Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (25 page)

I said it was a fine book.

He said: “Crap! Hit’s the only book they is.”

His eye shone, and I didn’t argue. He started damning commentators and interpreters, water-muddiers. You could drink the truth in its purity if you went to the source.…

Calvinistic fundamentalism and its joined opposite, violent wallowing sin, settled that part of the world and have flourished there since like bacteria in the yolk of an egg. They streamed in with the gaunt unaristocratic Southerners who predominated in that settlement, and you may like them or not, but there they are. You may consider that, given the region’s temperamental tone, only a punitive God can keep its people from slavering animality, and a trip to the illegal beer halls of Glen Rose on a Saturday night will back your
stand. Or you may wish that the whole schizophrenic mess could be tossed out and replaced with some sort of Mediterranean moderation.… But it hasn’t been, nor does such a solution seem likely.

Most of my own people came from South Texas, from the cattle-and-cotton regions along the Guadalupe, a piece of country with four or five different breeds of men and a consequent easygoing messiness of tone. There is nothing like having a few Mexican Catholics around to dull the spines of the Baptist prickly pear, and as a kid I liked it down there, and looked forward to summers with my grandfather in a gingerbread frame house among big live oaks. But I did most of my growing up in the Baptist country. There you breathed in the Old Testament, like pollen, from the air, and it produced its own kind of hay fever.

Not only Baptists, of course … There were a dozen or more sects, and several splinters off of each, and they all squabbled like cats on a midnight roof about such matters as total immersion and the scope of predestination. But they all saw sin in pretty much the same light, and they all went to the Bible for the word about it.

Old Man Willett said: “Listen. Can you show me any place in the Book where hit says anything about a nigger?”

Reflecting, I mentioned the un-Caucasic reputations of the Queen of Sheba, and Balthasar the wise man, and Ham.

But my fundamentalism wasn’t fundamental, and I knew it, as did he. He grinned. “Yes,” he said. “But do hit
say
they was niggers?”

I couldn’t remember that it did.

“Crap no, you can’t,” he said. “Because
hit
don’t. Nor nothin’ about no whisky, neither.”

Despite an uncertainty about what all this proved, I didn’t
ask, for fear of finding out at too great length. It proved something, for he chortled as he bore the Bible back to its place by the bed, and was in a grinning good humor when he sat down again astraddle his spit can. “You damn right,” he said.…

His load of evangelism thus queerly discharged, we began again to talk about the river, and about those times when, the Indians gone, the sharp-edged saints and sinners had carried their inherent squabblingness up the cattle trails or, staying home, had grated violently upon one another. Somehow, the old man knew quite a bit about the savage Reconstruction-time lynching of Dusky Hill and her five daughters in the northern part of the county, but he wouldn’t talk much about it. Someone he’d known had been involved.

“They was Yankees,” he said obscurely when I dug for details. “Liked Yankees, anyhow. And the gals was you know what.…”

It was late afternoon. The weather looked no better. I said I’d best get down to the river and make my camp.

“Crap, stay here,” the old man said. “I got room.”

Remembering the wind’s damp bite, I didn’t feel like arguing about it. He had a telephone. I called my Weatherford friend and asked him to come out and eat with me at some café on the highway. At dark he came; since he and Old Man Willett hadn’t seen each other in a long time, they spent a half-hour or so catching up on country talk while I went down and made the boat secure. The old man refused to come along with us to dinner, saying that restaurant food made his belly burn.…

“Proud,” my friend said when we were on the road. “Snake-bit, too. They hit a gas field west of him there, but not a smell of it showed up on his place. One daughter takes
a little care of him, but the other kids don’t worry much.”

As we ate and talked in a steak-and-catfish place by a bridge, I could tell that he was disappointed in my historical digging on the trip. I’d found nothing new. I’d known he would be, though, because there wasn’t too much new to be found, and besides, it was a goodbye trip, with a main part of its pleasure in the rehearsal of old things.… But there was enough to talk about. By the time we’d finished eating, the wind was harder and colder than ever and held a spit of rain. My friend left me off in the red mud before the old man’s house and drove home, and going in I crawled under heaped quilts into the bed made for me.

