Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (33 page)

W
ERE THERE
, you ask, no edifying events along the Brazos? Was it all gore and bitter gall, blow and counterblow, hate spun out to hate’s only logical end? Didn’t a mother somewhere along the river’s banks once stroke a child’s head and spark in him a flame to build laws or glory or ease for his people? Didn’t jolly old men beneath live oaks tell one another tales in which no single droplet of blood sounded its splash? Didn’t sober, useful, decent people build for themselves sober, useful, decent lives, and lead us soberly, usefully, decently up through the years to that cultural peak upon which we now find ourselves standing?

Yes. It isn’t hard (the Western movies do it over and over and over again, to everyone’s edification) to impose on that
hind-seen world a pattern that makes it clear that the kindliest of possible Gods had it in mind all along to install us in two-car suburban homes with air conditioning, television, and automatic kitchens. All you need to do is play around a bit with the weights of the scale—every storyteller’s right— and show the gentle, genteel, sober, useful, and decent people clinching a few victories over the old violence, as they did over Cooney Mitchell. Everything that happened was to the good. The composite hero won. His pink Thunderbird speeds into the sunset toward a new brick house engineered for patio living.

The trouble is, you need to see it that way. That the gentler people did gain a kind of control is certain. That it was time they did so is probable. That the control they gained was deep and lasting, and wiped out the old evil roughness, and left space in every man for the Jean-Jacques Rousseau kind of good to rise up like milky sap, I’ve tended always to doubt.

Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck—of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom— and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you’re not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It’s limited by what it has been, by what’s happened to it. And a people, until that time when it’s uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits. Its progenitors stand behind its elbow, and not only the sober gentle ones. Most of all, maybe, the old hairy direct primitives whose dialect lingers in its mouth, whose murderous legend tones
its dreams, whose oversimple thinking infects its attitudes toward bombs and foreigners and rockets to the moon.

I don’t think this means only Texans.

Another trouble, too—a deeper one—with the establishment of that pleasant air-conditioned pattern is that you need to be able to see old Cooney Mitchell as an evil.…

MIGRANT yellow-bellied flycatchers, or I niched them so, brightly fruited the bare trees along the river for a couple of hundred yards below Square Jaw’s creek, and then there were ducks. The banks are dirt in that stretch, and where the spring floods had undereaten them fallen cottonwoods and willows lay out diagonally in the river in a continuous tangle, their roots still clutching treacherous earth. “Sweepers,” someone has called them who got shoved by the current into the rasp of their dry branchlets and lost his hat and dignity and fishing rod. In spring and summer the big moccasins drape themselves there, and if you’re of a mind for such sport you can coast along popping at them with a twenty-two. Now eight baldpates swam smoothly out of the tangle in a little flock as I approached, and twitching their tails like honkytonk waitresses steamed ahead of me downriver, barely beyond reach of the shotgun’s pellets. I kept the paddle in the water to prevent it from flashing and scaring them, and slid it forward edgewise between strokes, remembering the old imitation-Chippewa days when we used to practice such things.

For a time, wanting meat for a holiday supper, Pilgrim or not, I tried to put on speed, but the eye of the drake that led them kept a precise gauge of the interval between us; when I moved faster they did, too. Jump-shooting on the river that way, you usually do best on singles and pairs separated from their flocks. Drained of the calm that numbers give them, they tend to wait till you’ve come abreast, then to flush explosively from under the shore. But these eight had the wary wisdom of a group.

It was a good day, wind-wisped, with cottony small clouds on the high air. The river, dropping slowly from the spate of snow and rain, had not yet cleared but was coffee-translucent under the sun. On the flat place in the bow that was the tarp-covered food box, the pup had curled himself to soak up warmth against the venom in his blood; sleeping, he snored thickly and jerked from time to time, but looked better than he had.…

Ahead, faintly then louder, sounded the
pum-pucker-um, pum-pucker-um
of an old electric well-pump at some farm, and the voices of shrill children. The widgeons began to zigzag, nervous between the human noise in front and the human apparatus behind. The interval shrank to just within shot range. For a moment I pondered, balancing vague honor against the idea of duck for Thanksgiving, knowing that when they flushed it would be away from me and almost immediately out of range again. Then—honorless—I eased the gun up and shot at a young drake swimming off to the left of the group. He died into an abrupt lump on the water. The rest flew, but one delayed, and to wipe out the pot shot’s guilt I fired the other barrel at him as he rose. It caught him unsolidly; he dropped behind the others and
below them and beat, losing height, for a quarter-mile down the river before he slewed clumsily again to the water.

