Ten Years of Spring

By Romer Shaw

Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Set between 1951 and 1954 on a banana plantation in Tiquisate, Guatemala, meet Connor Caine--disavowed New Orleans blue-blood turned renegade photojournalist--as he navigates Cold War politics, the 'Red Scare', and a CIA-led coup d'etat ending

• Language: English
• Publisher: 1805 Publishing
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985717020

Book preview

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February 21, 1998 – Big Sky, Montana

As I sit here, in what appears to be my final days, I find myself reflectin’ on the life I have lived, on my victories and my many defeats. I suppose this is normal, that all of us must take inventory at some point. And, I suppose, that I am luckier than most in that I know the end is near and have time to make sense of things. After the life I have lived, of all the danger and revolutions, adventures and near-death experiences, I cannot believe that in the end it is somethin’ as silly as a cigarette and this damn lung cancer that is gonna get me.

Although I haven’t much in years, I find myself thinkin’ a lot about Guatemala and Pappy and Goyo and especially my Abigail. In the springtime and early summer, as I look out from my porch toward the green and brown eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, I think of Goyo and me as small boys runnin’ through the banana groves at Tiquisate and Pappy teachin’ me to ride a horse and how to shoot a pistol. At night, as I sit with whisky eyes and ponder what’s to come, the orange lights of Big Sky Resort pull me back to my youth and I see the orange glow of voracious bonfires on the horizon and when I sleep, I dream of emeralds.

From a distance, the high peak and ridges of Lone Mountain remind me of the rim of Volcán Atitlán. I think of when I first met Abigail Hernandez in those green hills of Guatemala in 1952. I remember how we fell in love then, at that wonderful place, both with each other and what we were fightin’ for.

Abigail Hernandez was such a remarkable woman. Vibrant and alive, she held a ferocious fire in her belly believin’ somehow she could right the world’s wrongs by her passion alone. She made me believe it, too. She was that kind of woman. Passionate. Inspirin’. Devine. A rarity in this world, for sure.

The orange glow of lights and the pewter flask of whisky in my hand also bring up vivid memories of the struggle between me and my father. As our very natures diverged so drastically from one another, I see now there could have been no different outcome unless I was willin’ to submit to his authority. With him long dead, and me soon to follow, it all seems pointless now. It’s silly the things we lose because of ego and pride.

My father was a big man. Standin’ six-foot-four, he was an imposin’ figure, to say the least. His square jaw was strong enough to crack walnuts on, I figured. Sportin’ a year-round tan, with dark brown hair, penetratin’ brown eyes, and crisp-white teeth, he looked more Mediterranean than American or English—our ancestry.

I took after my mother; sandy-blond hair, fair complexion, hazel-green eyes, athletic but slight in build. My jaw would have broken while crackin’ open a peanut shell, I’d say.

Even in adulthood, I never reached higher than five-foot-eight inches unless I was wearin’ my favorite pair of boots which allowed me to steal another inch or so from the world. But even with my boots, somethin’ I wore every day believin’ that extra inch gave me some kind of an advantage, I felt small.

My father had a way of makin’ everyone around him feel that way—small—as if he were some giant that could crush you at his whim and without much effort at all. The only person Franklin Pierce Caine never seemed able to crush was my older sister, Caroline. She, perhaps, was the only thing my father loved more than himself.

Six-years-older than I, Caroline Caine was my father’s child in every way—ruthless, officious, and single-minded. I was the unambitious black sheep--somethin’ neither of them ever let me forget.

By the time I entered my first year at Yale, Caroline was in Boston workin’ on becomin’ partner in a large, influential law firm. She would eventually become the second woman Secretary of Labor in 1967, the first being Frances Perkins in 1933.

It makes me quite sad to think of things like this, though; about the people that hurt me and who I hurt in return, about all the things out of my control to fix or change or do anything about—especially in these final days where sadness and regret seem more comfortable and constant companions than joy or peace or happiness. But then, I suppose, I always did feel more confident in my feelings of despair than in the fleetin’ feelings of happiness or joy.

Abigail always said I possessed a gloomy disposition, rarely allowin’ myself to feel encouraged by the sunshine, instead findin’ solace and comfort in the rain. It often made me wonder how such a marvelous creature could love a melancholic scoundrel like myself. But she did.

