I don’t know where they found a chain of that size: maybe a ship yard. Links the size of a football. The dozers would stay parallel with each other, say . . . 40 feet apart at the blades. And they’d drag that chain about knee to waist height right through the grove: uprooting old gnarled dead citrus trees like they were dandelions.
Those dead trees were just getting’ piled up out of the way: we’re talkin’ thousands of acres of orange and grapefruit, that hadn’t done squat since late February of 1946.
The Hidalgo Company, owned by Russian immigrants buyin’ up farmland in the Valley like it were groceries, was clearing out the way for sugar. They had to get it done by October; because that’s when cane is gathered and hauled for refining. And the Hidalgo’s already had the most sugarcane in the state of Texas . . . so they’d need all hands on deck for the harvest. Cane will ferment if you don’t get it all to the mill right away. Sugarcane gets cut in October, planted in January. And every other year they burn off the trash left behind after the stalks are cut . . . and then they plow the whole mess under.
The dozers, just two of ‘em, were working 12 hours a day to push the citrus trees onto the old Sullivan farm. This was goin’ on for a couple of weeks until the town folk started getting bent out of shape about all the dust and the rattlesnakes. I guess all that vibration from those bulldozers would scare out the rattlesnakes. And that’s how I got my first real summer job.
I walked up to the little camper trailer that the foreman had parked up next to the old Sullivan place. The Hidalgo’s had re-routed the telephone line right into the trailer. I remember thinking that was pretty slick. When I knocked on the little door and he stood there lookin’ down at me I immediately went into my sales pitch. And in three minutes I had talked my way into a real sweet deal. The foreman agreed to pay me, something like 15 cents, for every rattlesnake I killed out in the citrus groves. Maybe it was even a quarter, I don’t remember; but I ended up with seventy dollars by the time school started up again.
I’d walk in between those two dozers and keep my eyes peeled for snakes. When one would come shooting out of a hole: I’d whack it in the head with a stick and stun it for a few seconds. I’d cut off the head and the rattle with a bowie. I’d bury the head, you know, to be decent. And then stick the rattle in my pocket to turn into the foreman later. He’d toss the rattles in a big pickled egg jar and at the end of the Summer we’d count ‘em up and settle up.
Like I said, I made seventy dollars that Summer. And never had so much fun in my life. When the dozers were done there was a mound of upturned citrus trees about four stories high and covering a hundred acres or so. You’ve never seen anything like it. The dozers were loaded up on flatbeds and the phone line had been disconnected from the little trailer. The foreman had gone down to the bank and bought me a flour sack full of silver dollars. When I showed up to the trailer to count the rattles he came right out the little door and tossed that sack at me . . . and laid me out in the driveway flat.
Paid me in silver: just like Judas. Except I was killin’ snakes.
I asked if I could have the rattles too. And he gave ‘em to me without a fuss. I took my sack of dollars and that jar of rattles home. And Pa took both from me as soon as I walked in the door. He reckoned that a nine year old had no real use for either.
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