Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (30 page)

The stone hotel there stands sleepy, its name painted in red-and-white letters across its lobby’s pane, changed certainly in few ways from those times when horses stood three-legged in the sun outside and the square rattled with the activity that went then—Fort Worth being a day or so away rather than a half-hour—with county seat-hood. A few of the buildings must certainly have stone memory of the day in 1875 when old Nelson Mitchell, known as Cooney, less guilty than his youngers but more available, was hanged in Granbury town. Names on some dig back into the shallow antiquity of the Brazos country, like the feed store of P. H. Thrash and Sons: in Ewell it is written that The People killed Jere Green in P. H. Thrash’s pasture, in the sixties.

Nor could the hardware store, high-ceilinged and gloomy, have changed much since hame-strap and hand-pump days, but it was a good one and had the lantern chimney and pliers and ball of cord and other things I needed. At the ser sta gro again the owner, when I’d bought some staples from him and thanked him for his kindness, said: “Well, I always figure I can tell a man that means well when I see him.”

I hoped he could, and hoped it was to him that they meant well. Back on the river, it felt odd to be coasting along under carpet-grassed picnic flats with barbecue pits and chairs and landings, and flights of steps leading up to houses on the hill. Granbury withstands the river’s periodic ire by holding to the high ground. Beyond the houses, lining down into the country again, feeling benevolent toward people because of
the couple at the ser sta gro, I came to a dirt bluff where the chromed nose of a hot rod showed against the sky. A young man moved up beside it, sideburned, dressed in bright blues, walking with the rolled jerking of his shoulders, akin to a pigeon’s head movements, which afflicts a good many athletes and self-made men and people who want to look like athletes or self-made men.

“Well, look at the local hero!” he said, staring down. Someone snickered behind him and moved up to see—this one shorter, barbered hybridly with his hair burred on top and long and wavily greasy on sides and back, with ducktails.

I looked at them. They looked back leering, but said no more, maybe because I was dirty and gaunt and browned and had a shotgun’s stock sticking up beside my thigh. A turn sliced them and their haircuts and their purple car off from view, and then there was nothing but the river and the willows and the big hardwoods, and on the hills the cedar— juniper, really, though no one calls it that.

Below Granbury the Brazos snakes among such hills for forty-five bridgeless miles to show itself again to public view at Highway 67 in the little county named Somervell, which broke itself off from Hood in the seventies on the grounds that Granbury was too far away to ride horseback for legal business. (The Somervellians are still a bit that way, otherwise-minded.) A part of Hood and most of Somervell make a kind of northern tip for a broken belt of cedar-covered limestone hills which skips south through a dozen or so counties and then curls spreading west into the vast Edwards Plateau. Once, before Anglo-Saxons hit it, much of that limestone belt was a rolling prairie thick in grass. But its topsoil wasn’t deep and used away quickly under the bite of plows and herds. The cedars crawled up out of the draws as the
only feasible expression, then, of nature’s abhorrence of bare ground, until finally in some places, as far as you could see from the highest hilltops, there was only a green-black unreflecting expanse with a few flashes of white stone where even cedar couldn’t grow. It was a poor part of the state. Its people—those who stayed, or those who came in because they couldn’t afford to go to better land—shaped themselves to the world of the cedar hills, as people will shape themselves to country when they have to, and built a stoic economy around it—chopping fence posts, herding goats where sufficient hardwoods remained for browse, still farming a little and disastrously in creek and river bottoms, making white whisky, running ser sta gros.…

Lately city money, working hard and backed by Federal aid, has found the way to bulldoze off the cedars and with a few years’ gentle care to nurse back native grasses and paint a semblance of the primeval range. Without having yet gone far, that process is the chart of the future. As we roll on happily toward that saturation census point that everybody used to lament in the Japanese, land—any land—gets too precious to waste. Though in most parts of the cedar hills the stoic economy and the Sam Sowells and the Davis Birdsongs still exist, drouth and discontent and wars and purchases are driving them out. Aircraft factories and beer halls and California and the general American driftingness absorb them.

