The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [4]
On the back of the vehicle in large figures was the number 47, the uniform number of the pitcher Joaquín Andújar. Andújar was an exceptional pitcher who had helped the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series in 1982 with successful starts in two games. Curiously, many of the former ballplayers had smoked windows on their cars so that the driver could not be identified, as though to preserve their anonymity, but then they placed their numbers on the outside to make sure that everyone would know who they were. Many of the former major leaguers in San Pedro drove large, expensive cars. However, the real status was not the value of the cars but the cost of the gasoline they ate up. Most people in San Pedro could not have afforded to drive one of these cars if it were given to them.
The pigeons weren’t the only ones startled by Andújar’s midday arrival. It was well known in San Pedro that Andújar, who was out late every night, was seldom up and out of his apartment by midday. His days usually began in the afternoon.
Andújar, a trim six-foot man, not particularly big for a pitcher, and on this day meticulously dressed in a yellow sweater—unusual dress for midday in the Dominican Republic unless you spend your time in air-conditioning—came over and argued with Mercedes about his trap. Mercedes insisted that the string should be tied to the cage and not the bottle. They tried it his way and the pigeons returned, but they were now too cautious to chance going under the cage.
The three men joked about eating the pigeons they caught. But they weren’t eating them, just keeping them in a large cage as pets. It was just for fun. Manny Alexander laughed. “That’s why the Dominican Republic is so good: we’re free here,” he said.
Back in the Consuelo cane field, Dionicio Morales, known to cane cutters as Bienvenido, which means Welcome, strolled sleepily over to the wagon for his lunch. He was not as lean as Elio and the others resting under the trees. A slight paunch indicated a somewhat better position in life. The son of a Haitian father and Dominican mother, he was the exact same age as Elio but had six more years’ experience. He had started in the cane fields when he was ten years old. “I’ve done every job,” he said, but it sounded more like a complaint than a boast. “I cut, I planted, I cleaned fields.”
Now Dionicio was a field supervisor, on this day in charge of the handful of weary cutters resting in this field. He earned 8,000 pesos a month, about $250, which worked out to about a dollar more a day than a cutter who averaged two tons. But he had the luxury of a stable salary, at least during the four-month zafra. In the mid-twentieth century his father crossed the island from Haiti to cut cane for three cents a ton. Dionicio remembers those even harder days when only a dirt trail led from Consuelo into town, and sugar people never left the fields. The sugar companies provided housing in the fields in little villages called bateys, a word that before the Spanish came to this country was the name of a ball game. Field workers and their families lived there and bought supplies and food from the company store, which gave them credit. These purchases ended up consuming most or all of their meager pay. If the cane workers wanted their children to go to school, the children had to walk for miles, but this was a considerable improvement over earlier times when there was simply no school. The major difference was that with the paved road, the baseball stadium in the center of San Pedro was only fifteen minutes away. The cutters still owned no transportation. But for the amount of money they earned cutting a few hundred pounds of cane—a few pesos—they could get a ride into the center of town on the back of a motor scooter. This was the leading form of transportation in San Pedro, known as a motoconcho.
Dionicio and Elio both lived, along with a few hundred other families of field workers, near this field in the Batey Experimental. The workers there