Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (28 page)

In general they were a yeomanry, as their offshoots still are, ethnically pretty much alike, angry in independence. But some had been of that yeomanry when they came, stock that had taken care of itself well and unplaintively for centuries, and others had moved down into it, bringing slaves and cherrywood chests and an un-Texan gentility of outlook, and others still had ascended socially with their westward shift, driven from the older states by poor-white desperation and a hot resolve not to take no crap from nobody nowheres no more.… There were Yankees in plenty and Southerners who lacked love for the South; many of them went to Kansas during the War but came back down gleeful when it was over, flanked by Negro Federal troops, to the imaginable delight of the region’s beaten, returned Confederates. There
were cattle kings and horse thieves and half-breeds and whole sons of bitches and preachers in droves and sinners in swarms.

There was a bit of everything, and the music they made rasping against one another, if not sweet, was noisy enough to ring down through the years—though, oddly, the records of that later time are even spottier than those of Indian days. When the records were being written, mostly in the first third of this century, too many people from the trail time were still alive; too many of the best stories, like a broken-backed rattler, still had a bite left in them. Once, a few years ago, when a writer showed up in the little South Texas town where my father’s people lived, and began digging up details of the old filthy, bloody Sutton-Taylor feud of the 1870’s, he had to be asked forcefully to leave. Families, friends till then, had gone to edging past one another in the street and glaring slit-eyed back and forth across the aisles of churches.

Of some aspects of the fight between the Truitts and the Mitchells in lower Hood County, T. T. E well wrote in 1895: “To enter into its details now would not be profitable.” Or safe, he might have added, since—though he was chronicling twenty years after the major uproar—the story wasn’t yet finished. Others later did enter into the details, or as many details as they could get hold of, but that comes in its place, down the river.

Take, for now, the sad and fragmentary tale of the sisters Mrs. McGee and Mrs. Bowen, also sketched with prudent caution by Ewell. In ’72 these ladies were camped with their parents and a younger brother and a batch of kids, some probably theirs, up Robinson Creek, which runs into the river three or four miles below the Parker County line in
Hood. (Clear water flows slow at its mouth, shielded from the river’s swirl by a big sand bar, and against its steeper bank you can cast a little silver spoon and let it sink wobbling without reeling in more than enough to keep the line tight, and in a moment, more likely than not, there is a bump and a bass. There was this time, anyhow. On down, the river still brownly high, the shores changing, all the rocks limestone now, aligned groves of diked, irrigated, city-owned young pecans on the flats above the banks, the blessed live oaks thickening on the hills, the unblessed cedar, too …) After the manner of the more feckless breed of drifting agriculturalists, the ladies’ father was changing farms and hadn’t yet built a house on his new place.

Does Ewell manage to imply that they weren’t “nice” people? The ladies, though not widows, were both minus their husbands, and the lack is relevant, he seems to be saying, to what happened there on Robinson Creek. You need to be roundabout in your reading of such matters in those chroniclers, since at this range of years the spaces between the lines aren’t wide.

What did happen, anyhow, was that at sundown one day, when the father wasn’t around, nine or ten types dressed and decorated as wild Indians fell on the camp, shot Mrs. McGee dead with a pistol, perforated Mrs. Bowen so thoroughly with arrows that later she too expired, and coursed their young brother George with such zeal across the roughs that he escaped only by jumping his pony over what he later claimed to have been a twenty-foot-wide gulch. They didn’t harm the mother or any of the small children, though they could have, nor did they take any booty, vanishing with the abruptness of their coining.

“It is generally believed,” Ewell says straight-faced, “that the perpetrators of this crime were white men painted and disguised as Indians.”

If it was believed, it was known, and known too who they were. The last real Indian raid in Hood County had been in 1869; it lay just far enough south and east of the protective edge of settlement that it felt relief before the other areas did. But “Indians” kept hitting all through the Brazos country far up into the seventies, long after the Comanches and the Kiowas were whipped and contained. They were whites, mingled just enough with half-breeds and tribeless, whisky-loving red men to keep things entirely confused, which is the way they wanted things to be. Mainly they were horse thieves, and though data is scant there seems to have existed an extensive, tightly governed gang that operated out of the Territory and drove its stolen stock up there as the Indians had, and maintained a network of spies throughout the frontier communities to spot likely loot and keep tabs on the counter-activities of more lawful folks.