Not that all those things are clear from a boat on the Brazos. A river in a sense makes its own country along its course, renewing the lowlands with silt, pampering on its banks trees and shrubs and grasses of species different from those on the ruined slopes of its watershed. But you can’t miss the cedar hills bulking on one side or the other, and sometimes on both.
Their people differ from the other people of the upper-middle Brazos mainly in degree, but the degree does make a difference. The cedar people have more hill Southern in them; their dialect is stronger, as are their pride of poverty and their touchiness and their suspicion of other kinds of folks. And their fierce equalitarianism—an implicit attitude of “I’m as good as you are” which sometimes produces comedy and sometimes danger and sometimes, working on good material, dignity …

I knew a cedar-hill man who served as foreman on one of the new cleared ranches built by city men in that region. He was a good foreman and liked his job and liked his boss. An oilman who visited the ranch offered him twice his salary to come to Oklahoma and run a ranch that he had there. He turned it down. But finally, when the offer got to three times his salary and his wife was shoving at him to think of the kids and even his current employer admitted—wryly—that he wouldn’t blame him in the least for going, he agreed. He called Buck Peebles, a silent wiry type who hauls cattle and household goods and Mexican shearers and goats and anything else that’s willing to ride on his old truck and pay for the privilege. They loaded on the furniture and the kids and the wife, and drove 200 miles up to the new place.

The oilman was waiting for them, anxious that they like him. Good men are hard to come by. He was courtly to the wife and showed them their house, a stout and handsome one, two-storied with oaks around it and a fenced yard and a deep sweet-water well and a rich garden patch. He chucked the kids under their chins and called them by their right names, all five of them. The ranch itself spread velvet-grassed to the horizons, and below the house a flowing creek wandered, dammed at one point into a ten-acre lake stocked with
fish, around which registered whitefaces and fat quarter horses grazed. The kids scattered like a flushed covey, shouting. The foreman listened and looked and tasted the water and kicked the garden’s loam with his toe and dug his thumbnail into the house’s hard coat of white paint, and said practically nothing. Finally they came out front again where Buck Peebles, unheeded by anyone upon arrival or now, was leaning against his truck’s fender and smoking a patent drug-store pipe and peeling, with a sharp stockman’s knife, the bark from a green oak switch.

“Might as well start moving in,” the owner said. “I’ll get somebody up here to help you.”

“I don’t know …” the foreman said.

The owner glanced up. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You don’t like the house? I’ll have it changed, any way you want.”

“Ain’t that,” the foreman said.

The oilman, unsettled, said he didn’t understand. He thought it was a pretty good ranch. He
knew
it was.

“Ain’t that,” the other man said. “Hit’s a hell of a sweet place and that’s flat true.”

“Well, what is it then?”

“Since you ast …” the foreman said without hostility, jerking his head toward the wordless, whittling shape of Buck Peebles: “Since you ast, I guess what’s the matter is I don’t want to work for nobody that’s too good to speak to no God-damn truck driver.”

And with a lift of his brows he moved his family back into and onto the truck, and Buck Peebles drove them the 200 miles back down to the cedar hills and the old job.

Like the rest of the upper-middle Brazosites, the cedar people are heavily Caucasian. But, as in other things, more
so. The concept of race has a rawness just now, with good reason, but it still has a relevance, too. It has relevance all through the ragged griffon shape of the former Confederacy, and though the upper-middle Brazos was but fractionally Confederate, it has relevance there.

Almost no Mexicans came that far up the river in the old days, and only a few Negroes, brought by more prosperous families like the luckless Terrells. Mainly grazing land, that region lay north and west of the soils and rain belts where the true cotton complex of things could be reproduced; plantation-type labor was not economic. A thick preponderance of the whites who came were of the Southern independent and tenant-farming classes, people who’d always tied their own shoelaces and plowed their own fields but who, because of long competition and embarrassment, were fierce about the pigmentation of their skins. If they were “old” Texans, the war for independence from Mexico hadn’t tended to salve that attitude in them.

