Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (16 page)

“Agnes, you old bat,” her friend said. “Fred and them’ll be waitin’.”

Hale was in favor of wrestling some more, but got slapped in earnest, hard, and sat back. Then they were in the car with their bucket and driving away, their laughter trailing back at us out of the window. Hale said, with surprise, that he felt terrible, and proved it by being sick.…

Across the years that laughter trailed down to me when I heard the two girls’ mirth on the other shore as they still-fished. It carried a weight of embarrassment, even now.
What had bothered me then, besides the hot pubescent confusion, was a feeling that the women and the beer hadn’t gone with the river, with the way I felt about the river and being there. Years and beers and women later, they still didn’t; I shaved resenting the girls’ giggling long-range interest in me, and was glad when finally, having caught nothing, they got in their truck and drove away.

You get to be a kind of loner.

For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool! It wasn’t only the girls who’d brought that bit up to boil around in the bottom of my consciousness; it was, too, the daily building and rebuilding of fires with twigs and debris that snapped as they burned.

From those same fires, I smelled like a smoked side of bacon. Which had been squirted by skunks … The sun had cut the thin fog and the wind wasn’t yet strong, so I went down to the water and stripped and bathed, plunging in to wet myself in the current and jumping erect to soap and scrub, then plunging again to rinse. It made me feel fine, though I’d have been a silly enough sight, had there been anyone to see, standing naked in ice water up to my knees under an autumn sky and a rising breeze that was picking yellow leaves from the cottonwoods.

Geese were trumpeting somewhere in the sky. I couldn’t focus and find them. Would they mean the real weather?

It seemed not.…

Worked-flint chips speckled the sand under the leaf mold in the brush behind camp when I scuffed it up with my foot. It was a site: for that matter, just about the whole of the Village Bend is. Its flat, flood-renewed alluvium must always have attracted the placid red men whose way of life was the
hamlet and the planting stick and the harvests of pumpkins, beans, corn, and potatoes. In the forties of the last century, when roving loners were the only whites in that country, a big Ioni village of rush wigwams stood inside the bend, and the Anadarkoes had another across the river to the south. The Ionies seem to have been the Tejas for whom the state had been named when they lived far to the south.… Robert Neighbors visited them on the Brazos in ’47, and General Cooper in ’51, and both reported them peaceful, amicable, and a bit daunted by the always overhanging shadow of the drifting Comanche.

The Comanches (no, ma’am, I hadn’t left them; when thou hast done thou hast not done, for I have more) slashed and stabbed and twanged their bows and banged their muskets as merrily around here as they did on the rest of the Brazos frontier. There were some good fights among the recorded ones and probably some better ones that never got written down. They killed Benjamin Franklin Baker, his horse slowed by a big load of fresh pork, just to the north of the bend. In the rough breaks at the tip a little group of Palo Pinto townsmen in ’67, ired by the loss of horses from the village itself, caught up with the rusty thieves by using hounds, and when they found them they wished they hadn’t; there were a lot of them.… The fight surged up and down the rough cedar-thick mountainside with little groups of cutoff citizens and Comanches meeting each other and fleeing and pursuing and dodging in a kind of Shakespearean comic confusion, nobody getting hurt much except a few horses. At the climax of things, when friends had found friends and lined up together on two sides, an old Comanche chief jumped up between the lines and began to strut and shout in Plains-Indian battle fashion.…

Henry Beiding wrote forty-odd years later:

Directly I saw Buck Dillahunty shoot his six-shooter at the old Jabberer, but he never batted his eye. but came on like he was going to walk over us. Then I took deliberate aim with my shotgun at his side and at the crack of the gun, he went off, all doubled-up, as though he had the cramp colic pretty badly.…

About ten years ago, close by that place, a rancher found a neatly disposed skeleton in a crevice with glass beads, brass bracelets, spurs, a bridle, and a clay pipe, stones packed down on top. There must be dozens or even hundreds more within a radius of twenty or thirty miles in that country, but few turn up. They were well hidden; the Comanches had a flat and overriding conviction that a man needed his body whole in the next world, and it was only when panicked that they ever deserted their dead, let alone their wounded. From childhood one of their basic and repetitious rehearsals was the swooping horseback recovery of the limp bodies of companions.

South and east of where I was, across the river, the land rolls up tumblingly into the mass of Ward Mountain, where a Comanche of a likable kind once fought a fight. J. C. McConnell talked to white men who had been there, and wrote it down.… The People had run two Methodist preachers down the highway into Palo Pinto town without catching them, and citizens leaped at the chance for a cross-country chase. Ward Mountain was where they caught up— as often, in such high, rough country that they had to battle afoot. A man named Taylor, his aim confused by the dancing, squalling, retreating redskins, finally shouted after them in fury: “Damn you, why don’t you stand still and fight?”

My Comanche heard, stopped, and looked around just long enough to holler back in good Fort Sill English: “Damn you some, too!”

And danced on … I always hoped he survived, though not many of them did for long. Their way dedicated them to self-destruction; with a paradoxical kind of innocence, a fierce lack of knowing what else there was they could do, they kept on playing the old Plains game of warfare against people for whom it was no game and whose weapons were not toys. Risk for The People was glory; in little stripped-down bands they slashed down at the frontier again and again and again in the sixties and early seventies. Companies of rangers made up of men like Charles Goodnight slashed back, but often at shadows, and for a long time the Comanches’ ultimate doom was not certainly envisioned even by the whites. Many of the younger settlers rode off to the Civil War, and after they got home again the Northern officials in Oklahoma still ignored or maybe helped the Comanches in their raiding. The frontier’s population thinned down to the purely tough ones, and some of those pulled back a way for years. So constant was the skirmishing that most of it went unregistered.

