Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (27 page)

Milliken’s Bluff (on down, drifting with the big brown river through the low country’s tangled bottoms) that Mil-liken, dead at Goliad, never saw, but his Irish heirs took up his allotted bonus league of land there. Kickapoo Creek where a lone young bluebill flew from under a sand ledge and I shot it, and the pup, for the first time in his life connecting firearms and quarry, jumped into the strong-flowing ice water and brought it to shore and howled at me in rage when I took it away.

Horseshoe Bend on the left, all the sandy wooded land inside its big loop owned now (and maybe before, for all I knew) by one of those proud continuous clans that had begun ranching on that frontier and had moved on north or west, their push like Old Man Goodnight’s, as the plains were cleared of Indians and the cattle markets were set up. They shaped imperial ranches in the big country and
later, mostly under the pressure of wives who wanted to be able to spend the new cattle money in a civilized way, many of them moved back to live in Fort Worth or San Antonio—according to whether it was the Southern Pacific or the T. & P. that had threaded their particular empire onto the nation’s railroad web. They built big nineties-style mansions in those towns, and their descendants live there still—some of them still rock solid, direct, functional, so that you can see in them how the empires got built; others gone rotten with whisky not sweated out in work and this century’s easy oil money, spewing out in neurosis and wild sport and mismarriage the inherited restless force that shoved their grandfathers against the Comanches and the plains.

Race horses the bend held now, shapely big-eyed thoroughbred mares with their colts that watched the canoe pass from behind tight fences repaired after the spring’s floods. Racing in Texas, when it existed, was a kind of property and a pride of those expansive families, kings in their way and in their time, but when old Mr. Waggoner died (his father made one start in Parker County, too, on Spring Creek) and a couple of others, no one remaining would keep riding fence against the citizens who thought that if it was pleasant it was most likely wrong, and racing was voted out.… Those Texans now who like to see their own fast horses run have to go outside the state to do it.

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Wind, big wind, slopping choppy spray at me from the full dirty river, slowing the boat so that the chips and sticks thick in the current floated downstream faster than I could paddle. At the bend’s tip were bars, and beyond them big ugly sand boils that wrenched at the boat and would have spun it if I hadn’t forced through. That is the pure sand country in
there, and in normal times it’s where the channel is hardest to read. You drift, and the river’s torpor gets in you, and the green flowing water under the willows is as deep as the grip of your paddle. Then suddenly you know that unless you paddle gut-strainingly straight for the other shore, the current is going to run you up on the almost surfaced lip of a bar, with more green water just below it.… Sometimes, if you’ve drifted too far to try to get across the river to the new channel, you can stay free by jamming yourself into grasses and willows against the near shore and hoping to find the three-foot-wide secondary channel that’s sometimes there, and sometimes not. And if, as often, you do get hung on the flat sand lip, just yards from floatable water with the current shoving you sidewise and trying to turn you over, the sand shudders and sucks obscenely at your boat and maybe the river will sweep you over into the green below, but probably not. More often the canoe shakes hoggishly to a halt and you can either pole, six inches at each huge thrust of the paddle and the planks crackling, or get out and wade towing, clinging at the same time to the boat for support against the hungry sand, swearing you’ll watch more carefully, or just swearing.

But now the whole river was one wide sweeping channel, and there was only a need to watch the big boils and an occasional snag. Fat cattle to the right were eating good green grass, some of them whitefaces and the rest assorted scrubs, all that someone had been able to find in the rush for stockers to put on the new-sprouting pastures when the drouth broke. The big eroded gullies yawning out of that pasture onto the river had been fenced across with lengths of corrugated iron roofing stuck between steel stakes, and some of them had been crammed full of old car bodies to halt the
historie Gulfward progress of the land. These imaginative expedients seemed to be doing the job, though they weren’t as pretty a way as good grass cover or even dumped-in brush. But that isn’t a part of the world where prettiness weighs much. West Texas runs functional, and when it does wax aesthetic it’s as likely as not to end up with a front yard full of old tires painted red, white, and blue, with petunias planted in their centers.…

S
ANCHEZ
C
REEK
, and old Francisco Sanchez who lived up it, Frank to the stark Saxons, and who knows how he came to be there among them? … Campbell’s Island, a spreading, sandy hunk of public domain … The Hightower Bridge, pecan pickers rattling their buckets in a grove, and Spring Creek, brush-choked, and if there were room and time, we’d talk about all there was up there—about Dan Waggoner and his partner Mr. Brogden who had the old Muleshoe ranch, and T. J. Shaw the cabin builder from Tennessee, and J. T. Shaw his trail-driving son, and that Blackwell whom the hired boy killed, and the children William Wilson and Diana Akers carried off by the Indians, while their parents made sorghum molasses on the creek, to a night on Mount Nebo and a battle to the west
(you
try to keep The People out of it, even now that we’re through with them).

