Centennial (118 page)

Otto Emig, whose beets looked the best of the lot, argued, “Central Beet would never have spent so much money building that factory if they didn’t have a plan in mind. They’ll find us workers somewhere.” The solution to this problem was to come from a man not associated with the factory.

Jim Lloyd, at Venneford, had been delighted with the arrival of the sugar factory, because it provided an alternative source of feed for his white-faced cattle. It was pulp that was important to him.

“I love to smell that pulp come out the chute,” Jim said. “I like the way my Herefords go for it.”

When the heavy sugar beet was sliced and pressed, and its precious liquid drained off, there remained a moist, grayish mass called pulp. It was an excellent fodder for cattle; especially when mixed with heavy black low-grade molasses, another by-product of the sugar process.

“Pulp and molasses!” Jim Lloyd said admiringly. “Whenever I cart a load of that up to the feed yards, you can almost see the Herefords spreading the news. They’d walk miles for it.”

Jim was therefore much concerned about keeping the Centennial factory operating, and he knew that without reliable help for the local farmers during the blocking and thinning seasons, the whole thing was going to go bust. Germans, Indians, Italians, Russians, poor white—none of them was a solution. “We’ve got to find someone who can be trusted to thin properly and who’ll stay on the job.” He decided to talk to Kurt Brumbaugh about an idea he had.

In December heady news spread through Centennial. Otto Emig had apparently performed a miracle.

As soon as it became apparent that some farmer stood a chance of winning the championship, experts from the factory went to that man’s farm with a steel chain to measure the exact number of acres he had harvested, and the results at Otto Emig’s farm indicated that he had set a new record: “Seventeen point seven tons to the acre!”

Emil Wenzlaff carried the news to Brumbaugh. “That’s what he done, Potato.”

“He’s a good farmer,” Brumbaugh admitted grudgingly. He could not believe that Emig had done so well on those bottom lands. He must have fertilized each plant by hand.

Potato had enjoyed many successes in his life and it would have been generous of him to concede victory this year to Otto Emig, but he was a fearful competitor and at seventy-seven needed victory as keenly as he had at twenty-seven.

And then the final figures were released! In a long article in the
Clarion
, with photographs, it was revealed that Potato Brumbaugh had set a new record! Seventeen point nine tons to the acre, a figure so high the other farmers could scarcely believe it.

Of his victory Brumbaugh said, “The right soil, the right water, the right seed, this Platte Valley land can grow anything.”

“And the right thinning,” Otto Emig said generously.

“Where will we get our thinners next year?” Potato asked.

In late February 1905 Kurt Brumbaugh sprang his surprise. He announced that following a suggestion provided by Jim Lloyd, and as a result of extensive investigation, Central Beet had come up with the ideal solution to the problem. Its field men had located the world’s best agriculturists, men and women—and children, too—who could grow fuzz on a billiard ball. One hundred and forty-three of them would arrive on March 11 prepared to make the Platte Valley hum.

All the beet growers of the region were at the station when the train pulled in, and it was a day memorable in Colorado history. Down the iron steps leading from the cars came a timid, frightened group of men, women and children. They were small, thin, shy and dark. They were Japanese, and not one of them spoke a word of English, but the waiting farmers could see that they were a rugged people, with stout, bowed legs and hands like iron. If any people on God’s earth could thin sugar beets properly, these were the ones.

A representative from the Japanese consulate in San Francisco stepped forward, a bright young man in dark suit and glasses, and he said in precise English, “Gentlemen of Centennial and surrounding terrain. These are all trusted farm families. You can rely on them to work. In consultation with Mr. Kurt Brumbaugh of Central Beet, we have assigned them as follows.”