People knew who the spies were and knew some of the raiders, too, but they were numerous and blood-mean, and for the most part their victims kept their mouths shut and went along with the diaphanous Indian fiction kept up by moccasin tracks and occasional whoops and arrows. The grandfather of my old Weatherford friend, a respected ranchman, heeded his wife’s plea for caution one night as they stood in their cabin and listened to a saw biting through the stable logs to which a thoroughbred stallion was chained. He knew by name who was out there sawing (once, when I was talking about the incident to another friend from Parker County, he started laughing; the progeny of one of the main thieves had gone the Bible road and constitute now a staid
and weighty family), and he wasn’t afraid of them. But he knew too that what his wife said about it was exact—that if he went out with his gun and ran them off or killed one of them, he’d have to spend ten years worrying about being shot down from ambush or “burned out,” and the stallion wasn’t worth it.

Law and order, in other words, were fairly faint ideals. The fake-Indian horse thieves had probably existed from the start—Robert Neighbor’s murderer in 1859 was entangled in such matters—but they hit their peak in the seventies when everybody knew that no true Indians were still operating. Their talents were various; the iron cash boxes taken in a train robbery at Benbrook back in those times were washed to view just a few years ago by rampaging creek waters in a pasture close to the old homestead of one of the known gang members.

Further, the fiction lent itself patly to mob violence and personal revenge. It seems probable that Mrs. McGee and Mrs. Bowen were the butts of some such individual rage. Whose? Their husbands’, almost certainly, from the way Ewell put it down, though what spiderweb of adultery and conjugal venom lay behind the attack no one now will ever know. Ewell knew, but one finds it hard to blame him— writing in Granbury, with that kind of people still around him—for not having set it down. There are all kinds of good reasons for the prevalent spottiness of history.

The group that dealt with the Hill family at Springtown in northeastern Parker County didn’t stoop to masquerade. Maybe they lacked imagination. They seem to have been outraged Confederate Calvinists, grimly active brothers’ keepers. They got Allen Hill, the father, during the Civil War, supposedly for his Union sympathies. The only grown
boy, Jack, was shot in a fight over in the Palo Pinto country in ’69 or ’70. Of the Hill women and children, the following was later deposed to a county court:

   Nance Hill, the oldest of the daughters, was supposed to have a bad character, a disturbing element in the community, and having gotten wind of the fact that she was to be waited upon by a posse of citizens of the Springtown community, endeavored to make her escape, but was followed, captured, and hanged by the enraged mob seeking her. This capture and hanging took place in 1872, near the line between Wichita and Clay counties, Texas. A few days after the death of Nance Hill and the return of those to the Springtown community who had hanged her, the mob spirit still prevailing, Martha and Katherine Hill were taken from their home and hanged at a spot about three miles Southwest of Springtown, in Parker County, Texas. Only a day or so after Martha and Katherine were hung; the spirit of the mob not having changed and its vengeance not being complete, the farmhouse of the Hills was burned, Mrs. Dusky Hill, with her daughters, Adeline, Eliza, and Belle and son, Allen, escaping at this time, but they were followed and overtaken when Allen and Belle, the two youngest of the Hill children, were driven back, while Mrs. Dusky Hill and her daughters, Adeline and Eliza, were taken to a point near the present sight of Agnes, Parker County, Texas, where they were shot and killed. The entire Hill family was thus wiped out with the exception of the two youngest children, Belle and Allen.

   What lingers in the mind is that dangling appositive, “a disturbing element in the community.” I guess they were. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord, but the good citizens of Springtown, Parker County, Texas, appear to have honed themselves into His cutting tools.

For what reason? Was Unionism still that repugnant, seven years after the War? Probably, though women seldom heat up enough about politics for it to matter. Did manless
Dusky put on the rural market her own and her daughters’ only salable services? Maybe—though Weatherford a few miles south, a cow town, would have been a much better selling place … Whatever it was that she did (no one will ever know, and you can put that ending on story after story after story), she paid for it in the ultimate currency.

