Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (29 page)

What was it, I wonder, that could have made them start talking to each other again, could have made them break a silence that had lasted six long years? …

A
NOTHER CREEK MOUTH
, clear too as those limestone streams nearly always are, where I lingered throwing a cork bug beneath
willows, though I didn’t need whatever I might catch. Like someone in Tolstoy—Levin’s brother, was it?—I’m fond of angling and proud of being able to care for such a stupid occupation. Even semi-chronic humanitarianism doesn’t get in the way, with fish.

I caught nothing. Hard by the creek mouth was another of the too neat groves of young pecans, the ground beneath them graded level and irrigation dikes around the whole. Their few leaves were yellow and ready to fall, as were those of the cottonwoods up the creek, twirling a little in the breeze. Winter’s pleasant sterile edge was on the air; in one of the pecans crows were rattling woodpeckerishly, prosperous omnivores, not dependent on any cyclical comings and goings of their food supply. Far enough away not to have noticed me, pickers were thrashing the trees with long bamboo poles and the ripe nuts were thudding onto tarps spread below, to be picked up and dumped into a cart behind a tractor.

On down …

At Thorp Spring the stone shell of old Add-Ran Male and Female College stares big-windowed off a hilltop, witness to gentler currents along the Brazos of the seventies than those I have recorded. Homicide and herdsmanship and horse thievery even in long retrospect hold color that grays the pastel ghosts of the townsmen who moved in behind the frontier or cropped up in the frontier’s own second generation, wearing frock coats and full skirts and going to unvociferous churches on Sunday mornings, practicing law and medicine, and selling dry goods, and in talk and manner yearning back toward a staid Southern way of living which, by yearning, they were imposing on these rawer places. But slowly … Addison and Randolph Clark, if Campbellite ministers, were also realistic erstwhile rebel soldiers, and found it wise to write into their rules for the Male and Female College a ban against owning or using “fire arms, a dirk, a bowie knife, or any other kind of deadly weapon.”

Near there, under a limestone hill, I camped for the night among boulders with my weapons deadly and undeadly. A
fisherman visited me in the morning; I went to the shore for coffee water, and he was examining my canoe pulled up half loaded, while a scarred old pointer sniffed the passenger’s messages on rocks and bushes, and drowned them out.

“Some boat,” the man said in greeting. He wore a red hunting cap and despite the morning’s edge a sport shirt without a jacket over it. Lean and tall and brownly falcon-faced, he looked to be a healthy sixty years old. In his hand were two steel casting rods with salt-water reels screwed on them and elaborate catfish arrangements of big sinkers and multiple hooks dangling from the tips.

I said the canoe was all right, though too high-ended for wind and with the fiberglass too heavy for one-man carries. He asked about my trip and I told him, and he smiled widely and shook his head.

“That’s good!” he said. “By God, that’s good.”

His enthusiasm was unrustic, and his accent held a faint foreign flavor of precision, allied to the dialect of the country. His surname too, when he told me it, was foreign, Scandinavian, and after we’d talked a little he said he came from a Norwegian settlement on the Navasota down in Limestone County, not far from where Cynthia Ann Parker had been kidnapped. He’d drifted around and had worked in cities and other states and had ended here, single, as caretaker for a Dallas man who owned a farm above the limestone hill.

The pointer bristled as the passenger came rolling cockily toward us from camp, drawn by the sound of voices. “Shup, Pete,” the fisherman said, and the pointer wagged its tail and went to play not-before-I-smell-you with the pup.… “Good on varmints,” the man said. “The only trouble, he don’t make no noise.”

He said much of the land around there now was city
owned. A big sand and gravel corporation had just bought the place across the river for exploitation, and the pecan grove I’d seen at the last creek was only one of a number planted around that country on newly bought land by a Fort Worth family with a share of the unbelievable money those cities have in them nowadays. He had no tight link to the region himself, and thought with gentle detachment that the changes were mainly for the better.

