Horse of a Different Color (17 page)

“Lard compound! What’s that?” he asked.

Before I could answer, Irene told him, “Land sakes alive, George, you’d ought to know that! It’s bucket lard. Some of the buckets have ‘Pure Leaf Lard’ on ’em in big letters shaped like a rainbow, with a maple leaf inside the arch and ‘Beef suet added’ printed in little bitsy letters down underneath. Others of ’em have ‘Lard Compound’ on the bucket and don’t mention the suet, but it’s all the same thing.”

“I’ve got some out in the Maxwell that I made this morning,” I told her. “I’d like to bring it in and have you see if it’s good enough to take down to Omaha for a sample.” Actually, I was so proud of the shortening I’d made that I was more anxious to show it off than to get her opinion.

As I started to leave the table George told me, “There’ll be time enough for that after breakfast. Lard’s lard, but if it was me goin’ down there I’d take along a bucket of this sausage to show the man.”

He put another bite of it into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully a moment or two, and said, “No, by jingo, I wouldn’t neither! Sausage is kind of like chuckwagon pudd’n; a man can’t tell much about it by the looks; to find out if it’s good or not he’s got to taste it. I’d take my sample to the man the same way you fetched this over here, hot in the fry pan, so’s’t he could get a smell of the sage and a taste of the ginger. Like Charley Frickey told you, you’ll have an uphill haul to get that contract away from the established butchers, and it’s a heap easier to make a deal with a man when he’s got a good taste in his mouth.”

“Supposing I could get a good taste in his mouth, how low do you think I’d have to bid to make a deal?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “like John Bivans told you, biddin’ on this contract is like sittin’ in on a poker game. Nobody can tell you what kind of a hand you’ll draw, or what to bet on it; every man has to depend on his own judgment in a poker game. So far, you don’t know if the railroad would even take a bid from anybody that ain’t a’ready got a butcher shop, or if the man that makes the contracts would allow any change from straight pork chops and regulation sausage. It’s my guess that you’ll find the first fence the highest one to jump, but if you get over it I wouldn’t doubt me you could dicker with the man to change the contract any way that’s reasonable—that is, if he could save money for the railroad by it. At a right price I don’t reckon you’d have a bit of trouble gettin’ lard compound included, and I don’t believe he’d care a tinker whether it was pork chops or cutlets. There’s always lots of Mexicans on railroad gangs, so they’d ought to like this sausage first rate.”

“In that case, and if I could get my bills paid every week, I believe I could make a good profit on sixteen cents straight across the board,” I told him.

“Wouldn’t surprise me none,” he said, “but if I was in your boots I’d go over my arithmetic mighty careful before I bid it. But when I was dead-sure of my figures I’d push all my chips out onto the table at one swipe; a good strong bluff’s the only way to win a big pot with a weak hand, and yours ain’t much better’n two pairs.”

George pushed his chair back, got to his feet, and said, “Well, that’s about all I know to tell you, son, and with two carloads of hogs to ship today I reckon you want to get an early start; Irene’ll look at that lard sample outside.”

While Irene looked at the compound, tasted it, asked how I’d got it so white, and questioned me about the proportions I’d used, George opened the sausage sample and examined it carefully. He didn’t say anything until I’d cranked the Maxwell, warmed up the engine, and was ready to go. Then he leaned an elbow on the door beside me and said, “Don’t know as I’d tell the man—or anybody else—just what all was in my sausage, but in the raw stuff he’ll see the beef anyways, so I’d let on about its bein’ there right off the bat, and the reason for it. A man that’s smart enough to be at the head of that department is smart enough to know you’ve got to cut the corners close to make a low bid, and he’ll think more of you for comin’ right out and sayin’ so. Good luck to you, boy.”

As soon as I got home I cut what was left of the pork shoulder into inch-thick slices and trimmed out a half dozen cutlets to look as much as possible like chops. After wrapping them in waxed paper I put them in a small tight-lidded bucket, then stowed them in the ice tub with the farmers’ packages, a quart jar of raw sausage, and the lard compound sample. I took me until mid-afternoon to clean up after my experimenting, scrub the bunkhouse, shave, and take a bath, so most of the farmers were waiting with their hogs when I got to Oberlin. As each wagon load was weighed in and I paid the man I gave him a package of sausage, simply saying it was the kind my mother used to make when I was a boy.

