Chapter 9

By mid-July, we had planted every available acre of my two farms, all of Tom’s farmland, and all but a thousand acres of the Santiago land, in vegetables or melons. All five of our tractors were in the fields each day from daylight to dark. By now, Tom, Lucia, Morena, Paulina, and I have learned to drive our tractors without tearing up the crops, and we drive them while the men eat or help with other jobs when needed.

We’ve had very few mechanical problems with the new tractors and what minor problems we did have, Dante and Danato were able to repair. Nothing more than a leaky radiator hose, or a fuel line leak. They said that was caused by all the vibration day after day. From the two brothers, we learned how to service the tractors. We change the motor oil once a month, grease them every morning and make sure they are full of water and oil before we start them.

As our crops began to grow, the weeds and grass have become a problem. We now have two tractors pulling cultivators back over the crops that can be cultivated – corn, peas, beans, carrots, cabbage and lettuce. The vines on our watermelons, cucumbers and cantaloupes have begun to run and we’re no longer able to hoe, or cultivate them. I was told that the weeds wouldn’t interfere with the melon crops like the others, so I let it go. They sure did look ragged, compared to the other fields.

The university students have been gone long ago, after giving us a schedule of what to do and when to do it, for each of our crops. They helped us more than they will ever know. We still refer to what we were told or what they have written down for us.

Luther took the name and telephone number of the rubber-tired wagon manufacturer off the frame of the one we have, then he called and gave them Mr. Thompkins name and telephone number at the bank. Once they had his OK, they agreed to ship us ten more of the rubber-tired wagons by rail.

When they arrived, they proved to be well worth the money spent, in the coming days.

We’d ordered a boxcar load of fertilizer in fifty pound bags, directly from the manufacturer. It took us two days to unload the bags onto the wagons, then stack them in the back of my barn. Tom told me we didn’t have to worry about the bags getting wet, since it never rained and the air was so dry out here.

“About the only thing we’ll have to do is bust up a few lumps as we dump the bags in the hoppers ... that and keep the pieces of paper out of the hoppers. Paper stops up the openings in the bottom of the hopper and you’ll never know it until the crops start taking off from the fertilizer. You’ll have one short row and one tall row.”

This was another daily chore we had now, loading two of the rubber-tired wagons with bags of fertilizer and pulling them to the fields where we were fertilizing the corn. We had four usable fertilizer distributors between us, and we put four tractors on the job so we could get the fertilize out as fast as we could, and then, turn the water loose again. They were able to make good time, since the wheels roll free and there was hardly any drag on the tractors.

It really helped, that we didn’t have to fertilize all the vegetables and melons.

Ten days after the first application, we were putting the second application of fertilize on the corn. Side dressing, the university students had called it. This time, the corn stalks were as tall as the tractors. I just knew the tractors would break the stalks over, but they only bent forward and stood back up straight as the tractor and fertilizer distributor passed over them.

As we finished each field, we had men piping water up to the canals to release it into the flume ditches and down the middles between the rows.

Within a week after the last fertilizer application and watering the corn, the corn stalks were over head high and putting on tassels.

Tom had told me this would be the last pass we’d make through the corn fields, until we pulled the wagons through them as the men and women stripped the ears of corn off the stalks. He and Juan Carlos both told me we’d be harvesting our first table-corn crop in three weeks or less.

We have four crews of fifty men and women, which we bring in from Mexico each day to hoe the weeds in the vegetable crops. This was not working, as there was too much wasted time traveling back and forth. Tom ordered thirty large tents and we’re using them for our day laborers to stay in and save time hauling them back and forth. We’ve had to set up food lines, using large pots and pans, with portable kerosene cook-stoves, and old mess tables. It’s much easier to do this and keep them fed and housed, than it is for us to haul them back and forth each day from across the border on the wagons.

We have four men building toilets and another four digging deep holes in the ground for the toilets to be placed over. These crews work from daylight to dark, just like the rest of us. We’re placing these permanent toilets at the edge of the turn rows, between each of the fields – on all the farms.

