Kilhaven Farms: A Story of Love and Prejudice

© 2014 Humberto G. Garcia. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/21/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7028-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7029-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7027-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014904343

Cover illustration by Sonny Heston on the front cover.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

This book is dedicated to my brother

Fernando Garcia (12-16-59) (02-04-13)

who fought a brave and courageous battle

against leukemia. He was a wonderful kid brother,

son, husband, father, grandfather and friend

to many. He will be sorely missed.

CHAPTER ONE

A s she got closer to her old hometown her heart began to race uncontrollably and her palms started perspiring profusely. She remembered the last words that her father had spoken in anger to her. It was the last time she had seen him in ten years but those hurtful words with which he pronounced her death still resonated in her mind as clearly as on that day in which she left Kilhaven Farms.

You’re dead to me, you hear? My daughter is dead! Manson Kilhaven had shouted to her.

That declaration repeated over and over in her mind as she sat in the car carrying her back home. She was Gloria Kilhaven, his thirty year old daughter, and as the car made its way closer to Hereford, Texas and closer to the father she had not seen in ten years, she wondered how a man she had grown up to know as sweet and kind could harbor such racist views that would make him utter such acerbic words.

This city in the heart of the Texas panhandle had been her home for twenty years until that fateful day in August of 1960 when her father learned of the decision she made to defy his irrational and racist objections to her choice of whom to fall in love with. When he had seen that he was not going to succeed in preventing Gloria from being with Adonis Nico Modesto, a then twenty year old Mexican-American farm worker, he became infuriated and drove himself to the point of madness such that he evicted his own blood from the farm where she had been born and was raised.

Now known as Gloria Kilhaven Modesto, and ten years older, she contemplated what his father’s reaction would be upon learning that she was married to Nico Modesto, and was the mother of his two children. As she sat quietly on the front passenger seat of their 1965 Pontiac Catalina that was taking her back to her home town, she began to wonder how it was that her father could react so drastically and extremely upon realizing that she seriously intended to be with the man he loathed solely because he was a Mexican American farm worker. Growing up on Kilhaven Farms she never realized that its otherwise kind and hardworking patriarch harbored racist and bigoted views of others who happened to be nonwhite until she fell in love with one of the hands that harvested the potato crops grown on their farm.

She was especially nervous about his reaction to her two children, Teresita, age eight, and Manny, age six. The fear that her father would reject them as his grandchildren because of their mixed blood made her distressingly anxious, more so as they travelled closer to Hereford and closer to the nursing home where he was now a resident.

They had just passed through the city of Dimmit, Texas and now only had about twenty five miles to go before arriving at the city which once boasted its claim to Kilhaven Farms, a thriving center of agriculture situated outside the city limits of Hereford, Texas just off Farm Road 1057. Nico, now known as Doctor Modesto, had done all of the driving since leaving Del Rio the day before but the adrenaline rush from anticipating the confrontation with his father-in-law kept him awake and alert.

In an effort to combat her anxiety, Gloria began to picture her father as he was back during the times when she had a positive relationship with him and when she truly enjoyed being a part of the farming operations. In the forties and fifties, their farm provided a significant portion of the potatoes, onions, carrots and cucumbers consumed by the people of north Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. She remembered fondly how he was always wearing those worn out blue jean overalls that covered his rotund belly at the center of his six foot frame. As she envisioned him in those overalls along with the worn out brown boots he wore with them constantly, she smiled.

She recalled that by 1960 Manson Kilhaven had worked very hard in his forty-eight years of life and his face and hands reflected the results of that hard work. The area around the back of his neck was leathery and wrinkled from years in the sun and his hands were as rough as sandpaper from all of the labor they had performed since he was about five years old. Despite the fact that the sun had managed to tan his face below the eyes, the milky white skin of his forehead and crown had been spared thanks to the baseball caps he wore to protect his bald head. Though he always seemed to carry a frown on his face, making everyone meeting him for the first time think he was constantly angry about something, he was usually quite pleasant with other farmers and the folks in town.

