America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF

little house in an apple orchard right in town. He was reputed to be a miser. My father had a feed store at that time and this man used to buy five pounds of middlings, which is somewhere between flour and bran. Every week he bought middlings and apparently that is all he bought. That is what the family ate, middlings and apples.
    First the daughter died and a year later the wife died. The doctor who signed the certificates was said to have said, four times removed, that they had died of starvation. And now our miser was living all alone in his dark house in his dark orchard.
    Naturally he was a pushover for us kids. We used to creep up close to his window at night and peek in at him sitting beside a kerosene lamp writing in a big ledger. Every once in a while he would stand up and make a speech to no one at all. We could hear his voice and see his gestures but could not make out his words. Then we discovered a delightful thing. If he sat still too long we could stir him up by knocking gently and in a ghostly manner on the wall. He would leap to his feet and deliver great speeches, waving his arms and shaking his fist while his face contorted with emotion and saliva dripped from his mouth. If we worked him over for quite a while, we could sometimes get him rolling on the floor. There was always something to do in Salinas.
    Then one day he was gone and we were very sad because we thought he had gone away. But he hadn’t. He was inside there and in about ten days somebody found him and the coroner had to take him away in a rubber blanket and spray the house with creosote.
    Well, gold fever ran through us. We dug holes at the roots of every apple tree in his orchard. We got a window open and searched the house, holding handkerchiefs over our noses. The big ledger was there and we could make out sentences like “Go good god goodly like liver line god do devil darn dawn.” It didn’t make any sense except to a psychiatrist and they hadn’t been invented. Anyway we tried to find secret hiding places, rapped on the walls and even took up some floor boards. Finally we had to give it up. Then a distant relative looked in a place we had neglected, under the sink in the elbow of the U-trap. He found a flour bag containing eight thousand dollars in gold. I still get the shudders when I think we might have found it. It would have changed our whole lives and our parents’ lives.
    Salinas had a nice balance of lodges—Elks for the gay men, Woodmen of the World, Knights of Pythias and, later, Knights of Columbus. We were a Masonic family, my father a Mason and my mother an Eastern Star. My father was a medium Mason, not as high a degree as some and higher than many. There must have been some ceremonies that were semipublic because I can remember clearly Louis Schneider, the local butcher, red-faced and short and fat and with a handlebar mustache. I can see him now sitting on a throne, I think it must have been of the order of the Royal Arch. He wore a royal robe with an artificial ermine collar and on his head was a golden crown studded with gems about the size of half chicken eggs. Louis’ blue serge trouser cuffs and box-toed shoes were the only unregal things about him.
    Salinas had a destiny beyond other towns. The rich black land was one thing, but the high gray fog and coolish to cold weather which gave it a lousy climate created the greatest lettuce in the world, several crops a year and at a time when no other lettuce in the United States matured. The town named itself The Salad Bowl of the World and the refrigerator cars moved in a steady stream out of the railroad yards toward Chicago and New York. Long packing sheds lined the tracks and the local iceman who had used to bring a fifty-pound block on his shoulder for ice cream made a vast fortune.
    The need for labor became great. We brought in Filipinos to cut and chop the lettuce and there were interesting results. No Filipino women were allowed in