After meeting with the four man team from Farm Fresh Canneries, we secured a ninety-nine year lease for ten acres of my land. They now have construction crews working two shifts a day, pouring concrete for two large warehouses – One for the fresh produce processing plant and the other for the adjacent cannery.

As soon as the canning company had the lease secured and the contracts signed with SaWaSa, we called a joint meeting with the county judge and the Southern Pacific Railroad managers here at my home place. With the assurance that there would be a fresh produce processing plant and adjoining cannery built here in the near future, the railroad agreed to lay a spur track alongside the rural county road, ending just east of the cannery, to allow as many as twenty refrigerator cars, to be spotted at one time.

The spur line was put to grade and the rails laid in less than six months, even though it will take another six months for the processing plant to be in operation, and a year before the cannery will be ready for production.

In the meantime, we began our first harvest.

Our first crop of produce to come off was table-corn. We packed the ears of corn in wooden shipping crates right in the field and hauled them to the Yuma train yard to load. At times, we pulled three and four of the rubber tired wagons, loaded with crates of corn, stacked four high and six across, then strapped down.

Even before we’d harvested the third field of corn, we started two tractors pulling the tumbling stalk cutters over the corn fields. At first, they weren’t doing a good job of chopping the stalks into pieces, so we loaded them down with heavy concrete house blocks which made the blades cut through the green stalks and chop them into pieces.

We loaded five refrigerator cars a day, seven days a week, for three weeks. When we finished the harvest, the manager at the produce company in Springfield called to tell us that we had broken the record for bushels per acre, on table-corn, during the harvest of our seven hundred acres of corn.

Immediately after the corn was harvested, we started harvesting cabbage and lettuce. With a large, razor-sharp machete in one hand, the men would pull the head of cabbage or lettuce over to the side and in one swing, chop the head off at ground level, leaving them laying on the ground. As the men moved down the rows chopping the heads off, the women followed behind them, picking the heads up and placing them in the wooden crates.

The shipping crates were made of wide, very thin slats of wood, wired together with the ends, sides, and tops of the crates laid out flat until they were folded together to form a box-shaped shipping crate. We had a ten woman crew which did nothing all day, each day, but fold the flat frames into shipping crates.

Labor was plentiful, and at times, we had over seventy workers in the harvest and shipping crews alone. There were still three crews chopping weeds and grass in the fields on a daily basis. The tractors never caught a break – either pulling stalk cutters or plows, or pulling wagon loads of crates packed with produce to the train yard seven days a week.

There were days when I hardly had a chance to speak to Lucia. When we did have a few minutes together, it was getting harder and harder to let her go. She told me she felt the same way, “Les, if we don’t hurry up and have some time alone together, I’m going to drag you down one of the corn rows and have my way with you.” She was laughing, but she had her hands on my shirt, pulling me close to kiss me when she told me that.

“Lucia, when the melons come off, let’s get married and make that ride up into the mountains. We’ll take one of the tents and spend few days alone together. We won’t be able to stay a week like we planned, but I need you to be my wife so I can hold you all night, every night.

“YES, YES, YES ... I can make it now. The watermelons will come off within the next three weeks and the cantaloupes will be coming off next week, Grandfather told me.”

The green beans and peas were ready to be picked and we used the labor we’d had used on the corn harvest to start picking peas and green beans. We still couldn’t keep up, so we pulled fifty women off the chopping crews and had them picking peas and beans to pack in crates so we could haul them to the depot for shipping. This was going even better than we first thought. We took the flat shipping crates to the field, loaded on a wagon and pulled by a team of horses. We put those same ten women back to folding them into crates, and placing on the ground. They were quickly filled before they were lifted and stacked onto the rubber-tired wagons, after the tops were folded over and wired securely.

The beans and peas would need a second picking in a week to ten days, but the cucumbers were ready now. These were small, pickling cucumbers and we were picking them between four to six inches long. This harvest went really fast since it took so many to load one crate. We only had two hundred acres, and we wiped them out just in time to start on the cantaloupes two days later. This gave us a chance to rest our labor one day, with them rotating.