And he began to recite that extraordinary series of lyric four-syllable names: Kagohara, Sabusawa, Tomoseki, Yasunori, Nobutake, Moronaga. As he did so, the families stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder, and bowed low from the waist, even the smallest children. Each family was then assigned to one of the Russian farmers, a curiosity which the editor of the
Clarion
duly noted:

Yesterday at the Union Pacific station a miracle happened, an amazing event which could have occurred only in the United States, where people of diverse races and religions live together in perfect harmony. A group of one hundred and forty-three sons and daughters of the Sun Goddess arrived in our fair city and were promptly assigned to work with our finest Russian farmers, and this at a time when Japan and Russia are locked in mortal combat on the other side of the world. Since the Japanese speak no English and
no Russian, they have placed themselves in the hands of their worst enemies. But such is the miracle of America that no one present at the station yesterday had the slightest fear that the local Russians would in any way treat their Japanese workmen poorly or with injustice.

The editor was right. This was a most happy union of Japanese who knew how to farm with Russians who loved the soil, and during that war-torn year, peace and amity reigned along the Platte, primarily because the Japanese were the best sugar-beet workers in the world.

To Potato Brumbaugh were assigned the Takemotos: father aged twenty-seven, mother aged twenty-five and strong as a Hereford, daughter aged seven, son aged six, son aged three. They rose before sunrise, had a meal of rice plus whatever they could find to go with it, and went out into the beet fields with the wife carrying a small basket containing cold rice balls, each with a sour pickled plum in the center, and a bucket of cold tea. They worked till dusk with a tenacity that Brumbaugh had not seen before.

Mother and father would take their hoes and start blocking, each to his own row. Behind Mr. Takemoto crawled his elder son, thinning the clumps. Behind Mrs. Takemoto crawled the seven-year-old girl, thinning her row. All day the baby watched the workers, pulling away any half-rooted plants they had missed. Since the parents could block a little faster than the children could thin, at the end of each row the elders would put down their hoes, drop to their knees and thin back down the row till they met their children. At each such meeting there would be a brief pause while the parents brushed away dirt from the round little faces or said something reassuring. Then it was back to the hoes and the thinning.

From March through October, there was no spoken communication between Potato Brumbaugh and this remarkable family. In pantomime he would show them what he wanted; after that they took charge, and by mid-September it was pretty clear that he stood a good chance of winning the championship again.

He told his son, “Kurt, the best thing you ever did for Central Beet was to bring in the Takemotos. One of them is worth six Russians. No wonder Japan won the war.”

And then he noticed two chilling things. The Takemotos were obviously acquiring money, and they were looking at land. How could they get hold of that much money? When Brumbaugh had allowed them a small plot by the river, he expected they would grow a few vegetables for their own use; instead, they had cultivated the land with extreme frugality, depositing on it all the Takemoto sewage, and were producing so many fine vegetables that Mrs. Takemoto was peddling the surplus through the village.

Where did they find time to do this? From sunup to sundown they worked in Brumbaugh’s fields, but they rose an hour early and in the darkness tended their vegetables, and in the moments after sunset they did not sit around resting after that day’s work. All five of them were down by the river, watering and hoeing and cultivating. When Brumbaugh indicated in sign language, “In America we don’t use human manure,” Mr. Takemoto replied in excited gestures, “In Japan we do, long, long time.”

“Well, quit doing it here!” Brumbaugh indicated, and they did. Each morning when they came to work and each night when they went home, the Takemotos carried a bag in which they gathered horse manure, or any other that had fallen, and their garden flourished.

On Saturday afternoons and Sundays, Mrs. Takemoto, accompanied by her son, who was picking up a few words of English, trailed through town, offering her enormous vegetables for sale and accumulating cash, which the family deposited at the local bank.

“They come in here every Saturday morning,” the banker told Brumbaugh, “and without saying a word they plop their money down and I give them a slip. He checks it and she checks it and then they check it a third time with me, and then they write something in their gobbledygook and they bow and go out.”

What really frightened Brumbaugh was that on Sundays the Takemotos, all five of them, inspected farms in the region. He saw them first one hot day in September, the father kneeling in the soil of the old Stacey place, the mother checking the irrigation gate, the children playing with stones. In August they were up at the Limeholder place at the end of the English Ditch, inspecting the soil and the water. Later he saw them at the abandoned Stretzel farm, beyond Otto Emig’s excellent land, and in October, when the beets were topped and delivered and Brumbaugh was on his way to another championship, the ax fell.