If I said she was wrong about me, I’d be lyin’. In my estimation, happiness is merely a mirage on the desert’s horizon; somethin’ you catch a brief glimpse of and which disappears or moves farther away the closer you get to it. And all the while it is the very search of this thing that is killin’ ya. But you keep walkin’ towards it, believin’ in its power and existence like a small child believes in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And then, almost without even knowin’ it, you fall to the ground with a great thud, helpless and alone, as we all are in the end. Then, as your face and arms and belly burn to a crisp as you recline there on your sands of hope, your life force drainin’ from the very core of ya, you simply die without ever havin’ it, this thing you desired more than any other.

Perhaps, in the rarest of moments, you held it in your grasp, like handfuls of the sand now burnin’ your very essence. But you held it and then watched as with any movement it poured from your hands, drainin’ faster the tighter you tried to grasp each grain. And never once did it ever quench even the tiniest of the thirsts in your soul.

It was Abigail, though, if only for the briefest of time, that changed this belief in me. She gave me happiness and hope. In the process, she taught me to love and to fight for what I believed in. She gave me courage and strength; two things that had never been revealed in my character before. She gave me focus and purpose. Abigail made me believe that we could change the world for the better, that we could create a world worth livin’ for; and, perhaps more importantly, one worth dyin’ for.

But it would not turn out that way. The world is the same as it was before and I cannot now reconcile all that we gave up and sacrificed with what little we gained. Not a single thing changed within the underlyin’ power structure that controls all our lives. As it was then, it is now. The rich are still rich, the powerful even more powerful. The poor are still defenseless and poor.

Regardless, this is my story. It is the only thing of lastin’ value I have to offer in these final days. I’ve come to believe that our story is all we ever possess which contains any real value to others. Our story, and the love we have given, if we have loved well, becomes our legacy.

What follows, then, is both my love and my legacy.

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Although it was December in New Orleans, the sixth, to be exact, I am told that the day of my birth was hot and muggy, causin’ many of the locals to both cuss under their breath religiously and to openly fear what was to come the followin’ year; especially in July and August, the months the Devil himself takes a vacation from the Deep South because it is simply too damn hot. The high temperatures had been unusually cruel that year of 1928, killin’ a higher number of Negroes than normal on the rice and cotton plantations dottin’ the landscape from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta, just south of Memphis.

An Indian Summer had turned into a Saharan Winter. It seemed that the welcomed prospect of winter’s cool would offer no respite from the incessant brutality of the Deep Southern heat and humidity. Afternoon breezes, usually driven into the various wards and parishes of Louisiana from the mighty Mississippi or from Lake Pontchartrain or from the Gulf herself, were absent for days and then weeks. Mosquitos, normally dormant this time of year, continued their annoyance and molestation. They had grown to the size of bald eagles, some said, and it was feared that the winged beasts would carry off small dogs and children unless adequately guarded.

I’m not sayin’ I believe in such fantastical manifestations, but I can say with certainty that strange things happen in places like New Orleans and Cartagena and Port-au-Prince; places where spirits remain forever tangible and shadows are alive. Magical and unexpected things happen in these places because the people both believe and know such things can happen.

As the stories were told for as long as I can remember, I can tell you for a fact that a greater number of both children and dogs went missin’ that winter of 1928 and I, myself, would never rule out the possibility they were indeed carried off by some demon over-grown mosquito, or two. I’ve had a few over the years try to carry me off. And they almost succeeded a couple of times and they were nowhere near the size of eagles, more like baby sparrows—their normal size in Louisiana.

But a heavy stillness blanketed Louisiana, and much of the South, durin’ that December. Nighttime seemed just as bad as the day. The spirits of Orleans Parish were restless. All of them, both underground and above, sat as still as a Buddhist monk in prayer, as if any movement at all would cause the dense air to squeeze tighter around them like a boa constrictor suffocatin’ its prey. These types of winters in the Deep South are rare, but they have certainly been known to occur.