The cantaloupes were ripening fast, and by the end of the week, we were picking them and hauling them to the depot in Yuma. We had all our tractors hauling produce now. The Cantaloupes couldn’t be stacked high on the wagons or in the refrigerated cars without damage in shipment, but by packing them in crates we were able to stack them, and managed to harvest another crop of produce in good time.

Before we were through with the cantaloupe harvest, the watermelons were ripe. We had already made short sideboards for the rubber-tired wagons so we could stack the melons without them rolling off. The sideboards were only two foot high, since the melons weighed so much we couldn’t stack them high without overloading the wagons.

As the drivers eased their tractors slowly through the field where the melons had been picked and placed in rows, we had men on the wagons stacking them into a mound, and men on the ground tossing them up for them to catch. We lost a few, but not many, considering how many we shipped out.

The good thing was, there was always plenty of watermelon to eat anytime they took a break. I had never eaten watermelon or cantaloupe before – and now, watermelons and cantaloupes were my two favorites of all the crops we grow.

As the watermelon harvest slowed to a crawl, we returned to the pea and bean patches to pick the second crop. This was it, the final days of harvest were just ahead of us.

We started four of the five tractors pulling breaking plows in the cucumber fields, then the bean and pea patches, and we eventually started in the cantaloupe and finally in the watermelon fields. We were plowing the vines under as we began preparing the fields for another planting season. Though we had hundreds of acres of vine crops combined, the total acreage wasn’t as large as the corn crop alone, or even the total acres of cabbage and lettuce crops combined.

The smaller acreage crops such as carrots, onions, cauliflower, squash, and butterbeans will be planted in the fields behind the corn, for the fall harvest. Our next corn crop will be rotated behind those crops, and the vine crops. We have plans to double the cabbage and lettuce acreage for the fall crops. We also have plans to double the watermelon and cantaloupe acreage, since other areas in the country won’t be able to grow these crops during the fall and winter months.

As soon as we could see a break in the mad rush to finish our harvest and ship the last of our produce, Lucia and I picked a date to get married. When I told Tom, he asked if he and Malena could get married the same day we did. Lucia and Malena started making their plans right then.

They wanted to be married here at the farm so our hired help could attend. Juan Carlos knew a priest in Yuma who would come perform the double ceremony and we were set.

Luther, Allece and their two sons have moved out of their house in Yuma and are now living with us, which made it easier on him, since he’s here every day. They told us that they would move back to Yuma when we married so we could have the house to ourselves, but Lucia quickly put a stop to that. Since Malena would be living with Tom, we’d have a separate room for their boys anyway.

Lucia and Malena wanted to wear white dresses, but neither of them wanted to wear a bridal gown. Tom and I went to Spragues to buy matching suits. Mr. Sprague took our measurements and told us he’d have them altered in two days. We didn’t see Catherine and since Mr. Sprague didn’t mention her, neither did we.

The day Tom and I rode back to Yuma to pick up our suits, we stopped to check with everyone Lucia had invited to our wedding. She had called Mr. Thompkins and his wife, Sheriff Collins and his wife, Mack Connor, his son Mark and both their wives. Mr. Sprague and Catherine, Mr. Martin and his wife, and the people who ran the depot, who had really worked hard to see that our shipments left on time and empty refrigerator cars were brought in without delay.

When we picked up our suits, Mr. Sprague still didn’t mention Catherine, and neither did Tom or I.

With our suits boxed and tied on behind our saddles, we checked with everyone on our list and were told that they planned to be there.

We stopped at the bank last, and as soon as we walked inside, Mr. Thompkins waved for Tom and me to come into his office.

“Les – Tom, I haven’t seen either of you for almost three months. I realize you’ve been as busy as you can be with the harvest, but you could at least stop by and check on your SaWaSa account.”

“That’s what we came for today, Mr. Thompkins. That and to see if you and your wife are coming to our wedding.”

“Of course, we’ll be there ... Now, since neither of you have had time to check on your deposits, I’ll give each of you a statement, detailing each deposit, payroll withdrawal, your seed purchases, equipment, tools, and other purchases. The statement is up to date, at the close of business last Friday.”

