En las Casitas

In the narrow river vales of the county, the fields lie in squares and rectangles of row crops, fence lines darkly outlining them with small trees; from above, in autumn, the pattern is of strips of plaid cloth showing through long rents in the burlap of the prairie. Beside one of these tears, which is the South Fork Valley, and up on its western terrace high enough to give a view down on the vale road and the cropped grids, sits a low stone building, gray and grim like a barracks. It has eight rooms, ten doors, five chimneys, and is built like a double-footed L on its side, , and between the two longer end rooms is a roofed porch, and in front of it, a covered well. The stone blocks are, in fact, concrete cast to look like hewn rock. The place sits above old 13 just north of Matfield and a hundred feet east of the railway cut. Built without plumbing or insulation by the Santa Fe in the twenties, the building is the last of its kind in the area. I’ve heard it called the Mexican bunkhouse, laborers’ quarters, trackmen’s houses, section hands’ dormitory, company housing. No one has lived here in some years, but once five Hispanic families did, and now the ceilings are shucking off their plaster down to their thin lath ribs, dropping pieces onto a miscellany of piled junk; window lights are missing, doors tied shut with twists of wire, and dirt lies so caked to the floor that the cold wind stirs no grit as it haunts through and gives the place an occasional voice—a slapped gutter, a shaken door, a rattled pane. Once there were ten clusters of trackmen’s houses scattered somewhat regularly along the line, and from them every day, regardless of weather, men went out to tend the track, even on Sunday when a walker followed the right rail halfway to the next section quarters and returned on the left, all the way hammering down loose spikes, tightening bolts.

Fidel Ybarra never lived in these Matfield quarters, and I have found no one still in the county who did, but he spent thirty-one years in the even cruder company houses at Gladstone, ones the inhabitants called las casitas and the Anglos Mexican shanties; sometimes still, even Fidel calls them that, but he pronounces it chanties as if they were pieces of some old folksong from the sea. Now he lives in Cottonwood on the corner of Pearl and State streets, two blocks west of the courthouse, in a white bungalow, the first place he’s ever had plumbing. It is late October, and in his small yard the long pods of the catalpa swing like pendulums in the slow wind, and the wahoo tree is about ready to split open its four-cornered berry capsules, and on the cramped front porch Fidel has stacked curious stones he has found along the Santa Fe tracks, and in the little bay window the morning sun warms the cockatiel into some whistlings and cage tapping. We sit at the dining table with its damask-patterned plastic cover.

Fidel is a compact man but not stout, his face nicely rounded, and he has a small, meticulously cut trapezoid of a mustache that resembles a silhouette of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, a place he has never seen although he was born a few miles south of it. His right eye is glass and seems fixed in a way that makes him appear to look through and beyond you, but it is the left that you must follow to read his meaning, his passions. He is sixty-three, and he and his wife, Teresa, an attractive woman whom he calls the Missus, have seven children, all living out of the county; they are clerks and businesspeople who have only the rudiments of the Spanish language. He is eleven months retired from forty-four years as a Santa Fe section hand, two decades of which he worked alongside his father, Nasario. Fidel ended as he began at eighteen, a trackman, and it’s the only real job he’s ever known. In 1927 when Fidel was a year old, his father brought him and his mother from Mexico City to Laredo, Texas, where they waited until Nasario saved up forty-six dollars for passports; then they caught a ride to Plymouth, Kansas, just across the Chase line. After fourteen months there, Nasario got drawn into some kind of scuffle and began going by Fidel Almanza, his father’s first name and his mother’s last; to get beyond the trouble, he moved the family to Glad stone, to the “little houses,” and that’s where Fidel grew up. He liked to watch the old locomotives blow off steam, but, since it was impossible for a Hispanic, he never wanted to become an engineer. In 1948, he brought his bride, born in the Mexican barrio of Emporia, to Gladstone, and eleven years later he became an American citizen.