In making the deals for those hogs I’d taken only what I judged to be 225-pounders, so that two hundred of them would cost about $2700 and leave 10 per cent of my trading fund in the bank. But my judgment had been awfully poor or those hogs had grown like toadstools since I’d seen them; they scaled in at over 49,000 pounds and cost nearly $2950. That, together with the amount I’d spent on the sausage experiment, left my bank balance just a few cents above twenty-one dollars. I couldn’t set out to get the railroad contract in blue jeans with absolutely empty pockets, so just before the train pulled out I cashed a check for twenty dollars, filled my tub with fresh ice, and set it in the caboose.

18

Making My Bid

T
HE STOCK TRAIN
on the main line was even shorter than the one on Christmas, and I was the only shipper to travel with his stock, so had the stockmen’s caboose to myself. Sunday was hot but the short train made fast time and the stops were long. I refilled my barrels and wet my hogs seven or eight times, and doubt that any one of them drew a panting breath.

I’d brought my butchering book along, and spent most of Saturday night rechecking yield figures. They showed that if I could hold my overhead to 25 per cent and livestock prices remained unchanged, there would be good profit in the contract at an across-the-board price of fifteen cents a pound. Sunday morning I began going over arguments I’d use to convince the commissary chief to award me the contract, and his probable arguments against it. It became almost a game, and I spent every minute I wasn’t lugging water and wetting hogs in carrying on both sides of imaginary arguments and dickering with the head of the CB&Q’s commissary department.

When the train pulled into the Omaha stockyards on Fourth of July morning my agent, Matt Quinlan, was there to meet it. He’d arranged for my hogs to be held over the holiday in shaded pens where there’d be a little breeze from the Missouri, and had a man on duty to feed and keep an eye on them.

After we’d unloaded and penned the hogs Matt walked back to the caboose with me, and as we talked I fished my two glass jars and bucket of samples out of the icy water in the tub. He was naturally curious, so I told him the whole story, saying that I’d shipped my hogs to Omaha in hope of getting an interview with the head of the CB&Q’s commissary department. I couldn’t have picked a better man to tell it to, for Matt knew all about the Q’s method of handling meat contracts for their construction crews. He told me that the chief of commissary operations had his office in Chicago, that the man to see in Omaha was Emmet Donovan, a neighbor of his, and that he’d get me an appointment for Tuesday morning. Matt wanted to take me to the doubleheader ball game that afternoon, but I had to get myself some respectable clothes before the appointment, and I wanted to look around the secondhand equipment stores, so I told him I’d take a rain check until my next trip.

When I shipped to Omaha I’d always eaten in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the depot, and the owner, Spiro Gusko, had become my friend. As soon as my hogs had been fed I took my samples to the restaurant and asked Spiro if he’d keep them in his icebox for me until next morning. He sat with me while I ate breakfast, so of course I had to tell him what the samples were for. When I mentioned setting up a butcher shop he became wildly excited, insisting that I must hire his brother Nick. According to Spiro, there was nothing in the world that Nick couldn’t do, except to speak good English. Although he was careful not to say so, it was evident that Nick had come to this country to escape service in the Greek army. He’d served out his apprenticeship to one of the largest building contractors in the old country, but because he couldn’t speak English the only work he’d been able to get since coming to Omaha was in packing plants, and he’d been laid off when the livestock market collapsed. To calm Spiro I said we’d talk more about it if I got the meat contract.

After taking a room at the stockmen’s hotel, I set out to see what could be done with twenty dollars to make me presentable for calling on Mr. Donovan. Most of the pawn shops in the stockyards district were open and I found some real good bargains. For fifteen dollars I got a pair of dress shoes nearly new, a pair of gray wool pants that showed very little wear, a brown jacket that fitted pretty well in the shoulders, a white shirt, a bow tie, a pair of socks, a white handkerchief, and a stiff-brimmed straw hat. I found a tailor who lengthened the pants legs and jacket sleeves for a dollar, and on the way back to the hotel I got a two-bit haircut. When I’d taken a bath and changed clothes I didn’t look too bad in my city-slicker outfit.

I’d worn jeans, jumper, and brogans so long that I didn’t feel comfortable in city clothes, so wore my new outfit only to go uptown and watch the Fourth of July parade for half an hour. After I’d changed back I set out to hunt secondhand fixture stores where I could buy what I’d need for setting up a shop in case I got the meat contract. The secondhand stores were closed, but in nearly every window there was a heavy-duty meat grinder powered by an electric motor. A man could make as much sausage in an hour with one of those machines as he could make in a week with a hand grinder, but they’d be of no use to me because we had no electricity at Cedar Bluffs. My grinder would have to be powered by a gasoline engine requiring a tricky setup. To protect the meat from dust and flies, the grinder must be inside the house, and to protect the user from carbon monoxide fumes the engine would have to be outside.