Manson’s father had been very tough on him, forcing him to do the work of adults around the farm. At age fourteen he learned to be a man when his father died but by then he knew everything there was to know about operating a farm. His mother became the owner but in name only as he handled all of the tasks required to keep the farm going. His sister’s husband would help him deal with matters that required an adult but he made all the decisions, which his mother approved without question. Gloria had been very proud of the fact that her father had been able to create such a productive farm practically on his own in the face of all that hardship.

Though he had dropped out of school when his father died, Manson possessed a keen common sense and by no means was he illiterate. He loved to read, especially before going to bed so he was in tune with the world around him and could articulate his thoughts with those better educated.

He had lost his young wife and unborn child when he was only thirty one from a complication stemming from her second pregnancy and he never considered remarrying. Though he had some friends, his principal companion had been Gloria, his only child, whom he relied on to handle what he considered the more mundane aspects of the farm operations, the accounting, bill paying and tax reporting.

A smile ran across her face as she remembered how she spent many hours riding on his lap while he drove his tractor around the fields when she was barely able to walk. She learned to drive a tractor by the time most kids her age were learning how to ride a bicycle.

At thirty years of age, Gloria still was as slim and attractive as she was at twenty when she last saw her father. Her soft milky white skin was like her father’s, that portion that was untouched by the sun, that is. She had those same pretty green eyes that her mother had and her father used to comment that he was so glad that she had inherited her good looks from her instead of the gruff features of his line of Kilhavens.

The children had never met their grandfather but had seen some pictures of him that their mother had shown them. It showed him when he was in his late twenties and early thirties when Gloria was still a little girl and followed him everywhere. Despite being disowned by him, Gloria always spoke lovingly of her father to her kids but had a difficult time explaining why he never had visited them or talked to them on the telephone. She had told them that he was very busy working on the farm all the time, or that it was so far from their home and he couldn’t travel that long a distance. The children said they understood her explanations but they sensed something was wrong though they were afraid to probe more deeply into the story behind this estrangement between their mother and grandfather.

Do you think Grandpa will be happy to see us, mommy? Teresita asked as she stood up behind Gloria’s seat and tried to place her arms around her mother’s neck from behind.

Gloria first looked at Nico who turned to her with a gaze that she read as his desire to also know the answer to that question but said nothing. I don’t know baby! She replied to her daughter. I hope he is.

In her heart she knew better than to expect an ‘open arms’ welcome from her father even though her aunt had secretly communicated to her a comment that her father made one day about a year before. He had let it slip that he missed his daughter but refused to say anything more when his sister prodded him for more expressions about Gloria. It was her aunt Martha who had written to her to let her know that her father had experienced a stroke and was now in a nursing home. She also informed her that the farm had to be sold in order to cover the expenses of his illness and his care at the nursing home. Fortunately, Martha’s husband had convinced his two brothers to join him in securing a bank loan to buy the farm and keep it in the family. In honor of her father, the uncle and his brothers kept the name so it was still known as Kilhaven Farms.

She and Nico had decided to make the trip to visit her father not knowing how he would react to them or if he would even receive them. He had spent hours trying to prepare his wife for a possible rejection by Manson.

Gloria had spent the better part of the past ten years as a housewife who devoted her time and energy to her husband and her two children. They had gotten married shortly after she involuntarily left the farm and then moved with Nico to Austin while he finished his undergraduate degree. She was by his side when he attended the University Of Texas School Of Medicine at Galveston and graduated with his medical degree. Both her children were born while Nico was a medical student and she worked as a teacher’s aide to help support the family. They were now residents of the small community of Del Rio, which is located on the southwest border of Texas and Mexico where Nico had recently started his practice. Though he was also thirty years of age, the time in school and the stress of supporting a wife and children had produced some early grey hairs.

Nico glanced at his wife as a smile ran across her face. You remember when we first met, my good doctor? she asked with a hint of fondness in her voice.

I most certainly do, Mrs. Modesto. Can’t imagine I’ll ever forget, Nico replied.

Upon overhearing her parents’ conversation, Teresita asked for the story. Tell us how you and mommy met, daddy!

Yes, tell us, daddy! Manny chimed in.