Takemoto and his wife, and the three children, appeared at the Brumbaugh ranch, bowing low. Mrs. Takemoto, who apparently handled-the money, placed a bankbook before Potato, and by means of gestures easily understood, indicated that they had decided to buy the Stretzel farm. They sought help from him in arranging the legal details.

Brumbaugh was seventy-eight that October and he feared that he had not the strength to break in a new set of help or till the fields himself. He judged it terribly unfair that this family had stayed with him less than a year, and he needed them more now than he had in March. He was tired, and there had been frightening spells of dizziness. A prudent man would quit the farm and the irrigation board and retire to Denver to live in ease, but to Potato this was simply not an option. He loved the soil, the flow of water, even the sight of deer in the far fields eating their just share of the crops. He had taken this once-barren land and made a garden of it, plowing back year after year the beet tops which helped keep it strong. Some farmers, eager for the last penny, sold their beet tops to Jim Lloyd as forage for his Herefords, but Brumbaugh would not consider this. “The tops belong to the soil,” he told young farmers. “Plow them back and keep the land happy. Cart manure from the ranches. Everything depends on the soil.”

It had been Brumbaugh who devised the clever system of importing boxcar loads of bat manure from the recently discovered deposits at the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. This new-type fertilizer was dry and compact and easy to handle. It was also preternaturally rich in mineral deposits; where it was used, crops grew.

Because of his own preoccupation with manure and its relationship to land, Brumbaugh had followed carefully the efforts of the Takemotos to enrich their soil, and whereas he had not always approved of their methods, he did applaud their determination. Therefore, when Takemoto sought his help in finding a farm for himself, Brumbaugh was ready to assist.

He loaded the family into a wagon and drove them to town. The banker, whose wife had for some time been buying vegetables from Mrs. Takemoto, said judiciously, “These people have a fine reputation, Potato. Look like top-quality risks. But they don’t begin to have enough money to make a down payment on the Stretzel place.”

Of the Takemotos, only the six-year-old son had acquired any mastery of English, and now he stepped forward as the interpreter. Jabbering in Japanese, he explained to his father that the banker could not lend the missing funds, then listened as his father spoke with terrible intensity.

Turning to the banker, the boy said, “He not want money you. “He want money him,” and the child pointed directly at Brumbaugh.

“Me?” This was too much. The family was deserting him, and they wanted him to finance their flight. “No!” he roared. “You leave me alone ... helpless. Then you want me to pay ...”

When the child interpreted this, it had a profound effect on Mr. Takemoto. Ignoring the banker, he turned to face Brumbaugh and his eyes misted. He spoke directly to Potato in Japanese, as if he knew the Russian would understand, and he made walking gestures with his fingers, and after a while the child broke in and said, “We not leave you,” and he made the same walking gestures across the banker’s desk, saying, “We walk thin beets you. We walk thin beets us.”

Brumbaugh understood. This incredible family was proposing that for the next year they would work two farms—Brumbaugh’s during the good hours, their own during the dark—and to accomplish this they were prepared to trudge twice a day the miles between.

This was in the fall of 1905, when the Russo-Japanese bitterness had not yet subsided, but in Centennial the two men looked carefully at each other, an aging Russian who had known great success in this land, a bulldog little Japanese who longed for a chance to equal it, and each knew he could trust the other. If Takemoto said he would tend Brumbaugh’s beets, he would, and after a while the Russian said to the banker, “Call Merv Wendell in here,” and in a few minutes the prosperous real estate broker joined them.

“Merv,” Brumbaugh said, “two months ago you quoted me a price of four thousand dollars on the Stretzel farm. I offered you three-five, and you said you thought they’d take three-seven. Well, Mr. Takemoto here is offering you three-seven as of this minute, and, Merv, I don’t want him to suffer any fancy business at your hands.”