That same hilly belt (no, I don’t know just where the stories are headed; I’m only talking about how a people was) and its violence had atmospheric connection with another tale I once pried up to view, unchronicled. I was talking, on a ripple-boarded front porch, to an old man down in Hood, and was trying to find out something about the history of a log house near there. He had been born in the log house and had spent his childhood in it, but he was ninety-four and his memory had gone piedald, with vast white misty gaps. In active years he’d been mostly a stockman. He remembered with clarity a cattle drive he’d made in the nineties to the Indian Territory, and how he’d raced horses with Cherokees, and to a silver dollar how much money he’d won.

But of the cabin he could recall only that an itinerant Irish mason named Regan had built its hillside storm cellar, where a spring still trickled through stone troughs for crocks of cream and buttermilk. When I would ask, maybe, if his father had built the place or had bought it built already, he’d smack his wax-white forehead with a white and withered palm and would say: “I’m sorry, son. It ain’t no good no more, my head.”

He said he knew a little about another cabin near there. I’d seen it, a ruin, its quarter-notched corners rotted out and the logs mostly collapsed into wormy heaps, though at one time it had been a comfortable place—double, a story and a half high with fireplaces top and bottom on both ends, and
lean-tos and outbuildings. The old man, whose name was Rush, said that it had been built with slave labor during the War, by a family named Terrell.

“They knowed we was losin’, the way I heard it,” he said. “Wanted to get what they could out of them slaves before they lost ’em. Old Dad Lowry, the head nigger’s name was. I used to talk to him later on, when I was a kid.”

The Terrells around there had finally died down to two old bachelor brothers, sons of the cabin’s builder, and their widowed sister. Once, Old Man Rush said, the brothers had gone for six years without speaking to each other, even living in the same house. “Old Iry he said one time: ‘By God, I ain’t gonna talk to you no more!’ A-fussin’, they was. And old Epp he said: ’Well by God, I ain’t a-talkin’ to you without you talk first.’ And they didn’t, not for six years, not ’cept through Allie, that was the sister.”

“Where’d they come from?” I asked.

“Mississippi to begin with, seems like,” he said. “Come here from up around Poolville or somewhere like that in Parker County. Old Iry he’d say at the table: ‘Alice, would you ast Ephraim to pass the peas?’ Would. Right in that house.”

“Seems funny they’d move here from Parker County just when most people were moving the other way,” I said.

“Does.”

“I wonder why? Indians?”

Old Man Rush looked at me from tiny, triangular, pale eyes. “Son,” he said, the white hand rising, “sometimes it seems like you pull down a window shade, right acrost my brains.”

I never saw him again. But I stuck the bit about the Terrells away in some nook of my head as you do stick such
things if you’re built to care anything about them. Not that it’s necessarily a good way to be built … One time a good while later I asked my Parker County historian friend if he’d ever heard of such a family, up that way.

He asked why I wanted to know. I told him. He shook his head wonderingly, and after thinking a little—he’s not a man to keep old scandals alive, though he knows nearly all of them—he told me the story. The Terrells had been a patrician kind of family for northern Parker County, and what had happened had caused a stir. A Negro, someone else’s, had come to the Terrell house one day at the beginning of the War, and had found Mrs. Terrell alone. The ancient Southern nightmare pieced out of masters’ guilt found its occasional solidity; he raped her. With joyous speed, the light-hearted north-Parkerian mob took care of the rapist with rope and torch and afterward, charitable, made it clear that for them patrician Mrs. Terrell was a dirtied woman. Or maybe she herself thought so.… The family had had to move away, and until now, nearly a century later and their house in ruins and no Terrell remaining, perhaps no one else had known where it was they’d moved to.

Nor probably had anyone cared except a type or so like the historian and me. And maybe Ira and Epp and Allie, sitting at their morose dinner table in the old house built by slaves … If they’d known of the trouble, and possibly they hadn’t …