Nico and Gloria looked at each other and they knew the thoughts that were going through their heads. The details were as vivid in their minds as they were back in1960 when they lived them. Without saying anything, as they were not prepared to reveal certain details to their kids, they each savored the memories of their experience ten years earlier and smiled lovingly at each other.

Ten years earlier their two different worlds existed miles apart and neither had considered any possibility that their lives would be affected by anything or anyone outside of their separate fated havens.

On that early summer morning in June of 1960, not even the darkness could hide the fact that underneath the farmer’s cap was a young woman. The moon was not much help in revealing her true features, yet in the darkness before the sun’s arrival, he sensed a charming beauty he just had to explore. She had already passed by him while atop a noisy tractor three times on this first workday of the season and each time she briefly shared her presence with him, instead of beginning the arduous labor that her efforts required of him, he stood and gazed at her until the light of the moon that was trying to assist him could no longer reveal any more clues about her.

Although there were no overt signs on her part that she acknowledged his glances, an unfamiliar feeling inside told her that there was something strikingly different about him. As the distance between them opened up, she pretended that she had not noticed him. In contrast, his glances said to her that he wanted to make sure that she was aware that he was looking and was interested in talking to her.

She was Gloria Kilhaven, the twenty-year-old farm tractor operator who was generating all the work for her admirer. By the time she made her fourth pass, the sun had made its initial appearance thereby exposing more of her essence. The light of the sun was enough to confirm that what he had noticed was worth admiring. She had light brown locks, braided and tied behind her head and protected from the dust by a red cap. The delicate milky white skin in her face permitted a generous emphasis of her bright green eyes. The blue jean coveralls she wore did nothing to betray her unquestionably feminine figure and there was no denying that on this summer morning, Nico had encountered a unique beauty he had never seen before.

Gloria had known the farming operations for most of her life, as she had been forced to be her father’s assistant in the unfortunate absence of any male siblings. She had accepted her share of the burdens of her father’s agricultural operations without ever complaining. Her father, Manson Kilhaven, became a widower when Gloria was three years old, leaving the female influence in her life to come from his sister, Martha Kilhaven Ludnecke. Instead of avoiding the rigors of farm labor, Gloria embraced every chance she got to show her father that she could handle any farm implement used in Kilhaven Farms as well as any chore required of her. In fact, she had become the best hand employed by Manson in his potato fields located just outside the City of Hereford, Texas.

Today, both Gloria and her admirer were toiling on the field that was part of the farm that her grandfather had established and which her father now controlled. From atop the old International Harvester tractor she operated she had a clear view of the subject that had made an initial impression on her. As she maneuvered the old tractor through the rows of potatoes growing in the field, the noise it made served to announce her approach to his position.

The tractor dragged a unique farm implement commonly called a digger which exposed the crop at harvest time by digging into the earth when the potatoes had matured. The rows it dug into were about foot high mounds of dirt that stretched the half-mile length of the field. The mounds served to incubate and protect the starchy tubers from the elements, especially the sun. The summer months meant that the crops were ready for market but exposing and releasing them from the bonds of the ground required that it be done in the coolness of the morning or late evening light when the enemy, the sun, could not take advantage of the roots’ sensitivities. To accomplish this meant starting the workday at a quarter to six when the sun was still in its slumber.

The digger was a marvel of modern technology in its time. In 1960, it presented a simple yet remarkably efficient tool for extracting the quite popular and edible tubers. It had two blades in the front, which were separated by a width equal to the distance between the parallel earthen mounds on the ground. Behind each blade was a conveyor belt made up of metal rods linked together at each end, somewhat ladder-like but with a gap of about an inch between each rod. The conveyor belts looped around the front and rear ends of the main body of the digger, much like the tracks of a military tank, except that they were not involved in the locomotion of this special plow. The conveyor belts were situated parallel to each other on a small trailer-like platform consisting of a metal frame supported by an axle with a wheel on each side which allowed for its movement when pulled by the tractor. The conveyor belts were connected to a chain, which rotated the belts front to back and around the frame in a direction opposite that of the rotation of the wheels as the tractor with the digger in tow moved forward. When the blades were lowered to sit flush with the lowest level of the ground making up the mounded rows, the tractor would move forward slowly causing the blades to cut or dig into the earthen mounds. This forward movement forced the potatoes and the dirt encasing them up onto the conveyor belts where they tumbled along on their way to the rear. The rotation of the belt served two purposes. First, it separated the potatoes from the dirt, which would fall through the gaps between each rod, leaving the potatoes on top of the belt. Secondly, as the belts completed their rotation toward the rear end of the digger, the potatoes would then gently fall onto the dug up row, which by now had been flattened. All of the moving parts of both the tractor and the digger were hydraulically controlled by the operator of the tractor with the use of various levers situated at the controls by the front seat.