It seemed to me that the best way to make the setup would be to run a drive shaft through the wall of the house, but it would have to be perfectly balanced and aligned to eliminate vibration. I couldn’t do the job myself, and didn’t dare trust it to any blacksmith in Oberlin or McCook. What I needed was an expert machinist who had a well-equipped shop, but whose business was small enough that he’d take such a job at a reasonable price and do it in a reasonable time.

I stumbled onto the right man for the job when taking a shortcut back to the hotel. His shop was in an alley, and except for a space at the front it was crowded with secondhand machines of all sorts. Just inside the window there was a metal lathe and workbench, and a man who looked to be in his late sixties was fitting a bearing to the drive wheel of a band saw. I stood watching him for maybe five minutes, but he was so absorbed in his careful scraping and fitting that he didn’t notice me. During the war I’d worked as a carpenter, and was mechanic enough to know an expert when I saw one, so went in to ask if he’d make me the grinding equipment I had in mind, and what he’d charge for it. He didn’t pay any attention to me or look up from the bearing until it fitted perfectly, and in the fifteen minutes or so I stood waiting I had a chance to do some thinking.

If the temperature dropped to near zero when Bob and I were butchering, meat froze so stiff that it couldn’t be cut with a knife, but it sawed like soft wood. It occurred to me that if carcasses were thoroughly chilled a band saw would cut through meat and bones as easily as through knotty lumber. If so, it would speed up cutting steaks and chops as much as a power grinder would speed up sausage making. The only difficulty I could think of was that it would be almost impossible to push a heavy piece of meat past the blade steadily enough to cut steaks of uniform thickness. That, I believed, could be overcome by a sledlike carrier with runners sliding back and forth in oiled grooves. But the piece would have to be moved forward each time and lined up perfectly straight for the next cut. I was trying to figure out some way of moving and lining it up automatically when the old machinist demanded gruffly, “Vell, vot after you kommt?”

I told him that I might be going into the meat business in a place where there was no electricity, so would have to power my grinder with a gasoline engine outside the house. I’d just started explaining my idea for making the hookup by means of a drive shaft through the wall when the old German cut in, “Nein! Nein! Ver ist de vindow? Ver ist de vindow?” As he spoke he stepped to the workbench, took a pad of yellow paper and a pencil from one of the drawers, and pushed them toward me.

I marked out a rectangle to represent the east wall of the kitchen, and drew diagonal lines from each corner to indicate side walls, floor, and ceiling. More to let him see my skill as a draftsman than for any other reason, I sketched in a big icebox door at the center of the north wall, the back door near the left side of the east wall, and a window well to the right.

In less than two minutes that gruff old man made my sketching look like a first grader’s work. With a few deft strokes of the pencil he drew the corner of the room, sketching the window with broken lines to indicate a transparent outer wall. Butted tightly into the corner he drew a thick-topped workbench, with the front portion extending about three feet out through the window. Atop this outside shelf he drew what was unmistakably the engine hood of a model T Ford, with the crank handle hanging down at the front. Projecting below the shelf he sketched the transmission housing, with the drive shaft extending under the bench to a gear box six feet inside the room.

As if suspended above the bench top, he drew a meat grinder head, also with a gear box, from which a square shank extended downward. In English so strongly spiced with German that I could hardly understand it, he explained that this would permit the grinder to be removed when not in use, or set to discharge onto the bench or into a container on the floor. The controls for the rebuilt Ford engine, he told me, would be just inside the window, so the speed could be regulated easily, the drive shaft disengaged, or its direction reversed.

If the man had been less ingenious I might have gone no further with the idea of slicing meat with a band saw. But I was almost certain that he could work out a means of moving a large piece of meat past the blade in such a way that uniform slices could be cut semi-automatically. He agreed that a band saw would cut chilled meat and bone without difficulty if a fine-toothed blade were used, and he liked the idea of a carriage mounted on runners, but could think of no way to move the meat up to the blade so as to make uniform slices. Neither could he give me a price on the grinder setup, but said he would have it for me the next afternoon, and that he’d think more about the band saw problem in the meantime.

