Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (12 page)

And the claim did have a little poetic verity—the river winds hugely. They used to tell about a fisherman who yanked out a catfish over his shoulder, and when he looked around he’d thrown it back into the Brazos ten miles upstream. And I wonder how many rivers
that
chestnut’s been told about.…

Therefore, and because he was giving me a ride, I said appreciatively: “Is that right?”

He said it was, and let me out at a brightly lighted ser sta gro. It was getting dark. I hiked the filthy pup under my arm and again thanked the old man, who laughed and said: “Hell!” and drove on home.

I went into the ser sta gro. They’re institutional in that part of the world; some for variation label themselves “gro mkt sta,” or “gro sta,” or whatnot. Practically every countryman below a certain level of prosperity seems to yearn bitterly to own and run one, maybe because from the times of drouth and depression and crop failure he remembers that storekeepers had canned goods on the shelves to eat and that everybody else in the county owed them money. Appearing
and disappearing like May flies, enduring in proportion to their individual owners’ popularity and skill at whipping off the wolves of bankruptcy, they vary in size from the one-pump station with a shelf or so of Days O’ Work chewing tobacco and Van Camp’s beans to a fairly elaborate approximation of a town grocery store, and serve as gathering places for the philosophical symposia of their neighborhoods.

Three or four philosophers in bib overalls with brown juice in the corners of their mouths regarded me as I dumped the pup on the floor. Countrymen are usually unfond of dogs indoors, but I was tired of carrying him and didn’t trust him alone outside by the highway. Their gaze told me that I was dirty even by their standards, which by open evidence were not effete. A radio was shrieking out that synthesis of the old simple Anglo-Saxon music with Tin Pan Alley and electric amplification that is usually called hillbilly, but not around there. There it’s just “music,” and the neon-glaring tonks near the cities seem its most appropriate setting. If you’re from that country, you usually have an unwilling affection for it, having listened to its evolution. Even twenty years ago it still retained a little of the old directness and innocence, but now the directness and the innocence have passed to not very direct and not very innocent people with guitars around places like Greenwich Village, and the country people take their music with heavier seasoning.

The proprietor was scratching beneath his belt and selling a lady green tomatoes. “Where to you want to call?” he said, not in direct answer to my question.

I told him and against the coolness in his pouched eyes added: “Collect.”

“There,” he said, pointing with the right rear surface of
his skull, still scratching.… Telephoning, I watched his ear monitoring me till it heard me repeat the magic word to the operator; then he sacked up the tomatoes and gave them to the lady and went to join the philosophers. One does not for long remain in command of a three-pump ser sta gro if he places confidence in grimy strangers; one is beset hard enough already by grimy acquaintances. When I’d finished a call to my people and was waiting for the operator to put one through to Hale, I saw the pup disappear behind the meat counter. I snapped my fingers. He ignored me. A dark young man behind the counter glanced toward the owner, and I snapped my fingers again.

“Don’t matter none,” the owner said, maybe because I had friends who would accept collect calls.

Hale said in a business voice, intimating weightiness, that he had to fly down to Houston the following day. I told him he’d be sorry, twenty years thence.

He said he already was.

I told him a yellow catfish that had looked to weigh forty pounds had nearly torn the paddle out of my hands that morning. It was true; I’d been shooting a clear heavy run with yellow leaves dancing down the water all around me in the sunlight, steering with just the edge of the blade, when suddenly something grabbed it with a bump and a twist, and as suddenly let go. Then he rolled in the current ahead of me, golden, sight-feeding as they sometimes do.… They run twice that big in the Brazos, some of them, though only a few are ever caught on hooks, and those by the patient catfish specialists. Some are wrestled ashore by the “grabblers,” sturdy rural sportsmen who wade and tread water while they probe the recesses of the undercut banks with
their hands, disregarding moccasins and game wardens and other dangers. Others are taken, just as illegally and less sportingly, by cynics with cranked magnetos, the so-called “telephoners.”

