Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (11 page)

A low windmill, tailless and bullet-holed, groaned futilely without revolving above the well in the rear. A diseased pear tree stood by it, drooping with fruit. I went into the house. Whoever had last lived there had taken away little gear with him when he left; worthless chattels lay everywhere, upended and thrown about by other woods-runners who’d rooted among them before me. In the room I first entered, the floor was of dirty four-inch pine planks held down but loosely by nails whose flat heads were still shiny from the polishings of boot soles. A square of flower-patterned, worn linoleum lay beneath a fat wood stove marked in cast letters:

Browned wallpaper printed with rose leaves peeled away from browned wallpaper printed with Greek temples, which in turn peeled away from browned wallpaper printed with
philosophical Chinese under weeping willows, and the damp-rotting smell of all three layers tinged the air. The cheesecloth ceiling sagged down between its rusty tacks as if inflated from above, only scraps of paper still hanging to it; in its center, strangely, was tacked a panel from a corrugated sanitary-napkin box. Four calendars, one for 1947, two for 1950, and one for 1951, all by courtesy of John Haley’s Gro. and Ser. Sta., had glazed, bright pictures bas-reliefed by some stamping process and showing happy matters: an un-tracked, snow-covered road beneath pines; a fat small boy fishing in very blue water while a brown-and-white mongrel watched; a smaller, fatter boy about to arrow an apple off his apprehensive browner-and-whiter pup’s head; Jesus Christ with a gold halo blessing a crowd of children under their elders’ grateful gaze.…

Two wire coat hangers on a nail, a straight-backed wooden chair with a woven-rawhide bottom totally sat through, an apple crate, half of a quirt, a paint can, feed sacks, a rocker with a bald, torn, plush seat and back piece and visible lumpy springs, a lone brown-and-blue-striped sock against a baseboard, crayoned fat geese and hoglike cows and cowlike hogs friezed in parade about the wall at the height a four-year-old might reach.… Besides the wallpaper’s smell, there was an odor of the kind that individual houses get from their families, not unpleasant. When I was little, I used to think you could characterize families from the smells of their houses, but an early addiction to tobacco kept me from developing the theory.

The other rooms, accessible through doors that opened to latchstrings, were much like that one. In the lean-to kitchen, where mouse-gnawed stains of grease outlined the
stove’s square absence, a dome-topped rotten trunk had been dumped on its side, and letters flowed from it onto the floor. I looked at one. It was dated April 17, 1899, and was from someone named Elnora in Hood’s Cove, Kentucky, to someone named Addie. It said that crops were what you might expect, but that Alfred had never given up his hanker to move southwest, what did Addie think? It said that Bella’s baby had died of colic at six months of age, which only left her two, and that the new preacher had “gotten Alfred’s
Irish
up” with what he said about Negroes, and it ended:

 … I do not know where Time
goes
and when he said the other Day that it was
Twenny Five Years
since You All went out to Texas and I begann to cry, Dear Sister, because I do not
beleive
that we are Like to see Each Other any more.…

I knew that if I read any of the others I’d probably stay there all day, so I dropped it into the pile and went out back to prop a rusted Model-T fender against the pear tree’s trunk and pick some fruit. The pears were good, bird-pecked and with maybe a worm or so in their cores, but sweet and not grainy like most Texas pears, which are fit only for preserving. Standing there, I ate three while a hungry mocker rasped at me from the shed’s roof.

Axles and planter wheels and the old iron-bound oak hubs of wagons and a hundred unidentifiable rusty rods and bolts and straps of steel … Pieces of the same kind of junk were woven and wired into the logs of the corral in such quantity that you had to believe the intent had been partly ornamental. A Prince Albert can, its red gone yellow, letters scratched from the legend on its back (I wonder if any Texas boy ever failed to learn that dirtiness) to leave a mild obscenity … A huge old sandstone grinding wheel, without
its frame … An automobile tire still showing patches of red, white, and blue paint, flush-filled inside with dirt for flowers. A rosebush against the house with one frost-speckled bloom …

On a mountain not far behind that place, there was a fight where the Comanches each wore one long white-lace lady’s stocking, loot of a raid. It was said they made fine targets against the dark cedars.… That would have been only a couple of years before Addie came there, if the Brazos was where she and her man first came when they reached Texas.

