The Cotton-Pickers Read Free Page A

during the next day as we had found on this first afternoon. The bush is green, yes, the whole year through, but water is to be found only during the rainy season and then only in those spots where ponds and basins form.
    So, no one who has not himself wandered the tropical bush can possibly realize the extent of the Chink’s sacrifice. But none of us said “No, thank you.” Everyone seemed to take it quite for granted that the coffee should be shared. And we’d have taken it equally for granted had the Chink drunk all his coffee himself. Half a day’s march in waterless country isn’t enough to make you turn robber for the sake of a cup of coffee, but three days in the bush may find you thinking seriously of murder for the sake of even a small rusty can of stinking fluid called water only because it is wet.
    Antonio and I had some dry bread to munch. Gonzalo had some tortillas and four mangos. Charley had a few bananas. Abraham ate something furtively; I couldn’t see what it was.
    We made ready to sleep. The Chink put a piece of canvas on his sleeping place and then wrapped himself, head and all, in a large towel; Gonzalo rolled himself into his sarape; and I wrapped my head in a tattered rag as a protection against mosquitoes and promptly fell asleep. The others were talking and smoking around the fire and I’ve no idea when they turned in.
    Before dawn, we were on our way. The trail through the bush was overgrown for long stretches. Saplings reached more than shoulder-high and the ground was so dense with cactus shrubs that they often covered the path. My bare calves were soon so scratched up that all sorts of insects were attracted to the blood.
    Toward noon we arrived at a place where a barbed-wire fence ran along the right side of the trail and knew that we were near a farm. We kept the fence on our right, and after an hour or more arrived at a wide, open clearing overgrown with high grass. We searched the place and found a cistern — empty. A few rotten beams, some old cans, rusty corrugated iron sheets, and similar junk indicated an abandoned farm.
    This was a disappointment, but we were not disheartened by it. In this part of the world farms are carved out of the bush, worked for ten or even twenty years, and then suddenly for one reason or another are abandoned. Within five years, often sooner, the bush has obliterated all signs of the men who once lived and worked there. The tropical bush devours more quickly than men can build. The bush has no memory; it knows only the living, growing present.
    By four o’clock we got to another farm; an American family was living on it. I was well received, was given a good meal with the farmer, and was offered a place to sleep in the house. The others were fed on the patio and were allowed to sleep in a shed.
    The farmer knew Mr. Shine, and told me that we had about another thirty miles to go. He said there was no water along the route and that the road was barely recognizable in some places, as it hadn’t been used since that time three years ago. Mr. Shine now took his cotton to the Pozos station, on the other side of Ixtli…. “That place isn’t quite so far from Shine’s as the one you fellows are hiking from,” he said. “The road’s good too. At first there was no road to Pozos either, but since the oil men came they’ve made one. Now all the farmers around there use that station, and I’d advise you to take that road when you go back. By the way,” he added, “I wonder why no, one told you to go to Pozos in the first place?”
    Why? Because to the men out recruiting pickers for the cotton farmers, what did it matter how we got to the job? “Ixtlixochicuauhtepec” they wrote out, and that ended their part in the matter. What concern was it of theirs to check out the route?
    Because to the stationmaster it hadn’t occurred that it might make a difference which station he made out the ticket for, or maybe he hadn’t even known there was a choice,