Hale said: “Forty pounds is easy to say. I bet he wouldn’t weigh what the one did that we sold that café that time.”

“You go on to Houston and make some money,” I said.

“No ducks?”

“High fliers. There’ll be some, below Rock Creek.”

“Not unless the water goes down,” he said. “You ought to see geese before long, whenever there’s another norther.”

I said I guessed I would.

“Damn you,” he said.… He wanted me to call him again, from farther down. I said I might, and hung up. He had always been a strong hunter and fisherman, and though he was a good friend I found that I’d fallen so much into the pattern of quietness and aloneness that it didn’t bother me much that he couldn’t come out.…

“Kind of motor you usin’?” the owner said, having listened. Four sets of hairy philosophical ears radared toward me.

“Canoe,” I said.

And saw a quintuplicate reproduction of the expression on the face of the little man at Possum Kingdom dam.

“Tippy damn things,” the owner said, and walking to the meat counter took out a little piece of liver and gave it to the pup, who gobbled it. The owner said: “Cute little sommidge. One of them dash hounds, ain’t he?”

But the dark young man was sympathetic. He said he’d been fishing once on the river and a fellow had passed in a canoe and had talked to him.

“On his way to the Guff,” he said. “Man, he was havin’
hisself a time. Didn’t have no clothes on, nothin’ but a pair of sharts. Brown as ara nigger. Talked Yankee.”

One of the philosophers snorted the kind of snort that poets get in taciturn lands, defining for me the young man’s rank among them, and obliquely my own. He waited on me while I picked out fruit and potatoes and biscuit mix and a little range-beef T bone, ruby red without marbling and by nature tough. Since they had no hamburger, he recommended neckbones for the pup, and I bought some. An outdoor-magazine reader, he said he’d saved up and bought a new .270 for the deer season that opened the next day, and asked me as a sylvan oracle what I thought about that caliber. Accepting the role, I said it was a sweet rifle, without adding that I had only three or four times in my life sought to kill any large mammals besides man, and then unwillingly and with a borrowed gun.…

The owner, partly because he liked the passenger and partly, Swissly, because I’d become a customer, had decided I was all right. He said so, which puzzled me till I saw that he and the philosophers had cans of beer sitting on a counter behind them; because of an army camp, a stretch around Mineral Wells is wet territory in that generally, justifiably prohibitionist land. He offered me fifteen dollars for the pup, and when I turned it down, he said he didn’t blame me, and went out to commandeer a seat for me, regally, in a blue pickup truck that stopped to buy gas. The two men in it were brown lean small-townsmen headed out to a deer lease, and made room cheerfully for me and the pup. They were talking about how they’d packed the eggs and whether the milk would keep without ice and such matters, the talk of women-tended men magnifying the maleness of a three or four-day expedition away from their women. I’d talked
that way myself, often, but listened now feeling different from them. They let me out at the bridge, and good wishes flew both ways through the air.

Thrashing … The armed night watchman at the pit, where the only level ground near the bridge lay, said it was all right if I camped there, but that I’d better make a noise if I came up around the machinery. The canoe, though, was on the other side of the river. Somehow I bulled it across in the dark, sloshed about in water and mud extracting an austere minimum of gear, and made camp by the light of the gasoline lantern tied to a willow branch. I was glad to be by myself again. There was no driftwood but only dry willow sticks, which make no coals; I scorched the little T bone a bit and ate it with store bread and tomatoes. The passenger found his neckbones too fresh and carried them off one by one, as I gave them to him, to bury each in a different spot for ripening; nor could I tell him that he was unlikely to be around at the time of their perfection to profit from his toil.…

He was an affable little brute, impractical but comic and good to have with me, philosophical under scolding and the occasional sleepy kicks he got when he wriggled too much in the bottom of the sleeping bag at night. In a few days he had developed more than in weeks in town, giving up his abject station at my heels to run about the woods on our shore excursions, learning to evade the cold by staying in the tent or by hugging the fire, sitting like a figurehead on the food box in the bow as we slid down the river in the long bright afternoons. At the ser sta gro he had been a help; elsewhere among countrymen he was as likely to be a drag, but I was glad I’d brought him.

