Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (14 page)

T
HE MORAL
? I think probably there is none. Leave loners be, maybe …

People had made me tireder than the river usually did. They had silhouetted my own temporary solitude and had shown me that I liked it well enough. The willow fire burned out and I went to bed, and lay listening to the periodic clank of the loose piece of metal in the bridge above.

Maybe that bit from Chaucer, if it was from Chaucer, wasn’t about nekkebones at all. Maybe someone had cleaved someone’s nekke vnto the brestebone.… It was the kind of thing likely to pester a part of your mind, alone.

Sam Sowell? He lived till well after the war, and changed in no respect. If cedar posts went up a little in price, so did snuff and fatback, and it all balanced out.

CRASHING BY six feet from where I lay, gravel trucks with hard brown faces laughing down at me from out of their cabs drove me breakfastless to the river that morning. I hurled in my gear and let it load the way it fell, and shoved off disgruntled, the passenger shrill in the bow. But it meant that I was moving early, and after I’d stopped on a bar a mile below to tuck things in and make coffee, I was glad of it. Some mornings I’d been puttering until ten or eleven o’clock, fire-staring, smoking another pipe of the tobacco that tasted so clean with another cup of coffee.

Shots, far back from the river … Deer season, and a Saturday, which would likely make for hell on the hills … I guessed that not even the normal quota of whisky-head sports would probably shoot a boat for a buck, but decided to wear a bandanna if I went rambling ashore. The river had risen eight or ten inches during the night. Three species of wrens were singing at the same time. It was a good morning, cool and with a dark line of clouds across the south, but the air had a muggy, head-aching edge to it somehow, the feel
of weather that was going to change. By eight o’clock I was on the river again, the sun good on my back, the paddle good in my hands, the alternating pull and recovery of the stroke good against my toning muscles.

In a while I passed the mouth of a little branch where Hale and I, having put in at the One Eighty bridge late on a Friday afternoon, had once made an unfortunate kind of camp. It had looked like a good place, and, thinking maybe we’d stay a day or so to fish there, we had set things up solidly and even laid a sandstone fireplace to fit our grill. Just before dark the turkey buzzards started dropping into the trees all around us like flies onto fresh dung. It was a roost. When shouting at them did no good, Hale lost his temper and shot one, and it fell to the ground beside our tent and puked before it died, and stank; the rest flapped up five or six feet from their perches at the sound of the shot and then settled solemnly back down again. Others kept coming.… By dark we calculated that there must be 4,000 within a half-acre of woodland all around us; the fire didn’t disturb them, nor did anything else. A hissing ran among them for a time like whispers, then stopped. We spent the night listening to the gentle rain-rustle of their droppings on dry leaves and breathing their vomital stink. A sky without two or three vultures wheeling and riding the thermals looks empty to me, but I saw less poetry in them after that night. In the morning they left, and so did we.

Fewer trees stood there than I remembered. But the floods the spring before had been big and had changed the look of the river’s shore all along, scouring it, taking out healthy trees with the sick and dead ones that high water usually gets.

The shores flattened. In the Hittson and Village Bends the valley of the river’s ancient scooping widens for a stretch
before the sandstone mountains close in again tightly for a few miles of farewell. A squirrel barked from a tall Spanish oak. The sky was patchy, El Greco, its blue mottled with dark and bright wind-flattened clouds, pleasantly bleak. Sand bottom, sign of flatlands, bane of the low-water canoe-man, since it swallows up three quarters of the river’s flow … Pecan trees and behind them fields with the growl of tractors … On the beaches, when we stopped to stretch from time to time, the pup dug great soggy pits, whining and barking at buried stones that balked his efforts to extract them, unaware that he wasn’t after stones at all but ancestral badgers.

