unconscious in the hospital all that time. I kept going to see him, but he never seemed to get any better. He just laid there with his big face getting thinner and his teeth showing more, and his wife and kids looking at me out of the corners of their eyes.
I thought those guys had talked to Chucho or they would not have known I was coming by at eight-thirty and then not expected me afterwards. I even thought of going to Terkel and killing him, but I would have gone to jail and I never have been quite that mad. What happened to Chucho is a story in itself. The papers in Lubbock and Amarillo wrote it up like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Luther’s friends kept coming by to see me at the house. Drinking and talking, I told some of them about the eight-thirty-nine deal we worked on Chucho, and one of them told me one night in the backyard, “If that boy sold Luther out, his ass has had it. He won’t last a month.”
I talked to Chucho on the phone a couple of times. He asked what I was going to do, and I said I would take a rest and suggested that he take over the union. He said okay, he would till I got ready to come back.
“I might not come back,” I said. “I’m sick of it. You can see that.”
“Sure, I see it,” he said. Two or three weeks later, Chucho and a guy with him got into it with some Negro hands north of Victory, and one of the hands picked up a rock and busted him on the head. He went into a coma and has never come out of it as far as I know. He is a Korean War veteran and in a veterans’ hospital somewhere, I think.
I managed to keep the union going. Actually, we didn’t even lose members. We were kind of disorganized for a while, but nobody had the guts to reduce wages to where they were before. The farmers must have seen better work for the better pay. The Mexicans weren’t mad at me about Chucho that I could tell. I started keeping them and the Negro hands apart as much as I could and replaced Chucho with an older man from Victory.
Who the thugs were came out. The first two were ex-cons from Lubbock. The other was a character from Dallas who was wanted for murder in Louisiana. The white-haired guy turned state’s evidence and said it was Jal MacDougal who hired them. That surprised me some. He said they got the third guy after the union kept going. They decided to tackle Luther right after the last meeting we had. They didn’t have to hang around because Jal was keeping them posted and giving orders. It may not be true, but he said they were only going to beat Luther up real bad. He said Luther never said a thing but whaled away till he ran out of shells and then got the knife out before he started getting hit. They came at him in the order I figured. They were in a different car because they were using rent cars.
Obviously, Jal hated the idea of a union more than I realized. I have pondered it for some time, and I think he did it mostly out of being tight with money. He might have thought Luther wouldn’t be believed or nobody would care if he got killed. He certainly never thought he’d be found out. He might have seen himself as a king protecting his kingdom. He was one of the ones whose old men kept them out of the war, and he never liked for me to talk about my war experiences.
The white-haired fellow got fifteen years last September, and Jal has been tried and got a hung jury. I doubt if he goes to jail. But everybody knows he hired those guys. I suspect some are glad and would done it have themselves if they had the money. Others think it was rotten and whether Jal gets off in court or not, he will be remembered for it the rest of his life.
Luther did finally improve. I went to see him every day or two after they let him go home and took to calling him “Leadbelly.” He started going to The Country Club again. Everybody wants to see his scars, but nobody has seen them except Hazel, me and the doctor. He tells everybody who asks to go to the circus if they want to see a freak. Vernon was operated on the night of the shooting and is okay except for a limp.
Most people stayed with
me because I grew up here and have lived here all my life. Benny graduated and has gone on wheat harvest with a family from Victory and a couple of his friends. He was in a car wreck where a boy in another car was killed right after we had the shootout. It was a drag race or something. Adrianne and Belle are spending a peaceful summer. I plan to get out of here in a week or two and go fishing close to Austin.
This is as true a story as I could make it. The difference between stories or books, I think, is in how much of an effort there is to be honest. Looking this over, I’m bothered by all the turmoil. It’s hard to believe it happened. But I think you will be less disturbed if you consider the violence in life that is not so highly visible. I’ve said people do what they do because of what they are and wondered how that applies to me. What led me to stay drunk after Luther was hurt was the feeling I had done it because I wanted to fight and none of my fine-sounding reasons were real. For the sake of the truth, I should say I’m like most people. The more important something is to me, the less I understand it.
I drove to Lodge Pole a few days ago, visited Annabelle and talked about this the same as I did that time about the war. Then I came back here and went to the cemetery to see Papa. It got completely dark in a little while, and for the first time out there, I felt at ease and ready to enjoy life.
Part Two: The Fields are Ripe for Harvest
“As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by. . .”
-- Hart Crane.
Chapter One - Cutting
The combines gave a low yowl, spewing exhaust and chaff around the field, and blew black smoke each time they slowed to round a corner and struggled to regain their speed. Two heavy trucks squatted running board-high in the stubble at the edge of the uncut wheat. A long way off in the clear portion of the field was a white and orange pickup truck. The wheat undulated over hundreds of acres. Beginning at one end of the field and working toward the other, the harvesters cut sections as large as they could go around once without overflowing the hoppers. They had come two-thirds across the length of the field. When a combine filled with wheat, the driver pneumatically wagged the long unloading spout, and one of the trucks mashed the stubble, came up alongside and without stopping or slowing rumbled along as the combine driver pulled up a lever in the cab floor and started an auger spiraling the threshed, cleaned wheat through the air and sun and into the open truck bed. When a truck was full, the driver sprang onto the cab and unrolled a tarp down the bulging load and tied the tarp with strips of rubber to upside down hooks on the sideboards. Then with his cargo out of the wind, he drove hard to town and the grain elevator to weigh, unload, weigh again and speed back before the other truck could fill. The motion was unceasing, and the hours elapsed with the circling of the machines.
The Byrds of Victory Page 10