There was no air conditionin’ in Charity Hospital in 1928. Even with the windows open and the fans swirlin’, the air was stiflin’, mother said. The only advantage to the heat was that the poolin’ sweat between my mother’s legs offered abundant lubrication for my eventual escape from her hot and dark womanhood. My mother, Agnes, the saint she was, labored for eighteen hours without drugs on that Sunday before I made my entrance to this world at 4:45 in the afternoon.

My father, Franklin Pierce Caine, was not there that day, or many others followin’ it. He was in Colombia workin’, as usual, for the United Fruit Company—the most powerful corporation in the world at the time. He was there managin’ a worker strike that had continued for the previous month in Cienaga. He left Colombia soon after the strike ended, goin’ back to the Company’s plantation in Tiquisate, Guatemala. My mother, older sister, and I joined him there four weeks after my birth; once mother and I had the chance to recover and make the trip.

We came from the prominent Caine family of White Plains, New York. It was my grandfather, Charles, who settled there in the mid-to-late 1800s after arrivin’ from England. With a small inheritance from his father, he invested in real estate and the emergin’ railroad business, creatin’ in the process a small empire of his own. He would later invest in the infrastructure necessary to carry electricity—wood, steel, aluminum, gold, silver, and copper—and eventually, telephone, to every American on the Eastern Seaboard. He owned thousands of acres of valuable land in New York and Pennsylvania. He dined with the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller, Morgan and Cabot and Lodge.

My father was educated at Yale, a Bonesman, Class of 1912. Like my grandfather, he excelled at business, but more so in the cultivation of relationships that allowed business to occur. He had the knack of makin’ the right kind of connections between people—most often men in positions of great power and of great wealth and those in government who craved power and dominance more than wealth itself.

We dined with Kings and Presidents. And in New Orleans and Central and South America durin’ the twenties and thirties, we ourselves lived like Kings and Presidents. I was a prince, and I loved every minute of it. Politicians, musicians, actors, and entertainers of all sorts made appearances at my father’s parties and social gatherings. Powerful men in Hollywood and New York City and Washington D.C. called on my father often for his advice and assistance.

By 1946, the year I graduated high school, my father was the Vice President of Latin American Operations at the United Fruit Company, a position that wielded a tremendous amount of power and influence over government and politics in Central and South America, as well as the United States. He would hold this position until his death in 1958.

My mother’s family, the Frazier’s from Schenectady, were extremely wealthy as well. Grandpaw Frazier invested in products that people never thought about but used every day. Things like pillows and toothbrushes and shoelaces and socks. Ubiquitous items like toothpicks and straws.

Every person from a man at a shelter to the President of the United States puts his head on a pillow at night when he sleeps. If we’ve done our job well, it will be our pillow he rests upon. Create a product that every single person alive will use and you’ve got one helluva business, Grandpaw Frazier liked to say.

He made millions of dollars off this concept of providin’ basic daily products that everyone used and needed and rarely thought about. He had factories that produced glues and solvents and tape and rope and string. Others that made shampoo and soap and brushes and combs. My Grandpaw Frazier was not a man of great vision, my mother would say, but a man of great practicality. It was this practicality that built his tremendous wealth.

It was this wealth, both paternal and maternal, that allowed me and my sister, Caroline, to travel extensively throughout our childhood and youth. Father allowed Goyo to join me as my interpreter, Spanish teacher, protector, and friend. Durin’ most of the year, when not attendin’ my exclusive private school in New Orleans, I spent my time at the Company’s banana plantation at Tiquisate, Guatemala. It’s where my father began his career with the Company, where Goyo lived, and where I felt most at home.

After high school, like my father, I also attended Yale. I did so because it was expected, and I did not at that time have the courage to stand up to or go against my father. Few did.

Father served in London durin’ World War I as an U.S. Embassy Attaché. He was a titan of industry who advised powerful men in their interests. I knew few men who were more applauded or successful. For a time, I wanted to be just like him. Although I didn’t know any better, havin’ grown up in wealth and privilege, I enjoyed the life that wealth and social connection gave a person. We traveled to faraway lands. Learned to speak foreign languages. We ate and drank well. People entertained us. I thought it was all so wonderful.