On the river the wind wasn’t strong, but high up it was doing violence. The El Greco clouds suddenly, as though consciously, coalesced into a gray overcast that turned the day ominous. Two long skeins of big birds flapped across that grayness toward the south—sand-hill cranes, grating out their castle-gate croak—and I knew what the air’s muggy edge meant. Geese confirmed it, the first I’d seen, four snows in a little disciplined V, winging solemnly and soundlessly south. The wind on the river died, and paddling I began to sweat. It was the kind of day that usually, in the Texas fall, is full of a kind of waiting; things are moving, the year is changing, a norther is coming.…

Winter there comes in waves, and keeps coming in waves till spring. For four or five months the wind rasps back and forth across West Texas like a great fiddlebow—north, then south, cold, then warm, so that even meteorologists don’t know what overclothing to carry to work in the mornings. From Canada down across the Great Plains the cold, from the Gulf the wet warm or the cold blown back up at you wet, and always hard, and in the beginning it has the
exultation of change in it, though after New Year more often than not it angers you, and you want again summer’s quiet, burning stasis.

There is less talk of “northers” these days. People sit softly at ten fifteen in the evening and watch while a bacon vender points to highs and lows and fronts on a chart, and then they go to the wall to twirl their thermostats, and perhaps the windows rattle a little in the night, but that’s about all.… In the country, though, a front is a fact still. There it’s a blue line along the horizon, and a waiting, sweaty hush, and a hit like a moving wall, and all of life scurrying for the southern lee of things. There it’s a battening down, an opening of hydrant valves, a checking of young and valuable stock, a walking across the swept lots with a flashlight, a leaning against the hard-shoving cold, a shuddering and creaking of old, tall, frame houses. There it’s a norther, and there someone always, inevitably, rightly, cracks the old one about there being nothing between West Texas and the Pole except a bob-wire fence.

Therefore I had a little doubt about the exhilaration that lumped in my chest while I watched the cranes and the geese. I’ve always hoped geese would outlast me; my pessimism might not be stolid enough to hunch its shoulders over their destruction by insecticides, human encroachment, or whatever other agent it may be that will probably get them in the long run. They sum up the autumn and sum up the spring and sum up all the wide surge of the natural world, and your far ancestors and mine thought they were red-eared white hounds harrying damned souls across night skies.…

But a good norther in November can pare fifty or sixty degrees from the temperature in a matter of hours, and if it’s
a “blue” one, it can bring days of driving cold rain or sleet.

I had a visit to pay. A man who had been decent to me a couple of times, and whom I liked, farmed a stretch of the right bank in that neighborhood. I’d met him in a warm October that had turned suddenly cold, catching me under-equipped; I’d passed him where he was fishing from the rocks below his house, and after we’d talked a little he’d said: “Boy, you’re gonna freeze. You pull out at my picnic ground down there and shoot you some squirrels and build you a far.”

I did. The picnic ground—a good many of the river’s farmers have them for extra money in the summer—was a sandy flat with big pecans and board tables and fireplace grills with stacked cordwood, and a doorless shack where I put my gear. Mooching through the woods in search of meat, I ran across ten new piglets whose mother made a run at me when I came too close. After shooting a couple of young squirrels, I fried and ate them and went to bed on the shack’s floor, to wake a half-hour later to the slubber-slop of the old sow’s champing as she ate up my bread and potatoes. Whacking her out with a board, I put the rest of the food on a table there, but she woke me again by damply sniffing my face, and I got up on the table, too.… In the morning the farmer, whose name was McKee, came down to get her. The piglets scattered to brush, but we caught one and tethered him by the leg to a stake and grabbed the others one by one as they came back to his squealing. It took all morning; we spoke of churches and Indians and beer halls and a good many other things while we waited, and before I left he brought me a bag of fine cold biscuits to take the place of the bread. “You feed my hogs, I’ll feed you,” he said.

He wasn’t at home this time. I climbed up through a cleft in the rocks of the shore and approached the house past a barn whose basic center was made of hewn, carefully fitted logs that showed it to have once been a cabin. New red machinery stood there, and six fat steers stared phlegmatically between the boards of the corral. The house itself was white frame, clean and orderly, with big elms overhanging it in a fenced yard. Four pleasant mongrels met me and, after barking dutifully, began to gambol, waving their tails, to the pup’s confusion and then delight.