There were more Negroes around during the fifties and sixties of the last century than there are today. Some of the ones in the old time were vivid, like Bose Ikard and the one I’ve never seen called anything but “Old Nigger Britt” (his lone-wolf vengeance on The People, before they got him, was spectacular), but most were a minor tide who, with emancipation and the legal injection into them of free will, moved back to more hospitable places, like coastal sea organisms which, having probed the temperatures and the plankton north and south, settle in a belt where they can survive.

The
Texas Almanac
tells some of it. Palo Pinto County, the good-sized resort and army town of Mineral Wells holding most of its people, has a population made up of “94.0%
Anglo-Am., 2.2% Latin Am., 3.8% Negro.” (The Latin Ams are recent arrivals, shearers and artisans who make up little colonies in the towns or have been brought in for ranch labor; all Caucasians are lumped as Anglo-Ams, though that seems unfair to the occasional clots from less rough-edged cultures.…) Parker County, richer than the others in many parts and therefore more Southern, has nevertheless “97.0% Anglo-Am., 1.8% Latin Am., 1.2% Negro.” Hood, less urban and shading into the cedar country, runs 99.3, 0.2, and 0.5, and Somervell, a cedar stronghold, is quite succinctly “100% Anglo-Am.”

Ike Atterbury told me once, without either bitterness or humor, since he is incapable of either, that it was illegal for Negroes to live in Somervell County. Just against the law. West of there lies a belt equally touchy where they used to put signs outside the towns advising anyone whose epidermal darkness wasn’t the result of sunburn to keep moving, and farther west still the whole question of tolerance goes academic for the want of any menacing outsiders, beyond a few Mexican sheepherders, to have to tolerate or not tolerate. In the scoop-shaped projection of Texas at whose point El Paso lies, Anglo-Saxon and Hispano-Indian rather balance each other, and despite Miss Ferber seem to get along not badly. In recent years the popularity of racial tension has roiled up some controversy out that way, but it tends, like the
gente ranchera
themselves, to be toughly, wryly humorous. A rancher in the Big Bend told me a very funny story of that kind, but it was pretty dirty, too, and for that matter far from the Brazos and its Starknesses.

Shall we then desert the raw subject of race without furnishing any anecdotes? I guess so; none of those that come to mind is edifying—neither the time when gentle
Bill Briggs wouldn’t get out of the car in Bowie, Texas, nor the time when Jim Lemmon and some cohorts shot up the camp of the colored highway workers, nor … No. Let us return to our picturesque Anglo-Ams, or maybe just to one of them, a solitary tattered sort coasting along a river in a canoe.…

Camped on mud—the river had been falling—under scraggly willows, hoping a rise wouldn’t come in the night, I dumped out the sack of staples I’d bought onto a tarp. A ser sta gro doesn’t cater to loners or to childless nibbling couples; it sells things in quantity, and most of the containers held too much. I filled my plastic sugar pot and threw the rest of the five-pound bag in the river, invoking pardon from the shades of the frugal old ones. For meat, since the pleasant grocers had had none fresh, I’d bought a square frozen pack of veal patties. They were about as far from the hot-streaming meat of one’s own killing as one could get—close to the ideal of a friend of mine, oddly a rancher, who likes all food disguised and geometrically reshaped, as different as possible from the living organism it once was. He says that doctoring screw-worm infections did that to him. The patties turned out to be fine-ground hamburger, called veal’ to excuse their pallid fattiness. But fried in butter with onions, an egg on top of each patty and a baked potato besides, they made reasonable fare. The passenger took his tartare, and wolfed them.

In the dusk, at an old crossing a quarter-mile below us, two brindle scrub cows and a black calf waded out halfway across the river and casually swam when it got deep, sweeping far downstream before they hit slick footing again. Fit successors, though rare, to the cross-grained longhorns that used to ford above and below there by the thousands …

As always on the river after people, it was good to be alone again, and to know that another long lone stretch lay ahead. Not very long, though—I’d be loafing if I spun it out to six days or a week. The trip’s end was visible, but the idea of its ending was a hard one to get my mind around.