Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (10 page)

Old people around that country will tell you also, with some bitterness, that Buenas Noches had a big mouth and took credit for much that Loving did. It is so. But the Comanches got Oliver Loving on the Pecos (there’s a hair prickler, but it’s a long way from the Brazos), and Mr. Charlie lived to tell both their stories. He lived a long long time, and when he was ninety-one and a widower he took a second wife, twenty-odd years old.

A tale exists. I heard it once about Goodnight and once about another of the old ones who stayed alive long enough to get rich, and it may not be true about either of them. But it could be true—ought to be.… When Goodnight was old, he lived on what was called the Quitaque ranch, having been eased out of the JA operation by the New York socialite widow of his Irish milord partner. Once a scraggly band of reservation Comanches, long since whipped and contained, rode gaunt ponies all the way out there from Oklahoma to see him.

No buffalo had run the plains for decades; it was their disappearance, as much as smallpox and syphilis and Mac
kenzie’s apocalyptic soldiers, that had finally chopped apart The People’s way of life. Jealously, Mr. Charlie had built up and kept a little herd of them.

He knew one or two of the older Indians; he had fought them, and later had gone to see them and reminisce with them in Oklahoma. They asked him for a buffalo bull.

He said: “Hell, no.”

They said: “They used to be ours.”

“They used to be anybody’s that could kill one,” the old man said. “These are mine. They wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for me. You go to hell.”

“Please, Buenas Noches,” maybe one of them said. Maybe not—The People seldom begged.

He said no again and stomped in the house and stayed there for a couple of days while they camped patiently in his yard and on his porch, the curious cowhands gathering to watch them. In the end he made a great deal of angry noise and gave them the bull they wanted, maybe deriving a sour satisfaction from thinking about the trouble they’d have getting it back to Oklahoma.

They didn’t want to take it back to Oklahoma. They ran it before them and killed it with arrows and lances in the old way, the way of the arrogant centuries. They sat on their horses and looked down at it for a while, sadly and in silence, and then left it there dead and rode away, and Old Man Goodnight watched them go, sadly too.

I parked the canoe in eddying water between big rocks, thankful for the casualness that fiberglass permitted, and climbed up to a nose above Keechi mouth, a picnic spot. A good place, with the hills rolling up behind and the green stream junction swirling below among its boulders … In an overhanging tangle of roots a mass of daddy longlegs
clung each to all the others and vibrated with the rhythmic ecstasy that seizes them in the fall; the pup charged into them and they scattered. Under a cedar stood a table made from an old barbed-wire reel set on its side. Strewn thick about it were layers of that heterogeneous litter whose concoction is one of our glittering talents as a people: paper napkins and brown sacks rain-molded to grass and shrubbery; bullet-pierced beer cans brightly plated and painted against the rust that alone might have made them bearable; bottle caps and bottle shards; a yellowed latex memento of love’s futility; tarnished twenty-two shell cases by the hundreds.

Yes, ma’am, I’ve drunk beer and with others like me have hurled hillbilly songs against the woods’ stillness, and have made country afternoons hideous with the pointless explosion of cartridges. Having done it doesn’t make it look any better to me, though.

Above there the old Painted Campground lies, twenty or so acres of worked-flint chips, potsherds, burn-marked hearthstones.… There are dozens of places like that along the Brazos, traditional stopping places that, judging from the thickness of the midden in some of them, must have been in use for unknowable centuries before white men came, by tribes in migration or seasonally encamped. If you poke around any of them long enough, you can usually pick up a couple of arrowheads to rattle against each other in your pocket until a nephew or a friend’s son begs them away from you—though, by the very principle of middens, most of what you find is fragmentary or faulty.

The main part of that one is now a pleasant pasture dotted with mesquites and turfed with side-oats grama. Like most of the other sites, it lies high above the Brazos; Indian and white alike gave the river respect. You don’t have to
be an old-timer in that country to remember when it was common, there being no dams above to take the shock, for a three- or four-foot curl of angry red water to roar around a bend upon a party swimming in quiet pools under a blue sky. A cloudburst far out on the plains could cause that.

I’ve never, heard why they called it the Painted Campground. In ’72, settlers trailed a raiding band to it, waited till dawn, and were easing in on their bellies when one of them lost the steel control that tactics require and let out a berserker yell. Fast wakers, the Indians hit the brush, leaving behind them a few artefacts, some stolen horses, and the distinctively long-haired scalp of Chesley Dobbs from down the river, whom no one till then had known to be dead.

