Margaret Holloway stopped at his tables at 11:15. She asked three questions. He answered them. She wrote him a check for one hundred sixty dollars, forty cents per sapling. She loaded all four hundred into the bed of a 1974 Ford F-250 and drove them sixty-three miles back to her ranch outside of Nixon. And within forty-eight hours, Gonzales County had a new story to tell. Margaret Holloway bought four hundred Argentine shade trees to plant in her cow pasture.
Understand what the saplings looked like in March of 1982. They were thin. Thin like a pencil. Some of them thinner than that. Most of them were eighteen inches tall. A few pushing twenty-four. They had four or five leaves each. Sickle-shaped and silver green. And the leaves smelled sharp when you crushed them between your fingers. Menthol. Cough drops. Nothing you’d associate with a ranch pasture in South Texas.
The root balls were the size of a man’s fist. The stems were pale and flexible and would bend ninety degrees without snapping. A few of them had a small aphid problem. Tiny black dots clustered on the undersides of the newest leaves. Three of the pots had a spider that had built a web between the sapling and the rim. They did not look like trees. They looked like something a gardener might plant in a flower bed next to a porch.
Something decorative. Something that belonged in a suburban yard in Houston, maybe. Where the woman of the house would water it with a garden hose and the children would knock it over while playing ball. They did not look like anything that belonged in a cow pasture in Gonzales County. Where the grass was native bluestem and buffalo grass. Where the mesquite and huisache had to be bulldozed every three years to keep the land open.
Where the cattle were Angus and Brangus and Beefmaster. And where the whole economy of the place ran on one simple calculation. Pounds of beef per acre of grass. Trees were something you cleared. Trees were not something you planted. Every man in Gonzales County knew this. It was as settled a fact as the direction of sunrise. Margaret Holloway had bought four hundred trees to plant in a cow pasture.
Calvin Ruiz himself almost tried to talk her out of it. “Margaret, I don’t think you understood what I was telling you earlier. These trees get big. They get tall. They’ll shade out your grass in places. This is not the usual.” “I understood you,” Margaret said. “You want to plant all four hundred? Not just a few along the fence line?” “In the pastures. Spaced out. Not in rows.”
Calvin looked at her for a long moment. He had been trying to sell these trees for fourteen years. He had sold six or seven here and there to people who wanted a shade tree for a backyard. He had never sold four hundred at once. He had never sold them to someone who was going to put them in a working pasture. “Ma’am,” he said. “I am going to be honest with you. I don’t want your check if this is a mistake. I’ll take these home and try again next year.”
Margaret folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Ruiz, I know what I’m doing. I spent three summers at a ranch in the province of Corrientes when I was younger. I have seen exactly this arrangement work on native grass in a hotter climate than this one. Your trees are coming home with me.” Calvin didn’t argue again.