“You take an old sorry place with the fences all down and the floods washin’ away the bottoms and the brush takin’ the rest, it most always belongs to somebody that had a daddy it belonged to, too,” he said. “Sha, you ought to see what we’ve done, up on the hill.”

But he said the locals had a point, too, fighting off change. It was hard as hell to get yourself left alone nowadays, as he thought he ought to know as well as anybody.… The flexibility of his insight was of the kind that comes sometimes from not owning anything or anybody and therefore not being obliged by your interests to shape your thought narrowly. People of that kind are good to be around, though they’re fairly rare even among have-nots, since the quality depends on some brains and an absence of envy.

Fishing was where he channeled his passion—catfishing, rather, for it’s a restrictive branch of the sport. He’d been on the river since before dawn that morning and was quitting now, fishless. But because a calendar he went by and his own theory about the stage of the river—falling a little, still turbid—had both favored bad luck, he was satisfied. Hook-and-line catfish around there, he said, ran up to twenty-five pounds or so, and others bigger. He had found a dead one on a bar once which he couldn’t lift.

“I guess they grabble those,” I said.

“You mighty right they do!” he said. “Get all the breedin’ stock. One of them he said to me one time: ’You can’t catch none of these fish we take, not on no rod and reel.’ I told him: ’No, I can’t, but I sure can catch their babies.’ “

I mentioned “telephoners.”

“Them,” he said, his mouth tightening, and wouldn’t talk about it.

“Them” get hold of old Southwestern Bell or Ford magnetos and rig them to wires so that when cranked they send sharp current through the river’s pools and stun smooth-skinned fish, which float to the top and can be picked up from a boat. Others, less capable mechanically, use sticks of dynamite which kill everything, or sometimes rotenone.… It is a part of the old ones’ tradition of getting what meat you can when you can, linked now to technology.

He said grudgingly, when I told him good fish had been twisting off my throwlines, that I could get around that by tying swivels at either end of each staging. But he didn’t like set lines.

“I want to feel ’em,” he said. “It’s no use havin’ that goin’ on down here in the dark while I’m up yonder asleep. I like to feel ’em.”

A
T
G
RANBURY
, the only town of any size on the river from Possum Kingdom down to Whitney, I parked where the old bridge used to cross, and walked up a dirt street to the highway. A ser sta gro stood there, run by a taciturn middle-aged couple who, when I said I was going to walk on into town for some bits of hardware to replace things I’d broken or lost or used up, offered not only to watch after the passenger but to lend me their car. Their name too, on the sign outside,
was Continental, which maybe explained their gentle open-handedness.

I drove to the square. The town is the county seat of Hood and has a stone Victorian courthouse of the kind the genteelly yearning folks put up in the seventies and eighties to express the firmness of their presence and their way. Around it old men sit now and chew tobacco and smoke and talk, and the stores and other buildings that face inward at them from four sides nearly all are older than they are. If you looked closely, you might find one or two with contemporary veneers of those shiny, vitreous, half-inch-thick materials beloved of ten-cent-store and movie-house architects these days, but I doubt it. Most are basically of the old rough-squared or rubble limestone construction, its courses often waving and wandering up and down with the size of the rocks that came to hand, that to me is twice as handsome as any laborious ashlar. Even back then, though, with an organic taste practically forced on them by the accessible local stuff, the builders disguised the rubble when they could, using it for backing and for rear walls, and buying brick or alien cut-stone for façades.

Are we biting again at gazebo builders, Maiden’s Leapers? I guess so. The yearners were predominantly gingerbread Gothic in taste. I’d rather not bite too hard, though, for I like their courthouse, and like too their little red-brick bank, graceful in Victorian ugliness, with stone-lined Moorish-arched doors and windows (it’s a drug store now) and its solid rear tied to the region by textured walls of fieldstone.

Masonry in that country now, when not concrete-block, is likely to be big polygonal flags laid on edge in jigsaw style, three inches thick, clinched to a frame structure underneath.
When one of the flagstone specialists wants to achieve special tone, he goes up to the Palo Pinto country and brings down some slabs of red sandstone to dot here and there among the white. The result dazzles, as it’s intended todo.…