I didn’t go to Spiro’s for supper, but stopped by the stockyards to be sure my hogs had been fed, listened to a band concert in the park for an hour or so, and went to bed early. From long habit I woke at dawn, and was in the stockyards by four-thirty, but Matt Quinlan didn’t show up until six. He said he’d made me an eight o’clock appointment with Mr. Donovan, but that he already had a nineteen-cent bid, including pork chops.

While waiting for Matt I’d watched every carload of stock that arrived, but there were very few hogs; most of them heavyweights of only fair quality. Certain there would be a shortage of top-grade bacon hogs, I told Matt to hold mine back until the supply was exhausted, then I set out for the hotel at a run. I shaved, took a bath, rigged myself out of my city clothes, and was at Spiro’s restaurant by seven-thirty. The place was crowded and Spiro was watching for me. I was barely inside when he rushed from the kitchen, yammering at me about hiring his brother Nick. To keep him quiet I said, “Okay, Spiro. You let me fry some sausage in your kitchen and I’ll hire Nick if I get the contract.”

At ten minutes of eight I set off for my appointment, carrying a jar of raw sausage and a package of pork cutlets under one arm, a jar of shortening under the other, and a napkin-covered plate of hot sausage patties in my hands. The CB&Q building was little more than a block from the restaurant, and I had no trouble in finding the right office; the door was marked COMMISSARY DEPARTMENT, and under it in smaller letters, Emmet F. Donovan. It was a rather large office with a dozen or more clerks, a wide aisle between two rows of desks, and a closed door at the far end of it. When I told the nearest clerk my name and that I had an eight o’clock appointment with Mr. Donovan he pointed a thumb over his shoulder and told me, “The door back there. Knock before you go in.”

When I knocked a hearty voice called, “Come in.”

I’d tucked the stiff brim of my hat under the plate, to hold both with one hand, but when I turned the doorknob with the other the jar of shortening nearly slipped out from under my arm. I made a frantic grab to catch it, lurched against the door and swung it wide open. A big ruddy-faced man was sitting behind a desk at the center of the room, and there was a trace of brogue in the words when he sang out, “Have a care, lad! Looks like you’ve got both hands full and your britches to hold up.”

I knew instantly that I’d found a friend and a man with good solid common sense, so decided to lay my cards face-up on the table right away. “I sure have,” I told him as I slid the plate, package, and jars onto his desk, “but no other man ever had his hands so full and his pockets so empty. That’s why I’ve come to see you instead of mailing in a bid. I’m dead broke and in debt up to my ears, with neither a slaughterhouse nor butcher’s shop, but I want the meat contract for the Beaver Valley job, and if you’ll give me ten minutes of your time I’ll bet you a hat you’ll give me the contract.”

“I could use a hat,” he said. “Have a chair.”

I took the napkin off the plate, pushed it toward him, and said, “First I’d like you to taste a bite of this sausage if you will. It’s the kind my mother used to make when I was a kid on the ranch, and our neighbors liked it better than any other kind. I didn’t bring it here to try and fool you. There’s some cow beef in it.”

He reached for the fork without much enthusiasm, and told me, “a bit of pork helps canner-cow hamburger, but I’m thinking that cow beef would ruin pork sausage.”

As he said it, he cut off a scrap from a patty, put it into his mouth, and looked up at me with a surprised expression. “Not bad! Not bad at all, at all,” he said. “What’s in it besides beef and pork?” Then he reached for a larger bite.

Instead of answering, I told him I was the cattle trader at Cedar Bluffs, that one of the McCook butchers had told me he wasn’t going to bid on the contract, and why. “Matt Quinlan tells me you already have a bid of nineteen cents,” I said. “If the man who made it has a butcher shop near enough that washout to handle the fresh meat business, the chances are ten to one that he buys livestock from me. At that price I’ll make you a bet that he aims to supply you meat from the cheapest old canner cows and worn-out brood sows I can find for him—meat so tough and strong you’d be ashamed to give it to your dog.”

Then I explained why I thought the job could be done far more economically by using good-grade stock. “To get the contract, I’ll shade the nineteen-cent price considerably,” I said, “and guarantee to supply tender meat from young hogs and grass-fat heifers, but the contract will have to call for pork cutlets instead of chops, and for sausage per sample submitted. I’m gambling that the men will like this kind of sausage well enough to eat it at other meals than breakfast. If a quarter of the meat for the job was sausage, and I supplied lard compound like this sample, I could use most of my fatback and beef trimmings, and wouldn’t have much left over to get rid of at give-away prices.”