Had it been their children who stayed on? If so, what had they been like? What music had they made in that stark shelter? What salt-rimed spot had there been in that bare yard where a man, heavy-eyed in the clean predawn, had emptied his bladder morning after morning, year after year, yawning gratefully at the goodness of Creation and the certainty of coffee, biscuits, and bacon? What daytime worries had wakened burr-prickling in his mind as he stood there? Where had he and his gone—to aircraft factories? to farms less tired? or, more probably, considering their leavings, each to take his thanatoptic chamber in the graveyard? Anyhow, they were gone, and neither they nor their kind would come back. We were not Like to see Each Other any more.…

Below the house, the field where the Indian midden lay was fuzzed silkily with needle grass, symbol of exhaustion. Figure-eighting about it, I kicked up a round mano and the forepart of a spearhead among charred hearthstones, and started back toward the river through descending brush. On the second narrow flat above the Brazos was a fine grove of big elms and pecans; squirrels there charked at me, and when
I stopped and let the pup run ahead, ignorant of his function, one came edging flattened around a tree trunk onto my side, watching the dog. I raised the gun, but then considered that there would be beef for sale somewhere near the bridge, and did not shoot, picking up a stick instead and throwing it against the tree. The squirrel arch-leaped to earth and ran to another pecan, and the pup, startled, danced after him screaming with tentative bravery. Nuts crackled underfoot; I gathered some and ate them as I walked—small, hard-shelled natives, but richer than the grafted commercial species. The wind soughed in the treetops, shut out of the woods’ layered silence.

A rusted trap in a patch of shinnery oak, twisted baling wire attached to the end of its chain … Dragged there by what unknown brute in what unknown pain, when? …

Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have died, and maybe never mattered hugely.

B
ELOW
T
URKEY
C
REEK
, I thought to put in and reconnoiter the area where George Eubanks played jumping jack with the Indians from behind an oak tree. But that stretch was a rapids, and trying to turn inshore I let the canoe sweep side-wise against a rock; when it tilted, I leaned compensatorily upstream and managed to ship half a boatload of ice water.… I jumped out into a current above my knees and led it ashore. Luckily there was sun, and neither the food nor my bed had gotten wet. I changed the morning’s clean trousers, soaked and mud-marked now, for my old filthy but dry ones, put on moccasins in place of the squishy boots, and laid everything out to dry. It would put me at the bridge late. I dislike schedules, and on the river the idea that I’d let myself come to count on getting to any one spot at any particular
time enraged me more than the accident my ineptitude had caused.

Not far above the bridge a dude ranch stood, tile-roofed and Spanish-stuccoed with dark oak trim, near where the Newberrys and some others fought half-white Quanah Parker’s raiders, a long running horseback fight. The Comanches got Elbert Doss, characterized in the chronicles as a “promising young man,” but Quanah, who wore a blue Yankee soldier’s coat on that foray, told someone in the later peaceful time that he’d lost nine out of sixteen warriors before he made it back to Oklahoma.

Among the pursuers was a type usually described as “Bose Ikard (colored).” He would be a story, a long one. Most of the not numerous Negroes along this frontier—“buffalo soldiers,” the Comanches called them—were pretty much background characters, leaving uproar to the whites whose supremacy forced heroics upon them. But a few like Bose Ikard and another one named Britt seem to have felt differently. In Weatherford cemetery Bose’s stone says:

   “Served with me four years on Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches. Splendid behavior”—C. Goodnight

   It was an Old Testamental God for whose perusal that commendation was issued, the stern Monarch in whose campaigns the stern generals like Mr. Charlie galloped. It seems clear, too, that Mr. Charlie considered that his opinion of Bose Ikard (colored) would carry weight with that Monarch.