Fidel and I are talking about those times, and his answers are ever so lightly gilded with Mexican rhythms and tones. He says, Those houses at Gladstone were made of one-by-twelves, and the gaps between the boards were covered with thin wood strips. Tarpaper over the roof. No insulation except my mother’s wallpaper. We had two rooms, about fourteen by twenty—that was the whole house. After the kids come along there was twelve of us in there. No electricity, no running water. There was six other chanties, some just one room, and all we had was one outhouse with two doors, a men’s and women’s, and just one seat in them: thirty people and two seats. We had a pump for water. But Santa Fe didn’t charge us nothing to live there, and in the winter the company sent in a car of old track ties and pieces of depots and boxcars, and we’d unload it and chop the wood up for our stove, but the place was still cold. Teresa calls in from the next room, Oh yeahhh. If we went to Emporia to visit overnight, when we came home everything was frozen.

Fidel smiles at that and says, Then in the summer, when the reefer cars come through and throwed off the old ice on the siding, we broke it up and put it in our icebox. And one day thirty-six reefers of potatoes derailed at Gladstone.

I ask did he like living in those little houses, and he says, I didn’t mind. A lot of farmers around us didn’t have no plumbing neither, and I say, but they had more than two rooms, and he answers, When my kids complain, I tell them, “You should’ve lived when I lived back then.” After the war we still just had kerosene lanterns, so I went to a company boss and told him if the houses were fit to live in they were fit to have electricity, and after a while we got it. And in 1950 I went and asked for propane stoves, and later we got them too. If I’d thought about it, I should’ve got Santa Fe to put an electric pump in the well. And Teresa calls, Look around and you won’t find any fireplace in this house—I’m not going through that again—the dirt, and Fidel says, No more busting up wood.

I ask just where in Gladstone the houses were, and Fidel takes the back side of a ten-million-dollar sweepstakes entry blank and draws a map, but the page is too small, so he goes to the kitchen and returns with two sheets of typing paper precisely taped end to end like a scroll. He lays a yardstick on it and draws twin parallel lines across the top that are train tracks and then freehands in curving parallels that are the diverging routes, and he begins talking as he draws in sidings, bridges, the control tower once at Elinor junction, cattle pens, the Strong City hotels (one an old Fred Harvey House), the section hands’ houses there (putting roofs on each one). He labels every item and gives measurements and distances, even the mileposts around Gladstone and Matfield, and he lists the trackman’s tools and defines them:

 

Spike maul—to drive spikes
Claw bar—to pull spikes
Lining Bar—to use to raise track also to line track and other various uses

 

and so on through wrenches and hammers and jacks, and he writes how rail sizes in his years went from eighty-five pounds per three feet to 140 pounds. The houses at Gladstone he labels with arrows pointing to each one:

 

Dad lived here

I lived in Middle one

We didn’t have no Electricity till 1945

Went to Miller School there Grade 1–8

 

As he limns in Gladstone, he X’s the house where a younger brother, during some horseplay, threw a toy hatchet into his right eye. Each time he tells of an incident about a chanty, he touches his pen to the building and leaves a mark, and soon they are full of inky points like little residents.

He draws and loses himself in the map, and he forgets to speak, sometimes only nodding an answer, sometimes writing it as part of the drawing:

 

I went to work for A.T.S.F. in 1944–1988

Section Hand—Tamp Track

 

I watch his large hands, hands for a spike maul, labor their history onto the map, and I ask whether he has driven a spike in every mile of track in the county, and he pauses and calculates and says, Way more than that, and he pens in the laborers’ quarters at Matfield, and says, I could take you out and show you just about every place I drove a spike, and the idea is that it was a hard task, the kind of work you remember. He says a mile of track has 3,200 ties (we figure 300,000 in the county) and that he’s done something to every one including replacing many of them.

I watch his map fill in. Artless and accurate but for its scale, it is a portrait of sixty years spent along the skinny rail corridors of the county, but it is a trackman’s picture: bridges without rivers, curves without trees, villages only sidings with labels like trackside signs, and Chase without hills, a level place of inclines you can’t perceive. And he draws on and turns it into a picture, chart, chronicle, handbook. The clock has struck off the hour again, and he keeps drawing. Then he seems to begin to rise out of his cartograph slowly, and he speaks more and nods less, and something between us, a caution, has disappeared, the way it will between people who travel some distance together.