He stood and handed Tom a folded sheet of paper, then reached over to hand me one. The first place I looked was the bottom line. I couldn’t believe it ... But I never said a word and neither did Tom.

“Aren’t either of you going to say anything?” he asked, and he was laughing.

“Honestly, Mr. Thompkins, I don’t know what to say,” I told him.

Tom looked at him, then at me and asked, “Is this real?”

“Yes, this is real and I want to tell you, SaWaSa Produce Corporation is now the largest depositor in my bank as of last Friday. How much more of this first crop does SaWaSa have left to ship?”

“We have about two more days after today and the shipping will be over until our next harvest beginning late October or mid November – That’s what Tom and Juan Carlos tell me anyway. They run that part of the business.”

Tom and I were in a hurry to get back to the farm. We shook hands with Mr. Thompkins, telling him we’d see him in two days. We were almost out to the new railroad spur when I stopped my horse and Tom stopped beside me.

“Tom, did you ever think we’d make this much money the whole first year, not just with the first crop?

“I never thought we’d ever make this much. I didn’t know there was this much money in the world. What are we going to tell the women, Luther and Juan Carlos?”

“I’m just going to hand this paper to Lucia and see what she does. I know she’ll cry, then she’ll laugh, but there’s no telling what else she’ll do.”

“I told Malena that if we made enough money, I’d take her to Tucson on a train for a weekend, when we got caught up. She’s never been anywhere except to Yuma and across the border. I’m going to tell her we’ll do that now.”

“Is that where you and Malena are going after you get married?”

“Yup. I’m going to tell her to pack a dress or two and a couple of pairs of her tight fittin’ britches and get ready to see the big city lights. Are you and Lucia going anywhere like that?”

“We’re packing a tent, some clothes and food, then we’re heading up in the mountains for three or four days. We’ve talked about doing that since we met and now we’re going to make it happen.”

“That sounds like fun. You’ll have to tell me all about it. I may get Malena to ride up through there for a few days, if we ever get another break. I did that alone, as a boy and I’ll never forget the way this valley looks from up there.”

On our way back, we met three tractors, each pulling three loaded wagons, headed to the rail yard. Joaquin and Alejandro were driving the first two tractors and one of the new drivers was driving the third. They were waving and smiling as they passed by.

As we rode on toward the farms, we met the rural mail carrier in his old beat-up automobile. We rode our horses off into a plowed field to stay out of his dust as he whizzed by. When we came to Tom’s place, we stopped so he could check his mailbox. He had a handful of mail but I could tell that most of it was farm magazines and a copy of The Grange.

I wasn’t expecting any mail to be in my mailbox, and hardly ever thought to check it. Today when we came to it, I opened the box to see a brown envelope. When I looked at the name, it was addressed to SaWaSa Produce Corporation with Lucia’s name under it. The address at the top, was U.S. Department of Agriculture. As I read this, the first thing that came to mind was the grant money which Lucia told me had been approved.

Rodrigo and Bruno ran out to take our horses when Tom and I walked them to the barn.

“Are you men caught up for the day?” I asked, and they grinned at each other when I called them, men.

“No, Les. They are filling the tractors with motor fuel and we came to the barn with them. We’ll be going back to plow some more very soon.”

“You and your brothers are really handling your jobs well. Without you young men in our crews, helping – doing the work of grown men, we would be still be far behind in our work.”

“Les, those four boys of Joaquin’s and Alejandro’s will be driving tractors by this time next year,” Tom told me as we walked toward the house.

“I hope they are, we’ll need their fathers either overseeing the farms, or as foremen in the canning and produce plants by then.”

I saw Lucia standing on the back porch and waved for her to come out in the yard and join Tom and me. We had our boxed suits under our arms. The first thing she did, was take both boxes from us and stack them on the porch.

When she turned around, I handed her the bank statement, without telling her want it was. She opened it and stood looking down at it for the longest time, then she looked up at me, then Tom. She had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling as she leaped for me with her arms open.