The Chink was right. Just when we’d got used to the eggs, their high food value, easy availability, and simple cooking, were we suddenly to be denied them because of Abraham’s whim? Why should I deny my poor self, and torture my poor body with the sight of beautiful, fresh eggs sizzling merrily in the others’ frying pans? “Give me six!” I ordered. And once I had eaten three fried eggs and boiled the others to take for lunch, my spirit was subdued and penitent.
So we kept on eating eggs.
One afternoon a few days later Mr. Shine stopped me on my way back from the field and talked about his farm, how he had started with sixty dollars of hard-earned money, how he had hacked the bush out with his own hands, and how he had widened a narrow, overgrown twelve-mile mule track into a road fit for his truck.
“It took me twenty years of hard, very hard work to build up this place. And yet we gringos, who helped make this part of the country what it is today, feel that we must be ready to get out on short notice and leave everything behind. These people — with some reason, I admit — hate us like poison because they fear for their political and economic freedom and independence, which means everything to them.”
Mr. Shine wasn’t the first North-American farmer to tell me this.
“Some years are very good. I’ve had as many as four crops of corn in the same year, something I’d never get back in the States. And I must say the cotton’s very good this year, first-class fiber, if only I can get a decent offer for it. The trick is in knowing just how long to wait, just when to sell. But I can’t understand what’s happened to my hens. We’ve never had so few eggs as in these last weeks. My neighbors are also complaining about their hens, and they’re wondering what’s going on in their corn bins that they fill up in the evening and find a little lower in the morning. Same happens to me. Must be rats, I’d say.”
That evening I told the gang what Mr. Shine had said about his hens.
“There you are, fellers, there’s the true American farmer for you!” said Abraham. “They’d eat their own fingernails, they’re so mean, and they begrudge the po’r hens a handful of grain — then complain that they’re not layin’. How kin they if they’re not rightly fed? Look at my hens! I don’t spare the corn, so I get what I want from them. They only have to be well fed and properly treated, and then they do their duty. My good grandmother Susanne taught me that, and she was a clever woman, you can take it from me, fellers. And that’s a fact! Another thing,” he went on, “it’s not the rats that get into the bins of those greedy farmers, it is the po’r starvin’ hens which at night instead of sleeping prowl around to pick up a few kernels of corn lest they starve to death, po’r little animals.”
And we listened to him. After all, Abraham had the proof of his chicken knowledge in eggs.
5
That same evening we came unanimously to the conclusion that we had to eat properly to keep up our work power, but that at the same time we had to see to it that a certain sum was left over at the end of the harvest so that we shouldn’t have worked for nothing, like slaves just for our keep — that therefore, in a nutshell, we weren’t being paid enough. If we got eight instead of six centavos a kilo, we could just about scrape through.
With this thought in our minds we went to sleep.
The next morning as soon as the other workers arrived in the field, Antonio and Gonzalo went up to them and explained that we intended to ask for eight centavos a kilo from now on, plus two centavos a kilo retroactively. These people, natives and more independent than we were, especially since they all had their own parcels of land, readily agreed.
Then Antonio and Gonzalo and two of the other men went up to the scales and told Mr. Shine how matters stood.
“No,” answered Mr. Shine, “I’m not going to pay that, and that’s that! I’m not crazy! I’ve never paid that much. I don’t make that much on the cotton.”
“All right,” said Antonio, “then we’re packing up. We’ll be off today.”
One of the local men intervened: “Listen, señor, we’ll wait another two hours. Think it over. If you say no, we’ll saddle our mules. And we’ll take good care that you don’t get any more men.”
With that the conference came to an end. The four returned to the field and reported Shine’s answer. The men left the rows they were picking, went over to the trees, and lay down to sleep. While I was also making my way toward the trees, Mr. Shine called, “Hey, Gales! Come over here a moment!”
“Now,” I said while approaching him, “if you think I’m going to act as a go-between you’re quite mistaken, Mr. Shine. If I were a farmer I’d be on your side and I’d go with you through thick and thin. But I’m not a farmer. I’m a farm hand, and I stick with my fellow workers. You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course, Gales. In any case I’m not trying to win you over to my side. You couldn’t get the cotton in alone. But let’s have a quiet talk about it.”
Mr. Shine lit a pipe. His elder son, who was about twenty-six, lit a cigar, and the other son, a fellow of twenty-two or so, peeled some filthy-looking paper from a piece of chewing gum and popped the gum into his mouth.
“You’re the only white man among the pickers here, and as I’m already paying you eight you are really neutral and can talk with us. I take it you haven’t told the other fellows that you’re getting eight?” asked Mr. Shine, taking his pipe from his mouth.
“No,” I said, “I haven’t had the slightest reason for doing so.”
The fact is I hadn’t. But I knew that had the subject come up, not one of the men would have felt wronged at my taking that extra two centavos. It wasn’t any skin off their backs. And not one even now would accuse me of not having brought the subject up. What good would it have done them to know? Some things we didn’t find it necessary to talk about. Our common lot was something else again.
Dick, the older boy, climbed into the back of the truck, propped himself against a bale of cotton, and dangled his legs over the side. Pete, the younger one, seated himself at the steering wheel and dozed off, still chewing his gum.
The old man leaned against the truck and, swearing the while, fiddled with his pipe that now went out, now got choked, now needed refilling although the tobacco in it hadn’t yet burned through. Only by the way he was handling his pipe did the farmer give any outward indication of the excitement that was fuming within him.
When about five minutes had passed without a word being spoken, Pete sat up and suddenly burst out: “You know what I’d do if I were in your shoes, Dad? I’d pay up and say no more about it.”
“You’d pay up, would you?” Mr. Shine was furious. “The money doesn’t come out of your pocket. That makes ‘I’d pay up’ very easy. All right then, I’ll take it out of your money.”
“You won’t do any such thing, Dad! Or, if you do, you’ll have to give me the money for the cotton sold. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Oh, don’t make me laugh! The money for the cotton sold? Have I sold even a dime’s worth yet? I tell you, Gales, no one’s offered me a penny yet. And what prime cotton it is this year! It’d put the whitest snowflake in all Alaska to shame. And just look here" — he tore off a pod nearby and holding it close to my nose squeezed it between his fingers — “the softest down is like barbed wire compared with this. Well, Gales, say some.. thing! Don’t stand there as if you’d lost your tongue!”
“But don’t forget I’m neutral,” I protested.
“All right, you’re neutral. But you can still open your mouth.”
All he wanted was someone with whom to argue.