Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (31 page)

A
T YET ANOTHER CREEK MOUTH
I eased down on yet another fisherman, and scared him. He jerked as the canoe’s bow came abreast of where he sat, then contained it and looked at me expressionless. He had the dark eyes and blocky jaws that in our part of the country seem usually to mean Indian blood, but he would nevertheless qualify in the
Almanac
as pure Anglo-Am. (O irony, isn’t it, you People who lost? …)

I ruddered out of the Brazos’s flow into the crystallinity of the creek, and he turned his head, watching. His line tugged. He pulled out a foot-long channel catfish. Lifting a fat tow sack from where he had it tethered in the water, he dropped the fish in. I said he seemed to be doing all right.

“Nothin’ but a bunch of little sommidges,” he said.

Between steep banks the creek ran back under overarched trees in a long pool, the mild current that fell into it over rocks at its head just strong enough to hold out the silt-thick river. I said it was a pretty place.

He said: “Hit won’t be so God-damn purty after
they
git thew with it.”

“Who?”

“Them,” he said.… It turned out he meant the Fort Worth family, who owned pecan land up the creek and
planned to dam it for irrigation. The creek, like most of the others, was an old axis of settlement in that country, and has ancient grist mills on it (one of the millers, wrote Ewell, had a whisky still, “which upset the religious and attracted the unrighteous”), and stabs up near Acton and the David Crockett grant of land—posthumously awarded to that tough and misrepresented Tennessean—where the Widow Crockett lived out her time and died and is buried and some of their blood still thrive.

When asked, the countryman said he’d grown up in the De Cordova Bend downstream, managing somehow to accent both the first and second syllables of Cordova in a way that no one not from that neighborhood can copy.

“Some of that’s pecan land now, too.”

“All
of it!” he said as angrily as was consonant with Anglo-Am reserve. “Same damn outfit. Cut down all the woods. My brother he’s worked for them scutters eight years. Could of had a good job with the highway construction and he ought to of took it. I told him.”

I’d been there. It’s a shining orchard project four or five thousand acres big, block-built by the present owner and another before him out of the tired homesteads that used to quilt the post-oak scrub within the bend’s great fleur-de-lis. Row upon row, the young pecans march out across the sandy loam, alternating now with ranks of fruit trees that help pay costs until the time when the nut crops will reach commercial bulk. Pecans are a long-term investment, more for the profit of sons than of the father who plants them. In our razzle-dazzle, speculative economy, that kind of permanent planning for land stands out pleasantly. It contrasts too with the savage traditional wearing out and moving on.

But old sour Square Jaw sitting there, winking black eyes at the river in negative fury, had his own kind of point. Plantations of that efficiency—“operations,” rather than farms or ranches—were the death of the old way. Whether the old way had been good or bad, it had been his way. This other wasn’t. When the city money buys you out, you can live no more in the poor-proud privacy of a shack back in the brush on the land your people wore out long since, raising your kids to the proud bitter mores that you were raised to before them, shaping in their mouths the proud nasal dialect that your grandfather shaped in your father’s mouth. Not even if the city money buys your neighbor out, you can’t … The bulldozers scrape bare your privacy and you move away to work in the city, or you take a job on the old ground for the city money and its operations, and every once in a while a bathed and shaven and tailored type drives out to inspect that particular one among his holdings and tells you what you’re doing wrong, and how to do better, in language that sounds like a God-damn radio announcer.… Unproud alternatives …

The dispossession must bring much the same feeling the Indians used to have, a century ago.…

I remarked, to be saying something, that there’d been changes just about everywhere. But either he’d detected city-ness in my accent or he disliked inanities or he’d talked all he felt like talking. He grunted. I pushed up the creek and began casting a bug for bass, and when I looked around again he had gone.

The pup was restless; I put him ashore and he scampered around on the thick leaf mat beneath the trees, stopping now and then to plunge his nose into it up to his eyes, sniff, snort, and scamper on. There were bass, but they were
striking short of the bug, slapping at it with their tails or arching up from under it and plunging down to make it dance on boiling water. I changed it and finally caught a couple, small ones but vigorous against the long aliveness of the rod. Jumpers … I’m afflicted by a belief (Veblen would smile) that the fly rod is the only decent tool to use in fishing fresh water. I use the others, maybe most of the time, because more often than not the fish are in moods or places that the long rod won’t reach well, but I always feel a little guilty about it, less than serious. Bait casting and more especially spinning are technological processes, dependent on the rotary machine that holds your line, and while there can be pleasure in the plunge of their weighted lures to the spot where you want them to go, it can’t compare, for me, with the feel of the long, slow whip of the long rod laying its line on the quiet water beneath trees. Besides, fly fishing is more sewn in with the whole evolved ritual of angling. That this is archaism I’ll admit, nor would I argue its right against a man who finds his joy in hurling treble-hooked bullets through the air, and winching his fish to boat or shore with an apparatus that practically thinks for him.

I kept the fish. Attached through the lips to the chain stringer, they’d stay alive for days in the cold autumn water, a kind of living meat locker. On shore the pup yipped and backed away, shaking his head, from a hole in the base of a tree. Something had bitten him. I called him to the boat and held him squirming between my knees and examined his head and foreparts, but could find no fang marks, not that snakes were probable after all those frosts. A late-surviving wasp, maybe, or a tree asp or a scorpion … He crawled into his blanket-lined nook beneath the tarp, safe there from unknown stinging things.

Above the arching trees it was a fine day, blue and yellow with puffy white clouds. Off to the right a redbird called:

and farther on, a Carolina wren answered him in key:

Sometimes in summer when one or the other of them gives that call alone, I find it hard to be sure which bird it is, but heard together thus, each was clearly what he was.

Another Specimen of Natural History eyed me from a low branch up the creek, a kingfisher, cocked to fly if I got too close. Casting still, I made a spaghetti mess out of the slack fly line next to the reel, wrapping it around my feet and the handle of the paddle and the shotgun’s stock. I pulled at it for a while and then started cursing, never having been patient with my own ineptitudes. Just then the kingfisher dived at a minnow, made a big splash, missed, and flew back to his limb with a long high chatter of rage. There we sat, two ill-tempered piscatorial dubs, the only difference between us being that I saw some humor in the likeness.…

The day was Thanksgiving. Maybe, trying, I’d be able to get more wild meat than those two little bass and celebrate it right. Not that it was a holiday that had ever seemed to me to have much real connection with that part of the country. There hadn’t been much of the Pilgrim kind of Puritanism in those parts. A sternness, yes, and the old tough Calvinistic web holding ethics together, or trying to … But the Pilgrims had been Englishmen making do as best they could in a wild land, and at times they didn’t make do so well, and when they did they had the English grace to be grateful for
it to God. By the time Anglo-Ams had hit northwest Texas, they were the end product of two centuries of frontier, and could make do almost anywhere or at least survive, and the controlled graceful Englishness had rubbed off somewhere. They tended to be either religious and abstemious, or crazy wild.

The pup threw up his breakfast in the bottom of the canoe. He was swelling about the head and had a hump-nosed, gross look and red eyes; his ears when I touched them were hot and welted and a quarter-inch thick. It had happened once before, when he’d assaulted a yellowjacket at home, and I knew from that time, having paid a vet three dollars to find it out, that there wasn’t anything to do except wait till he felt better. I cleaned up his mess and tucked him back in his blanket.

On down …