Having slept heavily, I woke early and lay there unwilling to slide out into the cold air beyond the quilts. At six thirty Old Man Willett came in and switched on the light. He was wearing flap-backed long underwear and slippers and seemed to be dancing a little with contained emotion.

He said: “You’re a blowed Jew!”

The pup started barking without showing himself from under the blanket I’d folded over him on the floor. “Why?” I said.

“Hit’s a-snowin’!” the old man cackled, and gave a caper, and disappeared.

Rolling up, I looked at the window and sure enough, hit was. Big wet white globs were whirling out of the half-darkness and flattening themselves against the glass and sliding down to stack up against the partition moldings. I got up and dressed and went out to the kitchen, where the old man was patting out biscuit dough and the radio, full-blast loud, was gloating over the fact that the weather was in a hell of a shape and likely to stay that way. I sipped coffee and listened and looked out the window at the snow-dimmed bulk of the log
house, and the old man laughed every time he glanced in my direction.

“November ain’t so bad,” he said, misquoting words of mine from the afternoon before. “November’s the nicest month they is, in Texiss.”

Nevertheless, he fixed a noble breakfast—oatmeal and eggs and good smoked bacon and fat light biscuits and white gravy and strawberry preserves and cream so thick that you had to spoon it out of its Mason jar into cereal and coffee.

He was so set up that he refused to be much concerned over the fact that his unharvested peanuts would now almost certainly rot in the ground, having been more or less continuously wet since early October. I was unsure whether he most enjoyed my company or my discomfiture. He got plenty of both, for it snowed all the long morning and into the afternoon. We pondered the state of man (parlous, the Scriptural mores going rotten in aircraft factories—though once with surprising liberality he said that Convair had saved Parker County during the big drouth), and the intricate lore of the upper-middle Brazos.

At around two o’clock the thick melting snow stopped, and though the outdoors was mainly sodden red mud and a sullen sky, I decided the worst was over. I called Hale and caught him loose, and argued him past his wife’s objections by promising to get him to Dennis bridge by the following night. They drove out followed by a friend in another car so that Hale’s wife could leave his at Dennis, and when I heard the peremptory chord of his horn outside, I picked up my bundle of gear and told the old man, with a little embarrassment, that I’d like to leave him something for his trouble.

He eyed me with his button glare, and I wondered if I’d
stepped over the thin line of offense, never precisely know-able with country strangers.

He said: “I didn’t
ast
you for no money.”

Relieved, I took out three dollars. He said it was too much and backed away when I proffered it, so I put it on his bed, where it stayed. I said I’d be around again some time, to visit.

“If you don’t git drownded,” he said.

“I’m not counting on it.”

“All right,” he said indifferently. “Don’t wait no ten years, though. I ain’t figurin’ to be here for the Second Comin’.”

O
F THE ISLAND GEESE
Hale said: “I’d have filled the damn boat. You can have five in possession.”

“Four would have rotted,” I said. “I can think of stuff I’d rather possess.”

“They were meat,” he insisted. “You could have given what you didn’t want to that skinny little old booger.”

“If they’d kept that long. And then he’d have loaded them off on a bunch of other people that never even noticed a flock of geese when they flew across the sky.”

“Maybe,” Hale said, probing at the fire with a green willow stick. “Just the same …”

He was a hunter and a fisherman clear through and always would be; for a long time he’d been impatient with my tendency just to snoop around instead of giving the business of killing wild meat the taut attention it needed. He worked hard and for good money and spent a lot of it every year on tight-scheduled expeditions after antelope in the Big Bend or mule deer and elk in New Mexico or bass in Florida, and the flesh of all of them was jammed usefully, labeled and dated,
into freezers at his home. It fretted him that maybe African safaris would have ended before he had the money and time to make one.