That would eventually change, of course, or my story wouldn’t be what it is. Lookin’ back, I think it all changed durin’ my junior year of high school and the horrible affair that left my first great love dead, discarded like a used piece of tissue paper on the trash heap of a banana plantation, burned beyond all recognition, as if she never existed at all.

While at Yale, I was tapped for membership into the Skull and Bones Society, like my father, in the spring of 1950; an invitation I did not accept. It was perhaps my first true act of rebellion against my father, beyond the adolescent acts we all commit that are more self- destructive than a statement of purpose and identity.

Well, perhaps, this was not my first significant act of rebellion but my fourth, or maybe even my fifth or sixth. I had embraced the Southern dialect of New Orleans, which he hated. I pursued a degree in anthropology, not business. I rejected every well-bred white woman I was intended to marry. And now I’d rejected membership into his precious Skull and Bones Society.

Beyond all others, this simple act of rejectin’ Club membership was as treasonous as givin’ away State secrets to the Germans durin’ the War. In this way, my overt actions were a profound statement indicatin’ that I no longer wanted to be like him and that I was willin’ to walk my own path.

A faint crack had been etched into the bond between me and my father. It was the spring of 1950. I was twenty-two years old.

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I carried on rebellin’ against my father, right up until the time I got hungry and needed a job. It should have been easy for a man like me to find work, especially in the boomin’ American economy of the 1950s. Comin’ from the right family, I had the right name. I had social connections that others would have killed for. I even had an Ivy League education, if that means anything—which, back then, it did.

But interview after interview turned up nothin’. It didn’t matter if it was private or government. The interviews and rejections piled up for over eight months. For some reason I had been blacklisted. I never could prove it, but I came to believe my father was behind it all. It was his way of showin’ me the reach of his power, and the price for my rebellion.

Swallowin’ my pride, as all children must at some point, in 1951 I moved back to Guatemala, acceptin’ a job with the United Fruit Company as the plantation supervisor at Tiquisate. I was surprisingly good at it. Well, parts of it, at least. Unlike my father and grandfather, I was not a numbers man. I had no aptitude for business at all, really. I knew, as with all things, if my last name had not been Caine I would neither have been offered the job nor would have kept it for long.

Perhaps it’s the curse of the third-generation wealthy, but I did not care about balance sheets or profits or cultivatin’ the boozy relationships that real business required. I cared more about the workers, my friends. The ones my father discarded at his whim, usually when my mother or the world made him feel small and he needed to regain his sense of power. Each darkened face, though, reminded me of the people that raised me, that bathed me in their warmth and adoration in New Orleans and the banana plantations of Latin America.

Although I spent my youth in New Orleans, the American South, and travelin’ the world, I practically grew up on the plantation I was now supervisin’. In reality, I had come home. I knew the people and the people knew me. I spoke their language; understood their culture. My first carnal experiences as a young man were in the wild, brown bosoms of these jungle women. In return, the people knew and loved me, somethin’ that caused another, even greater schism to grow between me and my father. It would be the very thing that would eventually divide the two of us forever.

An imperceptible crack in our bond irrevocably broke into a crevasse so wide and deep that it could never be mended or traversed.

To my father, the brown and black workers on our plantations were not people, but merely labor. They were nothin’ more than a mule or a goat that could be milked for every drop then eaten for dinner when it stopped producin’. They were capital, a means to an end, nothin’ more.

Franklin Caine had no more care or concern nor emotion invested in his workers than he had in a tractor that hauled his bananas to the warehouse or a ship that carried them to port. If anything, he cared more for the mechanical workforce that provided greater profits as long as they were oiled and maintained occasionally. A tractor, he would say, won’t give you grief over its children or the lack of food on its table. A machine won’t ask you for more money and then refuse to work when you don’t give it.

To my father, it would always be more profitable to fix the tractor and discard the person when each became broken. And that’s exactly what he did. He discarded thousands without consideration of age or ability or the very soul each contained. Franklin Caine crushed human spirits like a junkyard machine crushes cars, without thought or emotion and with such ease as a man killin’ a fly with a swatter.

I saw the world differently.

My degree was in anthropology, not business or law as my father wanted. I spent years in the classroom and travelin’ abroad, being taught at Yale by some of the greatest minds our country has ever developed. Men like Hiram Bingham, who discovered the great lost city of Machu Picchu in 1911, were my heroes. These men had a great interest in both the human spirit and its potential. They looked at culture objectively. They saw our differences as just that—different. One trait didn’t necessarily mean that one race or group of people were better than the other, like Adolf Hitler and my father and those within the Eugenics movement believed. They were simply different; adapted differently for each unique environment our world contained. The ability for all humans to adapt and survive was their individual genius.

Through my studies, I came to see equal brilliance in all people that ultimately discovered a way of both survivin’ and transformin’ their environment to their benefit—from the Inuit that had the ingenuity to survive the Artic, or the Incas, that built somethin’ so marvelous and precise as Machu Picchu, or the Maasai, the Great African warriors, or the great builders of Egypt, or the industrious English and Irish and American entrepreneurs that built skyscrapers, railroads, and our great modern cities, or the doctors and nurses that extended our very lives. They were each necessary and beautiful in their own adaptation.

As much I tried, as much as my breedin’ and early education told me differently, I could in no way believe that one man or race was better than the other, especially based on somethin’ as silly and superficial as skin color or the geographic location they inhabited. That truth had not revealed itself through my experience.

My father, of course, believed quite differently.

Franklin Pierce Caine, like the Romans and Spanish and British and Dutch and French and Belgians before him, believed the Third World indigenous to be subservient, indolent, and stupid. Like the American Negro, people in the less developed world were there simply to serve the white, rich, and virtuous. It was our manifest destiny. It was our divine right to conquer others less sophisticated, like the American Indians, Father thought.

If it were left up to the natives, he’d say, we would never have modern medicine or air travel or cars or even air conditionin’. The railroads that crossed treacherous mountains and desolate deserts—that connected America from east to west—would never have been even dreamed of, much less built. These advances were simply beyond the reach and ability of the native mind. They did not possess either the intellect for such ideas, nor capability, nor the desire.

The natives had been in the Americas for over 12,000 years and had not advanced beyond sleepin’ in crude structures made from sticks and coverin’ themselves with the skins of other animals. So, just as you would never expect a mule to build a modern wonder like a bridge or a skyscraper or pioneer such darin’ and aggressive medical techniques like open heart surgery, you could not expect an American Indian or a Negro to do so, either. The white man’s tremendous advancements in such a short span of time were proof of our superiority.

I found out many years later, long after my father had passed, that he kept a great many indigenous lovers on each of the plantations he oversaw in Latin America. Not a single year my mother and father were married was he ever faithful.

I never could make sense of that. How a man could despise a race of people down to his very core and at same time become sexually aroused by what he considered to be nothin’ more than a dog. How could he treat them so poorly yet have sex with their women? Just another act of dominance, I suppose, as I doubt a man like Franklin Caine had the capacity for love or acceptance. Like advancements in science for the indigenous, concepts of the heart were simply beyond his reach and understandin’.

I could, however, conceive a man like him being sexually aroused by the power he wielded over such women. Unlike my mother, these women had no power to tell him ‘no’, or to speak about unpleasant things he did not want to hear. They were there to please him. To stroke his ego and make him feel good about himself. They were to pleasure him and nothin’ more. They desired him in a way my mother never could, and pleasured him in way, I suppose, she never would.

As miserable as being a whore on a banana plantation was, it was better than the alternative. Plus, I imagine, being Franklin Caine’s private whore had its benefits. Being kept by a man like him offered them comforts and a life they would never have had otherwise. All for a few hours of their time each week, mostly lyin’ on their backs.

I’m not sure who it was that said whores and kept women were stupid. But it certainly was not me.

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The ‘Banana Massacre’ is what the newspapers called the killin’ of a thousand United Fruit workers and their families on December 6th, 1928. Some said it was over three thousand. The actual number was never verified. What was irrefutable was the fact that it was a sunny Sunday mornin’ in Cienaga, Colombia. While campesinos waited in the plaza for mass to begin—hopin’ to hear from the governor about strike negotiations—the roads were blocked and three hundred soldiers with machine guns posted on rooftops. Here they waited for their orders from Bogotá to kill.

Once a five-minute warnin’ expired, the soldados opened fire.

It was fish in a barrel. There were few