The People earned plenty of glory among themselves and in their own terms, but even while they raped and stole and killed and scalped and kidnapped in a totally glorious fashion, they were losing steadily, and after a while they knew it. They weren’t numerous enough to absorb the losses; their women, from a hard and horseback life, miscarried constantly and casually and bore few sons to replace the young men who ended up in crevices, stones tamped down above them. Besides, it was happening with speed.… In ’75,
after the frontier whites and the smallpox and the other diseases and Mackenzie had finished with them, only about 1,600 Comanches were alive, abject government wards, where brief years before 10,000 had hunted and fought.

Those who went, went the way they chose. Listen to old Ten Bears of the Root Eaters, at one of the brave peace-makings whose meaninglessness he divined:

They made sorrow come in our camps, and we went out like the buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked. When we found them we killed them, and their scalps hang in our lodges. The Comanches are not weak and blind, like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and far-sighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried and our women laughed.

 … There are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me and like them I lived happily.…

Do not speak of it more.… If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live in is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The whites have the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.

Most of them did wander on the prairie until they died, and because of the kind of activity the wandering entailed, their dying didn’t take long to accomplish.

They threw off a few sparks doing it, though. The Nsimna, The People …

P
ROGNOSTICATING DESPITE MYSELF
, I decided that the cold front must have slowed to a stop somewhere to the north, so I loaded up early in the afternoon and pushed on under a blue sky pierced high by yellow thunderheads. Up a creek canyon, searching afoot for an Indian rock shelter that someone had told the old gentleman in Weatherford about, I managed to let a $200 borrowed camera jolt from its case into a pool. When I fished it out and tried it, its shutter went
clud
, foretelling the expenditure of money.

The canyon was worth seeing, though—a tawny, weather-stained gash in the foothills of Ward Mountain with a clear creek, and on the flats above the canyon wall a stretch of primeval woodland. Maybe it had been too hard to reach to cut out the lumber trees, or maybe by some quirk of inheritance the owners were absentee and indifferent; patches of land turn up in the Brazos country from time to time whose titleholders’ whereabouts maybe the tax-collecting courthouses know, but hardly anyone else. Towering burr oaks and live oaks stood there above silence, and cedars of a size I’d never seen before in that country: one, lightning-split, must have measured nearly three feet through the long axis of an elliptical cross section. Brambles overarched trails that no livestock had used for years; squirrels played on high branches, and from underbrush deer I couldn’t see coughed at me and ran away with a sound of kicked leaves.

The rock shelter, when I found it, sat in a scooped niche of the canyon wall, a queer little circular sty with unmortared walls built up of flat slabs that any Boy Scout might have laid, but none had, and a fallen-in roof of larger slabs, one
of them grooved for corn grinding. It was like the others of its kind I’d seen. A couple of people might have been able to squat in it by a tiny fire when it had been whole, but why they’d have chosen to do so, with villages near and the woods for shelter too and even caves, I’ve never seen explained. High water had scoured it; I found no midden.

Back on the river, I lost interest in archeology. Swirling high currents swept the thunderheads out of the sky like minor actors exiting before the stars show up onstage. For thirty minutes a hot hush hung.…

Finally, from the northwest, an arched crescent of blue-dun cloud, sky-wide, rolled hugely high and fast down at us, the atmosphere clear before it and clear behind. Not having prognosticated worth a damn, I scuttled for the flatter shore and had the tent up lopsided but solid under a half-dead elm by the time the first big slam of cold hit, with a sweep of leaves and sand and the fresh uplift of body and spirit, probably barometric, that they always carry even when you don’t want them.

Unuplifted, the pup kept jumping back into the canoe with the apparent faint hope that if we continued our float, all that bluster would cease. He got sand on my shotgun, and I had to switch him before he would face the fact of our staying there. Working, carrying gear from where the canoe was moored unhandily between a cutaway bank and submerged willows, then chopping a thick branch of the elm into chunks for a fire, I watched the sky.

From the southeast, rearing to meet the blue-dun cloud’s charge, a white roll of exactly similar shape moved up. In the dusk, when I’d finished setting up and was squatting in the tent opening by a good fire, they met with thunder and the last red tints of sundown flame-edged their fight.…

Big drops of rain spatted down diagonally through the violent air, and the old elm in the fire hissed and spewed and stank and radiated; lightning took over the sun’s work and made the early night for a time flickeringly white, and loud with thunder.

It was a fine show. Out, natural drama big and little sops up much of that interest that in towns we daily expend upon one another’s small nobilities and bastardlinesses, and for me no surer proof of our unchanging animality exists than the response we give to storms. There is nothing rational about it. A man is a fool to welcome bluster and wet and cold, and yet he often does, and even indoors he is seldom indifferent to their coming. It is hard for him to talk about them without using the old personifications which, they say, first spawned theology; it is hard to write about them without leaning on the insights of poets who, sometimes self-consciously, have prized violence in nature. Maybe bare-nerved Shelley: