(HOST) The current immigration debate has reminded commentator Willem Lange of an old friend.
(LANGE) Wherever my friend Juan is today, and assuming he still lives, I know this about him, at least: just how old he is. We were born in different countries at exactly the same minute.
We met the summer of 1954 on a ramshackle ranch in the middle of nowhere. Cross Cut, Texas, was the nearest town. It’s derelict today; the wind blows through the broken windows of the abandoned schoolhouse. The ranch was another five miles south of that, just across the Pecan Bayou. Last I heard, Juan was still around. I think he’s legal now.
I’d signed on to work the summer for a retired Presbyterian minister who’d been a cowboy, a China missionary, and a professor of agriculture. After a long Greyhound bus ride to the little city of Brownwood and a drive through fading light in a 1939 Chevy – coyotes’ eyes and jackrabbits in the road ahead – we arrived at the ranch house after dark.
Next morning during breakfast a stocky Mexican came into the kitchen carrying two Mason jars full of fresh milk. I was introduced to him in Spanish. He was a wetback, a mojado. He sat down at a small, separate table, put his straw sombrero on the floor beside him, and ate silently.
When he’d finished, the old man drilled him in English. The old man was trying to teach him the words good, better, and best. So far he’d managed to convey that good was bueno . But the rest was a mess. Juan insisted on saying “more batter” for mas bueno . The old man gave up for the moment and sent us to work.
Juan and I were the whole crew. He was far more competent than I at ranch work. I got $75 a month and room and board. I don’t know what he got, but he couldn’t spend it without getting picked up by the chotos. The old man sent money orders to his family in Zacatecas.
Juan taught me the Spanish we needed: “Where’s the axe?” “Go get the shovel, please.” “Look out for the spider!” My invention was what the old man would do if he found us standing around talking in any language: “El maestro mucho kaboom!” Juan liked that one. I came to feel about him the way Huck Finn does as he gets to know Jim on the river: This is a good friend, and a good man.
I left for school in the fall; he went back to Mexico, where he was arrested for working illegally in the states. Later he swam the river again and reappeared at the ranch.
Last time I visited the ranch, the old man was almost a hundred, and a little vague. I asked him about Juan. Oh,” he said, “he’s around here somewhere.” He wasn’t interested. He didn’t know I’d cherished for fifty years the gift Juan gave me when we parted: a cowhide knife sheath with my name tooled on it Huili H-U-I-L-I.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.