Читать книгу Folded Hills - Stewart Edward White - Страница 10

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The two years required by Djo to become a dependable personality were contented years for Andy Burnett. The life and interests of the ranch satisfied him completely. He had a wife whom he loved increasingly; a fine young son; a grant of beautiful land; an increasing stock of cattle and horses; a comfortable house of the kind that obviously absorbs tradition quickly; a whole community of almost feudal retainers; friendly and congenial, though somewhat distant, neighbors; a dependable and beloved man friend not too far away. In addition to these things he possessed what the californios did not, an experimental nature. He was not content with things as they had always been, no matter how comfortable or how adequate to this simple and charming life these things were. His grain fields in the bottomlands, guarded by wide ditches in lieu of fences, proved astonishingly productive. He grubbed the sagebrush from a side hill, and on it planted grapes which he procured from Father Duran at the mission of San José. The vineyard interested him. Hearing from Father Duran of one Luis Vighnes who had come to Los Angeles in ’31, and who had there planted a great vineyard with the purpose of making wine, he sent to him a courier with a letter; and received a reply; and so began a lively correspondence the perusal of which, even today, delights the historian by its mixture of shrewd practicality as to technical details and its quaintness of magniloquent phraseology; for Andy was American, and Luis Vighnes was French; and they met in Spanish. The fact that each exchange required a ride by someone of sixty leagues each way was not permitted to interfere with the correspondence. Some day, Andy resolved, he would himself go south to visit Luis Vighnes; but just now he was too busy.

Andy had dozens of irons in the fire whose fashioning had never occurred to the easy-going, simple-living californios. There was the matter of the wheat, for example. It had always been the custom to supply personal needs by crushing the grain—procured, generally, from the nearest mission—by hand, in stone metates, with a pestle of the same material. After that it was cleaned by tossing in a basket, and sifted through a coarse sieve. The process was laborious and the resultant flour coarse and full of grit. Andy tried to evoke from his boyhood recollections how millstones had been rigged. He experimented for some months, with very moderate success. The flour produced by his rude contraptions was even coarser and grittier than that made in the metates. Vicenta, as a privileged character, openly mocked his efforts to invade what she considered a distinctly feminine field.

“Leave the priest to say Mass,” she advised him.

But Andy was obstinate. And one afternoon he was recalled from his absorbed contemplation of his latest effort by a deep-throated chuckle, and looked up to see a thickset bearded man, his sturdy legs apart, his head to one side, his hands behind his back, eyeing him sardonically.

The man was of a type familiar enough in that day. For one reason or another, ranging from ill treatment to the fascination of the country, sailors were always deserting from their ships. Until the vessel had sailed they were hunted by the vaqueros for the offered reward; but thereafter they were safe enough. Some of them, of initiative and independence, became accepted in time as citizens, over the left shoulder, as it were, for rarely was their status legalized. Of such was John Gilroy, who already was a ranchero. Others, the majority, skulked from rancho to rancho, or gravitated to the gangs of such men as Isaac Graham, who made whiskey at Natividad; a sort of outlaw tolerated until they became a nuisance.

“What do you know about this?” Andy demanded.

“Everything,” replied the man, without surprise, for everybody knew of the hidalgo-americano. “I used to be a miller before I took to the sea.”

“Take hold,” said Andy.

The result was a six-mule-power mill that turned out from ten to twenty barrels of passable flour per day. Andy’s grain fields were justified; for he sent the product to Monterey, where he found a market in the visiting ships, and occasionally to the north when a vessel called on the Russians. Abel Means, the sailor, became a fixture at Folded Hills: and after Andy lost the first keenness of his interest, as he did in every problem solved, gradually took supervision of the business. He ground flour for the ranchos and the haciendas, even for some of the missions, on the basis of equal division; half the flour for him who brought the grain, half for the mill. It is significant that up to that time Andy had not thought of making a charge for this service, but performed it as a matter-of-course neighborly convenience.