On this day, a rare and unexpected operator was expertly handling them, at least in the eyes of her new admirer. The way she maintained the steady and straight movement of the tractor over the earthen rows as well as the efficient way the potatoes were dug up and deposited safely on the earthen cushions below convinced him that she possessed a savvy experience and was not afraid of hard and dirty labor. It was her job to traverse in one direction with the loud digging system for the full length of the field, thus exposing two rows of her family’s principal cash crop at a time and then dig another two rows as she returned in the opposite direction. That meant she got to see the young man who had obviously noticed her, on two occasions, one going and one coming.

Her admirer was Nico Modesto, one of the pickers who had been hired to collect and bag the gems left littering the ground each time Gloria passed by on her tractor. With his athletic six feet, two inch frame the chore presented little problems despite not having the experience possessed by the other members of his crew. The bulging muscles in his arms covered by the light brown skin had not gone unnoticed by Gloria. A white and orange Texas Longhorn cap covered his rich black hair but it failed to cover his congenial smile, which Gloria returned on each trip past him.

His family had a long history of performing this type of farm labor colloquially known by the workers as los trabajos or "las piscas". Every year they would travel during the first week of June to the Texas Panhandle to begin the harvest season. However, Nico had not made the trek since he began high school five years earlier. He had caught the coach’s eye when he first took the football field as a freshman at San Felipe High School. As a reward for his talents and leadership, the coach convinced his parents to allow Nico to take a job he arranged at the coach’s parents’ lumberyard. Coach Givens convinced his parents that by allowing Nico to stay in their hometown of Del Rio, Texas during the summer, he could help their son refine his talents while the physically demanding chores at the lumberyard would keep him in shape for the football season. This would improve his chances of impressing the college scouts, according to Coach Givens. The prospect of being able to get a college education helped convince his mother, Ninfa Modesto, but she really liked the idea that Nico could help take care of his grandmother who could no longer handle the trips to the north. His father, Rafael Modesto, was convinced by the fact that Nico would be earning slightly more than what he could make working on the fields.

The spring before Nico and his family joined the crew that would work the Kilhaven Farms, misfortune befell upon the Modesto family. First, his grandmother passed away on her eighty fifth birthday in March. Then, the Givens Lumberyard went up in flames and the Givens family could not rebuild it. Although Coach Givens offered to find him another job following the completion of his first year at the University of Texas at Austin, Nico decided to spend the summer of 1960 helping his family. He could have stayed in Austin at the end of the spring semester as he was offered a tutoring position in the biology department to help summer students, but he decided to rejoin and help his family earn some income since he had not been able to spend much time with them while he tended to his college studies away from home.

Nico was considered a favorite by the teachers at San Felipe High School and was especially admired by all the ladies. Twice he was voted the most handsome student by his classmates, this being in his freshman and senior years. He was also considered the best athlete by his teammates in football, baseball and track. Many thought there would be no doubt that he would be playing football for some top college and though he pursued football scholarships from the main schools in Texas, his desire was to attend UT and obtain the degree that no one in his family had ever received. Indeed, he was the first child in the Modesto clan to ever attend college, a fact his mother proudly bragged about to anyone who would listen. To the surprise of none of his teachers, Nico was the valedictorian of his graduating class in 1959 and when he gave his valedictory address, there were no dry eyes in the stadium when he personally thanked and praised his parents for having afforded him the opportunity to receive a high school education.