If I ever quit shooting, it’ll likely be because of unrecovered wounded game.… I grabbed up the dead one and set off pushing hard. The oiled maple paddle dug in, bending, and the canoe rose and began to skim and the sun felt good and the speed felt good and my muscles felt good, doing fast and easily and well the work they’d been training themselves to all the way down the river. The pup sat up, staring back at me.

But the widgeon waited till I was within sixty or seventy yards of him, then flew another half-mile down. I kept going, and he flew again, and again, and again, until suddenly it was late afternoon and I was scooting past the live oaks and willows at the mouth of Falls Creek, three or four miles beyond where I’d planned to go that day. The duck had winged around a turn below, still strong, and I was tired. I crunched the canoe’s bow onto a drift-strewn gravel bar where Hale and I and Bill Briggs used to make camp a long long time ago, and carried the gear up to the sandy second shore, hitching my tent’s fore-rope when I raised it to the arch of a low thick live-oak limb that at its outer end dipped to touch the sand before turning upward and fraying into twigs and dark tough leaves. Inland a few yards rotting stratified limestone rose, and on top of that, I knew though I couldn’t see them, were the buildings of a girls’ camp that in summer was plangent with the shrieks of small females divided unfemalely into tribes and packs and regiments. But not now …

At the creek to get a bucket of clear water, I looked to the billowing line where the darker river shoved past, and saw a
flashing beneath the surface. Since on the willow-thick bank there would be no room to whip a flyline, I went to the canoe and got out the spinning rod. In the half-hour before sundown. I stood in one spot flipping a little spoon with a pork-rind tail out on the river and reeling it back into the creek, and on each single cast just after it darted back out of the river’s coffee murk I had a strike. I didn’t hook all of them, but must have caught ten or twelve while I stood there, good head-shaking jumpers, blacks of two and a half or three pounds that kicked and splashed and bulldogged back and forth sidewise before yielding to the rod’s spring and the reel’s steady mechanical tug.

They were gorging without caution on hickory shad; the largest one I caught was stuffed with them and had a five-incher’s tail sticking up into his throat, there being no more room in his belly. It was one of those times, rare in my experience, when the forces that rule such things fall queerly into balance; “Frank Forester” and “Nessmuk” and the other old pleasantly corny Eastern outdoors writers would have said that the Red Gods were smiling. I strung only two of the bass, letting the others go back into the water without handling them any more than I had to, remembering the afternoon’s wasted, wounded baldpate.

It was good fishing, a little too good. In angling, as in reading, suspense is a quality worth having. You savor the waiting quest of quarry or fact and like their possession the more for the time and—you tell yourself—the skill that went into attaining it. I do, anyhow. When the Red Gods grin, there is no wait and no skill; there are just luck and fish. It’s like reading in an encyclopedia.… I used to have a book by a trout-fishing Englishman, one of those little specialized unutilitarian volumes that our parent breed does
better than anyone else ever did, in which there was a description of one heavily lucky day on a chalkstream. Then the author with fervor wished that such days might be few. They had no challenge in them.

For supper, though, I was able to Give Thanks. The holiday ritual seemed to have little to do with the river, but for its honor I put in an hour or so of food preparation and came up with fried bass filets and beans and steamed brown rice and biscuit bread and a roasted widgeon stuffed with prunes, and there seemed to be little reason to envy the fare of anyone in town. It was all good—the better for being the harvest of gun and rod—and afterward I sat under the arched live-oak limb by the fire with the pup, drinking coffee with a little whisky and honey in it, listening to the Morse dots and dashes of steam whistling out the end pores of a damp log. That gets to be one of the river’s symphonic sounds, like owls and the gurgle of snag-thwarted water and the eternal cries of herons and the chug of tractors in unseen bottom fields. Whimsically I wondered if maybe the steam sounds might not
be
a code, the channeled voices of the ghosts of puritans and Comanches and horse thieves and, maybe, Gothic gingerbread fanciers. It seemed as likely a way for communication between the worlds as table-tilting or those other phantasmakinetic manifestations.…

Or maybe they were the Red Gods, sour because no offering had been laid on their altar. Cleaning up, I took what scraps the pup wouldn’t eat down to the gravel bar and threw them far out on the eddying moonlit surface of the river just above the old mill rapids, for catfish or Red Gods or whatever, but when I went back to the fire the whistle-voices were still gibbering.

One trouble with sportsmanship (I guess we were talking
about it) is semantic. Field sports aren’t conservationism or any of the other ways of being a pleasant fellow which often get confused with them these days. Neither are they the roaring pursuit of meat for meat’s sake, or killing for killing’s sake. If words mean what they say. sport is ritual, the setting of borders, the slighting of ends in favor of means. It is method: the white line you don’t step over in tennis, the goal posts’ H through which the football must tumble, the wingshot, the trout taken from beneath alders with a cleanly cast Brown Variant on 3X gut.