No end, no end to the stories …

The river angles back south there, and the wind turned ferociously against me. For a time I fought it, the high old-fashioned bow of the canoe slewing back whenever I stopped paddling hard, and then camped early on the shallow-shelving west bank at about the place where they’re going to put one of the dams, a couple of miles above Turkey Creek. The river was rising again, and the spate silt was still slimy from rain for six vertical feet or more above water level, so that I had to carry my gear a long way up into a little elm motte. As he was won’t to do at stops, the pup ran about barking proprietarily; across the river there the land rises to a steep escarpment, which gave him a clear echo, and he had a fine time with his own reflected voice until I made him stop. Then he went in the tent and with industrious molars gnawed our covering, despite punishment, steadily till bedtime.

The night was black but starry. The wind kept on in the darkness, unnaturally; I woke once or twice as it popped the
tent flaps. Big wind depresses when it continues without the normal wanings of evening and night and dawn, whether it’s called sirocco or khamsin or whatever. I lay feeling soft muscles ache and wondered if they would tauten to the work or whether I’d finally arrived at that point where the body won’t snap back into tone with a few days’ misuse, and wondered too what weather the wind might portend, and what idiocy had brought me out there to lie on the graveled ground, in November.…

A DOE … Deer go with mornings. Sleepy and unfocused, I went into the woods for breakfast fuel and stood out of the still big wind in a sheltered place by a heap of fallen post oak, unwilling to rive the silence with my ax. She came picking her way along a fence line at right angles to me. Half catching my scent, she flicked up her tail and went away soundlessly and without desperate speed; then another came the same route, snuffed the whirlpooling scent full, coughed, and tore off across a field with a big fawn behind her.

A shave and clean khakis, since I’d get to the One Eighty bridge that day and would have to locate a telephone to reassure relatives of my continued, undrowned, unfrozen, unstarved existence …

A disgust … Skating fifty yards down and back in greasy mud, and down and back, and down and back again, following my own slithering spoor as I bore boxes and sacks to the canoe, I wondered what Thoreau would have thought. Or, for that matter, Mr. Charlie Goodnight … They were both ascetics, the one in order to think and feel, the other in
order to act. A kind of asceticism, undefined, was root and sap of the idea of my being there, on the river. Therefore I’d come out with 200 pounds or more of assorted unnecessaries. A blanket and a bag of meal were all you should need. Even making the blanket a sleeping bag, maybe, with a tarp to throw over it …

But then what of an ax and a knife and a gun and a rod and a lantern and a change of clothes and a cunning Teutonic burner for when the wood was wet? Not to mention compasses, maps, sides of bacon, apples, field glasses, books, pots, ditty bags … Goods swamp the shallow ship of yoga, Saint Henry; your spare cry of “Simplify, simplify!” rings more alien generation by generation.

A relief … Loading done, the feel of a well-trimmed boat on live water between yellow-and-russet autumn shores, the waxen slim strength of a paddle’s shaft. The sky was milky and the big wind still blew, but neither mattered much with movement and the fresh beginning of a day.

A frame house, at another high Indian ground … Since I’d climbed far out of public domain there and was carrying a gun, I came at it from brush, uncertain until I could see whether it was in use. Besides the poacher’s unpainful sense of guilt, there is a shyness that gets into one after a few days, out alone. But nobody was there—nor, I could tell as I came closer, was anybody going to be. Ailanthus and chinaberry and a crumpled stone fence framed a bare yard space. The windows held only inpointed fragments of their lights, and the gray upright planks of the siding had never felt a paintbrush’s wet kiss. In back stood a cedar-log corral and a crib and a shed, repaired with baling wire and littered with rusty junk, and on the front porch lay three beer bottles, an old white icebox on its side, a set of bedsprings, and a swollen,
still aromatic dead goat. Under an eave a canyon wren sang, then flicked away.

It was of that ungothic shape—roof peaked high along a ridge pole in the middle over three rooms in a row, and flattening fore and aft over the gallery and a rank of lean- to rooms—which the double log cabin’s form had suggested to a log-cabin people abruptly presented with lumber. The East Texas mills began shipping boards into that country on the new railroads in the seventies, and after that few log houses were built; the old arts of the froe and the maul and the adze and the broadax died. By then the good post oaks had just about been cut down, anyhow. Existing cabins were often planked over and their dog runs enclosed, but this wasn’t one of them; its windows were not deep-set enough.