His parents, affectionately known as Don Rafael and Doña Ninfa, knew at an early age that Nico possessed unique qualities. He began to talk in actual sentences before his first birthday in both Spanish and English. He astounded them when at this age he would look out the window while traveling in a car and read the signs out loud to them. To nurture his obvious talents, Don Rafael would pick up old discarded books from the school where he worked as a janitor during the school year and give them to Nico. Nico would spend hours sitting on his little chair, which his uncle Beto made for him for his first birthday, and read the books over and over until he asked his father if he could get him some more. By the time he entered the first grade at Stephen F. Austin Elementary School, which was known locally as La Escuela Amarilla, Nico was reading The Black Stallion by Walter Farley when the other kids were struggling to learn to read Fun With Dick and Jane. He had seen The Black Stallion on his teacher’s desk and when he asked her if he could borrow it, she puzzling asked him if he realized that it was a book for adults but offered to lend it to him if he could read aloud the first page. He eagerly picked it up and began reading the first few sentences with ease and when he stopped and explained to her what he had just read without any prompting, she almost fainted with delight and gladly consented to him borrowing it. He returned it to her three days later and volunteered to tell the whole class the story of the black horse, much to her amazement and appreciation by the students. By the time he was in the fifth grade he had read the complete works of William Shakespeare, parts of which he performed before his class, complete with the British accent. By the completion of his high school education, he had read over a thousand books, which produced a vast knowledge beyond his young life, and academically he had no equal at his school.

Though he had consented to being considered for an athletic scholarship, he was determined to pursue a college degree no matter if he had to work several jobs to pay for it. His father and mother had vowed that if he got accepted to UT or any other school, they would sacrifice everything they could to help him achieve his dream. It was early February of 1959 when the University of Texas at Austin informed him that he had been granted admission in the fall but he did not meet the standards for a scholarship for any organized sports. Though disappointed, he was content with the notion of just being a student at his target school. Despite the urgings of his coach, Nico refused to pursue an athletic scholarship with any of the other schools, which had expressed an interest in him. He was determined to attend the University of Texas even if it meant that he would not be playing football, baseball or running track.

As one of the pickers on the crew, it was his job to make sure that all of the exposed potatoes ended up in the burlap sacks given to him by the crew leader. To accomplish this task, he used a contraption known simply as a picker’s belt. The belt was made of a four-inch wide strip of tightly woven strands of crude cotton fibers that were as strong as any leather belt. Attached to the backside of the cotton belt were two u-shaped hooks with the blunt end of each hook secured to the belt by a thin leather strip sewn to the belt, while the other end, the sharp one, was exposed symmetrically with the sharp end of the other hook similarly secured to the belt. The front side of the belt had two horizontal leather straps with buckles on one end, which would be secured to two leather straps attached to the other end like a typical belt. About six inches away from each end of the belt were two more strips of leather five inches long and half an inch wide hanging down and each had a spring loaded hook attached at the end. Once the belt was fastened around the waist, a half-inch thick wooden board, approximately twenty inches in length, would be attached to the spring loaded hooks by two eye hooks screwed into the top of the half-inch side of the board about sixteen inches apart. The board would thus be situated across the lap of the picker when fully engaged. To the bottom of the half-inch side of the board were two smaller u-shaped hooks facing away from the user.

Once fully in place, the picker would hang about ten empty one hundred-pound burlap sacks on each of the rear u-shaped hooks. He would then take one empty sack and secure one side of it to the two smaller u-shaped hooks on the board so that the sack could remain open when the picker bent over and straddled the empty sack between his legs. Now ready to begin his assigned task, the picker would bend over at the waist and reach for the potatoes lying on the ground. In a rapid-fire motion, the picker would toss each gem into the open sack and drag the sack between his legs as he walked briskly forward along the rows where the digger had exposed the potatoes. Once the worker sensed that the sack contained about fifty to sixty pounds of the earth grown products, he would raise the sack and stand it up on the previously designated side of the two rows. This task was repeated until the picker collected all of the exposed potatoes within his predetermined territory. The territory would be pre-determined by the picker by pacing out a distance measured along the rows before any digging began. The distance represented the volume of potatoes that the