He was also a good friend and an old one and the best kind of company. It was night. We were camped sloppily on a loose-sand shore a mile or so below Old Man Willett’s, with willows furnishing a leaky break against the continuing cold northeast wind. The river was high and wide and thickly brown, and made angry noises in the dark against snags and the roughnesses of its banks. Hale had brought steaks and some good whisky, which we were drinking out of enamel cups with honey and lemon and water while we waited for the fire to make coals.

He’d put out a trotline, a quarter-inch nylon cord from shore to shore with maybe twenty hooks, baited variously. The big cats bite most willingly in a rising muddy stream. I’d helped him set it, fighting the brown shove of the river and watching for the drifting logs that can toss a boat end over end, but had told him that if he wanted to run it during the night not to wake me. Now, restless, he emptied his cup and took the lantern, loud and functional again with white gas he’d brought, and went down to check it alone, absorbed in the bow of the canoe, pulling himself across hand over hand and examining the stagings as he went. Against the night the lantern made a clear bright circular picture of Hale and the canoe’s curving bow and the hard-rushing brown water. I wrapped potatoes and stuck them in the fire and got the grill ready to use. Hale came back grinning, the lantern in one hand and his chain stringer in the other, with a six-pound channel cat and a couple of others that looked to be maybe three pounds each.

“My
breakfast,” he said. “Them as works, eats.”

The steaks were plump; garlicked and seared over glowing oak, they came out fine, and when we’d eaten we had coffee and smoked and talked about the days when we’d gone out to the mouth of Falls Creek in Hood County with big black Bill Briggs, Hale’s family’s chauffeur and yardman and occasional cook. Hale agreed that they had been the size of telephone poles, the tree trunks that Bill had lifted and carried over to drop across the fire. Red, the river had been then most of the year, high or low, Possum Kingdom not yet up above to catch the silt and hide the fact that West Texas was washing away, down toward the Gulf. But the creek had been clear, with bass and good bream. A girls’ camp stood there now.

The wind, quite naturally, as though it had intended all along to do so, started bringing horizontal thin rain, so cold that it seemed it should be snow; and in fact, I knew when a fleck hit my cheekbone and slid down to where beard stubble stopped it, it partly was snow. We tarped things and tumbled into the little tent. Hale had unrolled a fancy down bag on the windward side, which was sagging, its stakes unfirm in the sand. After I’d lain there for a while and was nearly asleep, I heard him cursing under his breath.

“What?”

“Leak,” he said.

The flashlight showed a drip from the down-curving sag of a seam, and a dark stain on his sleeping bag. We rolled out into the night, all wet snow now, and pulled the stakes tight and pounded them deep into the sand, trampling it down on top of them and finding stones to put on the trampled spots. It was tight then, but the snow was piling up against it, and I knew that having started it would probably keep on leaking. I offered to flip a coin to see who slept on that side. We
did. I won, and lay down again on the good side and slept well except when, from time to time, I woke to hear him thrashing and blaspheming in his bag. Once when I did I said: “Hale?”

“Yeah?”

“Hale,” I said, “how come you don’t go run that line? …”

In the morning it was worse, still snowing, the ground a mass of melting slush and patches of dirty golden sand showing through. I stayed in the sack, as was my policy with weather. So did Hale, and slept a little finally; it had not been so much wetness as the first-night-out insomnia that had bothered him, most of the water having run off onto the tent floor beneath his air mattress.

Finally at about eleven he woke up and reminded me that I’d promised to get him to Dennis by night. It wasn’t far, but on the other hand we were bound to move slowly.… Outside, the thick wet snow plastered itself to us, and having lost my raincoat somewhere upstream I soon got soaked through a “water-repellent” jacket. While I gathered wood, fishing for it with numbed, hurting hands beneath mounds of snow, stumbling on numbed, hurting, wet feet, Hale built a fire. It took him thirty minutes to get it going even with gasoline, and when he did, a willow branch bowed down with slow grace and deposited a load of snow in its exact middle, and put it out. Later, when we had it burning again and a pot of sugared fruit bubbling on it, nearly ready, I raised my foot too high as I passed and dropped a thick glob of wet sand from my boot sole into the pot.