The dairy was the result of Vicenta’s demand one day for milk to supplement Djo’s natural diet. She got the milk; but four men were required to do the milking, three of them mounted. One held the distracted cow by a reata about the head; the second stretched her by means of a reata about both hind legs; the third’s job was to keep off the calf. The man afoot milked with one hand into a cup held in the other. Everybody else connected with the rancho was present as spectator. Andy could see no sense in all that fuss over so simple a matter; nor, when he stopped to think of it, did he see why a place that supported fifteen or more thousands of head of cattle should not also have butter and cheese and cream. To be sure, nobody else had these luxuries habitually; and Panchito assured him it was no great trouble to the vaqueros to milk as many wild cows as might be necessary; but Andy insisted. The lactiferas were held apart, and fed, and gradually gentled, and at length placed in charge of Benito’s eldest, who proved to have a flair for dairy matters. This set Benito up enormously. In the old order, at the hacienda, the gardener, the keeper of the milpas, was no great shakes in the hierarchy of esteem. His function was humble and subsidiary. But here, what with the expansion of the grain and milling, and the vineyards on the side hill, and now this dairy business, Benito began to perk up. However, he would never have dreamed of openly arrogating to himself any importance. His disposition was much too kindly and easy-going. But he adored Andy, and so became the ranchero’s head man when it was a question of innovation; just as Panchito, the vaquero, was his head man when the old order was to do.

As a matter of fact, barring minor improvements of method here and there, the flour business and the dairy business and the wineries yet in the making were the only really important departures from the traditional pastoral life. Unless one counts the flower garden. On second thought, that should be counted; for in time it became of equal importance with the others in deflecting travelers toward Folded Hills. To be sure, most houses of the better class had the customary patio fountain with its surrounding of vines and shrubs and flowers. But the outsides had invariably been left blank and bare in almost fortress-like simplicity, so that the dust of the dry season powdered the doorsteps, and the ground squirrels burrowed and chirked to the very walls, and the bones of the cattle slaughtered for domestic use lay in the wide white ring of a semicircle. Andy had, when the casa had been built, overthrown all tradition by preserving the great live-oaks. Every other ranch house in California stood stark and bare and naked on its hill. The custom had had its use of defense in the earlier days, but the necessity had passed. Now he was impelled further by the nostalgic recollection of a ruined garden before the prim old Pennsylvania farmhouse of his boyhood, his only link with a mother who had died so young that all memory of her had gone.

So, though he knew nothing of gardens and the gentle growing things, he had made for himself a dooryard with flowers, and led water cunningly through conduits of stone for its refreshment. Far and wide he sent for new plants and shrubs and vines. It was a curious hodge-podge at first, for Andy’s instinctive desire far outran his feeling for detail. He was a mountain man at heart; a runner of the wilderness; and in such matters his spiritual fingers were awkward and fumbling. But Carmel had the quick Latin eye for beauty, and Benito the growing hand. So Andy had his garden, vivid and glowing in its seasons; and so this happy time of his life was linked back across the years to his origins, and some mysterious reaching of his soul was contented. In the cool of the evening, after the long riding in the hills, he loved to stroll with his pipe, absorbing some instinctive satisfaction from the garden. He knew nothing of the detail of plant or shrub; their variety had passed beyond his recognitions. It was the blended gentle harmony of the whole that entered his spirit. Benito and Carmel talked earnestly together of this or that. He was told names, and promptly forgot them. He liked the bright colors, and the perfumes, and the soft wet freshnesses. Linnets built nests in the vines; humming birds shot like bullets or poised like brilliant jewels; busy swarms of chickadees and kinglets searched with intent singleness of purpose the under sides of leaves; hordes of robins and varied thrushes raided the red toyon berries and departed, leaving bare the bushes, to the disgust of the fat towhee who had looked upon them as his winter’s supply; great flickers sat on the shingles surveying the world, occasionally drumming against the reverberating hollowness of the rooftree an absent-minded ratatat of contemplation. Andy recognized these and many others; but rather as people than as species. His classifying observation was for the practical; all other things stole into his heart by the door of feeling.