Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (15 page)

His wife came out. I hadn’t met her before. Standing at the top of the back steps, she said she remembered his speaking of me. She was around fifty, in gingham, with black hair pulled back on the sides of her head, and sun-narrowed eyes—the big-framed, gaunt breed of woman that farmers and ranchers so often pick to mother their sons after they’ve finished with the pinch-faced pretties of the honkytonks. Sometimes at town gatherings of people I have looked around and wondered what happened to that physical type in the process of urbanization, and then have seen them maybe along the wall, standing round-backed, dressed to deprecate their bulk among the slim-waisted twinkling blondes with Empire hairdos. In the country they still stand straight, and are prized.

Two married daughters, young and shorter than she, were peeking past her shoulders. She lacked the frequent stolid suspicion of farm women. She said: “Helped him cotch them pigs, I know.… Think you’d git tard, chasin’ up and down in a old boat.”

I said there wasn’t much up to it, the way the river was running.

“Ain’t it nice?” she said. “Seven years I thought we was gonna end up with a dry creek there. You, Tookie, git away from that pup!”

One of the daughters asked if I’d seen any deer. I said I had.

“My husband kilt one this morning,” she said. “He had nine points.”

“Eight,” her sister said.

“Nine, silly. That little old bump down by the head counted, he said it did.…”

She was pretty, dark-haired with blue eyes and as taut with life as her body was with young flesh, and I was glad she had a husband she was proud of. I liked all three of them; tone filters through families from strong fathers as it does in business from bosses, and McKee’s women were a corroboration of what I remembered of him. Even his dogs were.

The women affirmed what the cranes and geese had told me; the television said that weather was on the way. They hadn’t paid much mind to how bad it was to be, or when it was to hit.…
He
would know. How come I wasn’t married? Didn’t I get sick, eating junk I cooked on the river? … In the end, I had to argue out of an invitation to lunch two hours thence, when McKee would have returned; I said I had to get on down the river. It was true; if weather was to come, I wanted to be set for it. Mrs. McKee, in farewell, allowed that he would purely hate to have missed me, and that I was certain to get pneumonia.…

Near the Oakes crossing where the old road between Weatherford and Palo Pinto used to hit the river, the water’s surface was much as I remembered the surface of the classic Test, in the south-English chalk country, from once when I
stood there on a bridge watching the big, incredibly uniform trout at their feeding stations over the gravel. Smooth, with little swirls forming everywhere and drifting downstream to disappear, a dry-fly man’s reverie … The Brazos runs wide there, with a large-gravel bottom about a foot and a half down like the Test’s, and that was why they were alike. I wished it might also have held such trout, and in memory of not having been able to fish those rigidly owned foreign waters, I began to cast a little golden spoon with the spinning rod as I drifted.

Improbably, on the fourth cast I caught a one-pound white bass, and a few casts later another of about the same size. They pulled well in the current, and the second one jumped twice. They would make supper, if not an especially savory one. Most of the time I dislike them, to catch or to eat. An introduced species, they swarm in the big artificial impoundments and are good quarry for motorboat trollers and those who like to spot the feeding bunches of them on the surface in calm evening and race full-throttle at them to make a few casts.… They have coarse flesh and run in schools, and fishing for them lacks the studious, precisionist illusion that goes along with stalking trout, or black bass, or even bream.

It was pleasant, though, to have caught two fish of any kind in that pretty water. I strung them through the lips and drifted on down, past the old stone house at the crossing, wishing I could place in my mind what bird it was that was singing a thin, high, sad song off in the brush.… The sky seemed about to clear, then did not. The wind veered about from the east, and then back from the south, while the north side of me itched in expectation of that thrust which didn’t come. Finally it did come, or seemed to, a cool push from
the northeast behind me as I tooled down into the long ingoing stretch of the Village Bend on smooth-flowing water over shallow sand and gravel. Then it stopped, and the air was hot again. I gave up weather prognostication.

Many cranes were calling from a field somewhere off to the right and ahead; four wheeled in the air there. I was passing good Indian sites without heed; the Village Bend is rich in them. On the left, a goat lewdly surveyed me from a long, sloping, dead willow branch; he was perched at least twenty-five feet above the water, and had no business up a tree. The feel of farmhouses and people, though I saw none from the water … Smoky air, the sun hot through it, the wind in the east again now … I nearly went to sleep, and let the boat spin and drift backward as it willed in that obstructionless smooth glide, four or five miles of it. No fish, no ducks, no squirrels, no Indians, no pioneers …

Hills ahead against which the bend breaks itself to fold back in its long finger shape … Behind a low rise someone shot, and sixteen sandhills rose and came over me in gawky hasty flight, unformed, calling. Law enforcement in that back country is hard, and for that matter three-quarters even of the countrymen now think that cranes are geese, and the goose season was on. Further heavy flights of cranes passed over the river southward, behind me.… In the deep pool at the bend’s tip, just under the rocks where Henry Belding gave an Indian chief the cramp colic, I intended to fish, having left myself time for it. But when I got there, two couples were car-camped on a flat beside the rocks, and the young men, sideburned and snickering, were firing a twenty-two pistol at chips and clots of foam in the water. I paddled on down a mile and, having time, picked a good campsite on a Bermuda flat ten or twelve feet above the water with
a wide, clean, sand beach below it and brush sheltering it behind, on the north. Goats had cropped the grass like a lawn and had done the passenger the favor of eating up all the burrs, which they perversely like. Good solid driftwood was lodged among the brush from the spring floods. I pitched the tent tail-north, the stakes solid in good turf, dug a pit for the fire before it, and, liking the look of the whole business, decided I’d stay there until the norther had come and blown and shown the length of its teeth. I could hold out, there.