Strange country then, a stretch I’d never floated where the live oaks begin to thicken and shale starts cropping out among the sandstone …

A fisherman, on a boulder …

“Hey,” I said.

He answered, uninterrogative: “How you doin’.”

“What do they call this bend?”

“Don’t know,” he said, as though glad of it, and without trust watched me out to sight.

ARE we going to re-redefine the cowboy? Shall we deny again the blue-glowing psychoanalytical myth of the television tube, give anew the lie to California’s brave wide-screen miracles of amorous, bellicose pigslop? Shall we pin-prick the rotund gassy fiction of the code duello and the quick draw, and show the shotguns and the ambushes and the men who never fought at all, or needed to? Shall we—no half-horse, half-alligator types—sniff the bathless sweat of our fellows, and hear their hollers and the screams of red-eyed steers, and whale hell out of a runty ill-tempered mustang under us, and eat beans and biscuits and bacon, bacon and biscuits and beans, till we’re loose with diarrhea or drum-bellied with its opposite, and sleep four or five bug-crawling, dust-coughing hours a night on the ground without being able to get the boots off our feet swollen with heat and fungus itch, and ford the rivers and ride the stampedes and worry about the Indians in the Territory and get sloppy-sleepy drunk at last in Wichita or Hunnewell where a pasty whore will stash beneath her mattress our wages earned so pleasantly, and maybe in return give us a lasting souvenir?

I think not. Men who know mountains more than I do about those things have set the record straight often enough, and if the general run of folks want to believe that John Wayne and Frank Sinatra and Ricky Nelson and the Gabor girls made high drama in the railheads of Kansas, they’re going to keep on believing it. Read Andy Adams if you want to see cowhands right; read Teddy Blue Abbott, and Frank Dobie, and the groping-worded, utterly straight tales in
The Trail Drivers of Texas
, and J. E. Haley’s work on Old Man Goodnight.

All that touched the Brazos country, of course—changed its tone, kept it awake as The People had. The Chisholm Trail passed through it from the south, and the herds stacked up on one another sometimes during high water at the Kimball’s Bend crossing (down the river, farther than the trip would likely take me). The trail poured change and money and excitement and sin into Palo Pinto and Parker and Hood and Somervell and Bosque and the other river counties; Sam Bass robbed a stagecoach near Weatherford and had a fight with the law, and Belle Starr functioned there, and flamboyants with revolvers swaggered through or loitered, kicking up one kind or another of fuss. Some of it was even a little bit like Hollywood.

In return the counties poured cattle up the trail to the paying places, and young men, too. Of those, some came back sooner or later to marry good Baptist girls and raise more cattle and guilt-inspire their offspring as they themselves had been inspired, while others kept moving, restless from Old Testamentalism or from their rebellion against it or just from being born restless, in that migration that washed Reconstruction Texans up the whole wide belt of the West, where they taught other men to handle cows.

Chauvinism? A little, maybe, but not much … It was true. If it hadn’t been for Mexicans, the South Texas Anglos would never have learned how to cope right with longhorn cattle. If it hadn’t been for Texans, nobody else on the Great Plains would have learned how, either.

At Kimball’s Bend now, bright tail-finned boats sometimes slice the water, trailing bathing-suited boys and girls on skis; it is a curl on the upper end of Lake Whitney.…

Of the people who stayed at home, farming or doing business in the little towns or raising the stock that went up the trails, there were many different kinds. It’s no use trying to homogenize them for these pages; that process is pleasant, but it leads one into half-truth nearly always.… As people will, they became more homogeneous later when all the furors died down and they were left in the stagnant boom-lessness of their little region, but just then they were still most of them from other places, with infinitely various reasons for being in Texas.