Nekkebone, nekkebone, kept running obsessively through my head as I watched him dig. It was from Chaucer or somewhere; someone had smitten someone else and cleaved his head all the way vnto the nekkebone.…

Traffic roared with irregular steadiness across the bridge. Each car or truck that crossed rattled a loose bolt somewhere toward its center.

Near that bridge an old fellow used to live who was known generally, probably because somebody had read Mark Twain, as Indian Joe. He spent the latter end of his life scrambling up and down hills all through that country with a witching rod in his hands; he believed in buried Spanish gold. Unfortunately for Joe, the gold didn’t believe in him; he died there as poor as ever, though I imagine he’d had a better time than many a more practical seeker has in country clubs.

The Brazos nurtures a few lonely ones like that, some of them pretty wild-eyed. They live on willow islands in driftwood shacks, and in holes among the high rocks, neighbors to the rattler. One of them near Palo Pinto used to sell reptiles to schools and laboratories. You hear about them more than you see them, though they probably see you as you pass. When landowners know they’re there, they seem usually to tolerate them; some widowed or bachelor landowners get a bit that way themselves. In hard times there were more; now, with jobs easy to come by, the hermits who remain are the real ones.

We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the musk
of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him.…

But there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do.…

There was old Sam Sowell. He didn’t live on the river, but not far from it either, in the limestone and cedar country near Glen Rose. His home was a dugout on a hill with a grove of live oaks, on the backest back end of 180 acres that belonged to him. In those depression days the land would have been expensive at seven dollars an acre, but it was his bank. He subsisted on flour and beans and fatback and squirrel and mustard greens and such luxuries, and he dipped snuff. When he needed to buy anything, he would chop two cedar posts out of the matted brake that covered most of his estate, and would shoulder them and walk straight across country the three and a half miles to a store on the Stephenville road. There he would trade the posts for two bits’ worth of whatever merchandise it was that he wanted, and would walk back home.

The dugout held an iron cook stove and a bunk, and on sunny winter days Sam would come up through the slanting trap door and sit like a gopher on the forward slope of the turfed mound that covered his home, blinking out over the dark hills, skeeting amber snuff juice onto the limestone rubble. I’ve studied him like that from a half-mile off, through a field glass. He had no woman nor wanted any, could not read or write, kept no dog, and had reduced friend
ship to a three-inch wave of his hand and a waggle of his gray narrow head to briefly encountered persons who had known him all his life. Anyone who hadn’t known him all his life got neither waggle nor wave. He bothered no one and, it seemed to me, wanted more than anything on earth not to be bothered.

One winter night with a raw spit out of the north, four young men were drinking white whisky in a shack not far from Sam Sowell’s place. One of them was named Davis Birdsong; he runs a kind of ranch for a friend of mine now, but I didn’t know him then. They had put out dogs after bobcat, but the cats knew better than to run abroad on a night like that, and after a while so did the hounds, who were huddled now on the shack’s little porch, having been cursed and tethered. The young men were keeping warm both by drinking white whisky and by burning what was left of the shack’s teetering furniture in a potbellied stove with a big crack down one side, through which from time to time live embers spilled out onto the wooden floor. This disturbed none of them, since the shack wasn’t theirs.

(It still stands, disastrous, with inch-wide gaps between the grayed boards of its sides; I have slept there with the cotton rats and the skunks, and at noon in summer sometimes the rattlesnakes’ dry buzz sounds from beneath the floor, where they lie impatient for cool night.)

Jim Lemmon said: “Listen at her whustle.”

Davis Birdsong finished kicking a bureau drawer to pieces, shoved them into the stove, and said: “Give me that jar.”