Except that it didn’t come. Evening was dead still and rosy; from the farming flatlands north and east of me people-sounds rang faint—shots, shouts, the barking of dogs.… With the last sunlight at least 500 cranes came out of the north, spiraling and sailing down onto the river, grating their call. A dozen lit on the beach near my canoe, but took off again whistling and calling when the pup ran to the edge of the flat and barked down at them. Above and below, the other hundreds remained, stalking about the sand flats and bugle-croaking that stridulous sound as ungainly and wild and noble as the birds themselves. The pup went into frenzies until I quieted him.

For no good reason I went down to the canoe and took out the spinning rod and made one cast, reeling the lure in fast as it swept down the quick smooth water. As I was lifting it out, a good bass took it with a splash and a twist and tore fifty feet of thin line off the reel before it slowed him. Then he gave up and came to a quiet backwater where I beached him—a black of about three pounds, long and slim as the river fish are likely to be. Since the afternoon’s two whites were still flapping-strong on the clip chain, I turned them loose and fileted the black for supper, and it was dark. The lantern’s gas was exhausted, but its hissing
would have been harsh against the calm starry night anyhow; I cooked and ate by the fire’s flicker and used the flashlight to put out a throwline and to get myself to bed.

It was warm; the pup, finding me too efficient a heater, went off to sleep on my wadded pants.

I had given up prognostication.

I
N THE MORNING
there I saw day come. Not in the way you usually see it if you’re up, over a stretch of a half-hour or so. I saw it come. I was standing on the beach, with light fog eddying about my legs, and was looking down the river along the dark shoreline fading into mists. Everything was a dull blue-gray. Then the sand was yellow and the trees gold and red and green, and though clouds and fog still hid the sun I knew that I had seen the abrupt instant of its rising.… The throwline had one small channel cat, which I threw back, and two snarled stagings where larger ones had twisted free by that process they know. The cranes seemed to have concentrated below during the night; they talked among themselves for a time and then rose all together with an uproar of angry armies, and left.

Coffee, and a piece of cold fried bass … I felt no hurry to leave that place until I knew for certain that the big cold had hung up to the north of us somewhere, as it probably had. So I smoked, and drank more coffee, and made an expedition back into the brush after the high, sad, slow whistler’s song:

Birds were there—a Harris’s sparrow, a mocker singing a subdued winter song to fit the quiet morning, doves fat and
mature now that the season for their shooting was past (you kill mostly pinfeathered infants in September, when it’s legal), a spotted towhee, cardinals, the usual raucous mob of robins, something black-throated with yellow cheeks.… But it was none of them. The whistler stayed hidden, and kept singing. The passenger impeded bird watching, bouncing about with sticks in his mouth and snarling at me for refusing to play. He impeded bathroom matters, too.…

The thing was, I had once known what bird that whistle belonged to. Knowledge of that kind takes so long to come by, solidly at least, and there is so much of it to try to have before you die, if you care anything about it, that to lose any small part of what you do have seems unfair.

Cranes, battalioning about in high swarms, maybe having decided too that the cold wasn’t chasing them … Shooting, in the northwest where the rugged country lay, the sound fuzzed by distance until you couldn’t tell whether it was rifles or shotguns … Deer? Ducks? Cans? Cranes? Probably a little of all of them … I washed dishes, sloshed out the canoe, and squirted Duco into a tear I found where the rock at Turkey Creek had gouged the fiberglass. As I was heating water for shaving, two girls in a pickup drove down to the rocks above the opposite shore, and got out to fish. Though they were maybe 250 yards away, I resented them. So did the passenger, who stopped playing and sat down to stare, not barking because they were women and he was woman-reared, but growling low in his throat from time to time. They stared back covertly; once while I was shaving before the tent with a mirror in my hand, I heard them giggling across the quiet air.

As the laughter of fools? What was it? …

Hale always claimed, and still does, that those other girls
that time were solid in their intentions toward us, and that I botched it. He seems still to feel strongly about it.… As I remember, we were walk-fishing in the limestone country below Granbury, ranging down the river afoot from camp at some farmer’s pay picnic ground, wading the long shallow stretches in tennis shoes and climbing over the boulders beside the pools. The girls, older than we, were sitting under a Cottonwood by their car with cold beer in an ice bucket; laughing, they offered us some, and Hale swilled two bottles in succession, declaring that he was an old beer drinker. I drank one, and since I was empty and hot it dizzied me, nor did I like its bitterness. The girls started a kind of banter that made me jumpy even without my understanding much of it. Hale answered with some truck-driver talk from a hamburger stand we frequented, and in a while one of the girls slapped him and started wrestling with him in the sand, laughing.

“Let’s fish some more, Hale,” I said.

His answer was muffled but negative.

The girl with him sat up, tugging her blouse straight. She said: “You ain’t nothin’ but kids!”