Why shouldn’t he so have considered? Nowadays the jostling millions around us, and an economy in which the
“planned obsolescence” of both man and machine is basic, and such weighty concerns as whether or not Oscar will rise to vice-presidential rank and be able to live in Westport, Connecticut, convince us that Fate does things to us and that for sanity we’d better laugh about the things it does. People like Mr. Charlie had what was maybe an illusion, but a solid one; they believed they did things to Fate. They were engaged in the foreordained rape of a virgin land and they considered their task meaningful. It was. Most of them had pretty fair senses of humor, but they didn’t feel obliged to laugh at themselves.

Once I’d gone to that stuccoed dude ranch as a respectable Sunday visitor in company with well-dressed friends who knew the owners. Now, it was a logical place from which to telephone. But I was feeling raunchy in aspect and shy in soul, and drifted by it uncertainly on swirling waters, and picking up my paddle flushed a great horned owl from a cottonwood tree.

The sound of gravel machinery announced the bridge below. The pit operation itself, northwest of the bridge, seemed at the moment too raucous a reintroduction to the world of men; I parked the canoe on the other side of the river and clambered, carrying the pup, through stickerburs to a house there. A pregnant, sallow woman in gingham, whose cheeks sagged where fat had used away from beneath them, checked her screen door’s latch to make sure I couldn’t get in by force, and said she had no telephone.

“Has the pit over there got one?”

“Naw,” she said without embellishment, studying my stained pants and old wool shirt. I didn’t blame her.

Less confident even than before, I tried hitching, holding the passenger under my arm and pointing a thumb in the
direction of Mineral Wells as the pickup trucks and station-wagons and shiny sedans sh-h-h-OFFed by. It is one of the main east-west roads, and there were a good many of them, and the big transcontinental trucks that shake you as they pass. Some drivers looked at me with interest, or at the pup, but none slowed. Our world periodically respects Bold Looks and Successful Looks and Manly Looks and Ivy Looks and various other kinds of looks that advertisements tell it to respect, but since the proletarian thirties, the Unwashed Look has lacked admirers.… Rejected, I walked on across the bridge toward the clanking, squealing gravel pit. Inside its gate I set the pup down; he ran over and wet himself to the shoulders in the liquid red mud dripping from some sort of tall gravel-washing machine. In the little office shack an old man with a seamed scarlet face said no, they had no telephone.

I told him what I was up to.

“Hell,” he said. “We close down here in five minutes. I’ll run you somewheres, my way home.”

I thanked him.… In the car, a well-tended and fairly new coupé, I put the pup on the floor between my legs, but after we’d started I forgot him, and he surged up and printed red mud over the seat covers and my benefactor’s breeches and mine. I slammed him down and apologized.

The old man grunted. “Some dog,” he said. “Where the hell you goin’ to, down the river?”

“Around Glen Rose.”

“Purtier up here,” he said. “You know they was exactly three hunderd and sixty-five miles of the Brazos in Palo Pinto County? One for ever’ day in a year.”

He said it “Payla Pinta,” as a lot of the old-timers do. “Colorayda,” they say, too, and “Alabammy” and “Virginny.”
What he said wasn’t true, though it was familiar. At Cholula southeast of Mexico City, where the Spanish built all those sterile little chapels on top of Aztec altar mounds to milk away their evil, people will tell you that the chapels tally
exactamente trescientas sesenta y cinco
, but they don’t. I’ve heard the same thing about the depth in feet of some pot-hole lakes outside Roswell, and the number of steps in a tower stairway somewhere in Europe.… A slovenly roller-measure check of the Brazos map on my wall, just now, registers a little over a hundred river miles within that county. But people find a pleasure in such fabled correspondences; none of us is immune.