Teresa passes by, looks at the map, and lays a finger on the middle house at Gladstone where she lived next to Fidel’s parents, and she says, It was okay there, but it was lonely, and there was no privacy, and she is not self-contradictory. She says, The tracks were so close that the engines shook the house, and cinders blew in, and sometimes pieces broke off trains and crashed by the houses: Fidel’s little brother got hit by a loose wheel cover. Then she leans close to the drawing, and she too seems to enter it, and she says as if from some distance off, In summer, I pumped water into a tub and let it sit in the sun all day, and when the sun went down and the water was warm, then I started washing clothes. Fidel says, The only running water we ever had was the flood in ’51, and Teresa draws out a long Ohhh. It came up so fast, and all the men were gone except a neighbor, a colored man. He was on vacation. He came up to help, and I passed him my baby out the window, and he held him above the water and took him to higher ground, and when we all got out, I saw how scared the man was, and I thought, “Oh God, I gave him my baby.”

Fidel says, At first the company wouldn’t let us have gardens, I don’t know why—nobody asked in those days—but later it was okay, and we grew green beans, tomatoes, corn, sweet peppers, hot peppers. And if a hobo come down the tracks, my father gave him tortillas and beans.

I ask, were you poor? We knew we were Mexican but we didn’t call ourselves poor because we had jobs.

I say, you knew you were Mexicans? In Cottonwood or Emporia, Topeka too, we couldn’t get served in restaurants, but at some places you could take food out or go around to the back to the kitchen. We couldn’t get no haircuts neither. Then one day when I was in high school in Cottonwood, I guess in 1941, I was walking down the street past the old bank, and the barber come out of the basement where his shop was, Jim Venard was his name, and he starts talking to me, and he says, “Who gives you your haircuts young man!” and I said, “My dad—nobody here will cut it,” and he says, “You come to me. I’ll cut it. Bring anybody else.” That was a breakthrough. During the war things changed, especially afterwards: guys figured if they were good enough to fight for the country, they were good enough to eat in a café instead of in the alley. But we never had it as bad as the colored people. Whites let us in earlier. I ask him about the war. I couldn’t enlist because of my blind eye, so I worked on the track then: seven days a week, ten hours a day, sixty cents an hour.

Several times he uses the word breakthrough, and his idea, unarticulated, is that whatever changes have occurred came about one person at a time—a barber giving a haircut, a café owner offering a table, a foreman asking for electricity, all of them bucking the wind on their own and not waiting for jurists to catch up with justice. Fidel says, Things were like that, and we went along with them, but it was hard on us. I ask how life is now besides having insulation and a toilet, and he says, Some older white people remember the way things were, but they keep hush, but I remind them. I tell them, “It isn’t like the old days when you had power over us—now it’s going to be the other way around. In time, the Caucasian race will be the one dominated.” I tell my kids, “We had to take it back then, but you got the Discrimination Board in Topeka.”

He speaks of twice confronting men who had, on separate occasions, grabbed his youngest son and torn his shirt. I told them both, “If you’ve got any problems with my boy, I’d like to settle them now.” And I said to one, a coach, “This isn’t like back in the dirty thirties—this is more modern now.” Coach said he was sorry, and I told him, “That don’t get it anymore.” I should’ve took him to Discrimination. After a moment, Fidel says, Nobody paid for the shirts.

He is telling all of this while he keeps fixed to his map, and as he speaks, he draws in the ties of his tracks, a couple hundred little hash marks. At first I see them as tallies of wrongs, but when he keeps making them even after the topic changes, keeps laying down those little sleepers, I think: of course, the most important element in a trackman’s work is the crosstie—that piece holding the railroad together, the predicate between subject and object, the linking between soil and rail. A trackman’s days go to battling ties; as feet are to a walker, so ties are to a train. (Later I would recall ancient Aztec picture maps that used narrow parallels with footprints drawn between to indicate roads. In a like way, Fidel’s map is primitive—of a first time.)

He does not fill in all of the space between his rails with ties but stops as if the time has come to put up the mauls for the day, as if to leave some work for tomorrow, and he looks over his document. I can’t tell what he thinks its worth is, but then he gives me the answer: in the left comer, right under his good eye, he draws a small rectangle and in it carefully prints By Fidel G. YBARRA, and he adds his postbox number, street address, zip code, and ten-digit phone number (four digits put through local calls). He rolls it, presents it to me (and I’m thinking, of all the papers countians have handed me, this map of a man’s territory is the finest because it is the most wrought). He accompanies me to the sidewalk, where the catalpa-pod pendulums swing slowly, and Fidel nods a so-long, and his right eye looks past me, past the courthouse at my back, on past everything in the hills.