Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (35 page)

On summer afternoons the gravel bar even under willows would shimmer with heat, and we would move up to lie on the sand under the live oaks, and to talk. I don’t remember much of what we talked about—what kids used to talk about with Negroes, probably—fish and animals and how Hale’s mother kept trying to teach Bill Briggs to wait on her bridge group with white gloves. And Bill’s youth in the East Texas woods, tumbling great logs about for the sawmill from the age of fourteen … And what the white folks were like in California: there’s a place for communication then that shrinks later as you align yourself with the
way things are.… But mostly laughing matters, we talked about. He was fond of laughter, Bill Briggs.

The squabble about the big catfish we caught was the only one I remember our ever winning with him, and that was mainly, I guess, because he was arguing from a standpoint not of moral rightness but of appetite. He loved catfish. Hale and I had been running the trotline early one morning in a leaky boat that someone kept tied in the creek mouth, and had come to where the big fish was surging at the end of his staging. Scared of his spines, we had held onto the line with him thrashing half out of the water till Bill from shore had started yelling to drop him before his weight tore him loose, and had come running out through the water with splashing giant’s strides and up to his nipples in red water had hugged the catfish to him regardless of spines or anything.

“Grocies.” he said while we argued that afternoon under the live oaks. “You ain’ goan git mon enough grocies for one sminchy li’l ole breakfas’, what them white folks’ll give you fo’ that fish.
Ef
they gives you anythang. Shoot, what I says, is le’s
eat
’im.”

But we sold him to the highway café, for $2.50 as I remember; it bought us a sminchy little old breakfast or so, and we stayed out two days longer than we’d planned to be able to afford.… Because of Bill’s great strength, Hale’s father got the notion of backing him as a professional heavyweight. Bill didn’t think much of the idea. To oblige, he tried it once, but just sort of grinned and backed away during the round or two it took his opponent, bigger and darker than he, to hack his face into strips and pound him unconscious. The next day Hale’s mother’s bridge group was served coffee and cake by a white coat with bloody purple
meat and a pair of swelled-shut eyes sticking out of its top, and that was the end of a Black Threat.

I ran into him once on a street during the war, in Los Angeles. He had fattened, and was running a cafeteria for a defense plant. He liked it. I was a new lieutenant in a green uniform and pleased with myself about it, and he was pleased with me, too. I was so pleased that I said I was thinking about staying in the service after the war, a professional.

“Aw, naw,” he said, wagging his flat face slowly. “Aw, naw. You go on home, like you belong to do.”

Red, the river had been nearly always. That had been West Texas, washing down to the Gulf from the dry-land farms. Except that there was a kind of good-old-days romanticism in that thought, an unwarrantedness. Long ago, when the Comanches and the first tough whites knew it, the Brazos ran clear a good part of the time because the matted grasses of the plains to the northwest held their soil. It ran higher and steadier, too, because the scant rain falling on that wide grass was held and soaked in slowly and fed out constantly from the subsoil into the country’s drains, all necessary use having been absorbed from it on the way. But, nevertheless, the old salty red-bed terrain far to the west had always bled down its thick pigment in times of spate, and its flavor. Port Smythe testifies to that, and others. If it weren’t so, the Southwest wouldn’t have a plurality of rivers called Red—or Colorado, which is the same thing.

Something was trying to boil to the top of the rice pot of my mind, the way things do. Something else Spanish. I finally put it together, another of the maxims of old Juan Ramón Jiménez, who, exiled, lost his wife and got the Nobel
too late and died having said that it couldn’t mean much, then.…

“Pie,”
he had written—
“Pie en la patria casual o elegida; corazón, cabeza en el aire del mundo.”

Foot in one’s accidental or elected homeland; heart, head in the world’s air … Shaking two ser sta gro eggs in the skillet in vain imitation of Bill Briggs, I supposed the maxim was a comment, from somewhere inside me, on the parochialism of what I was doing, of the things I was thinking about from day to day. You get off into corners.… One scrawny, salty bit of river on the edge of West Texas seemed at the moment, together with its unsignificantly bloody past and its bypassed present and the kid memories I had of going there, to be maybe less than a noble focus for a man’s whole interest.

But where the feet stand has importance, as Spaniards know better than almost anybody. The Antaean myth has meaning still. And one river, seen right, may well be all rivers that flow to the sea.

Aloud, I quoted Juan Ramón Jiménez to the passenger, who listened gravely, then tried to make off with a tent peg, and got the end of a rope across his hindquarters for his trouble. From high up in the live oak a squirrel barked at us, bright-eyed. I looked at him, and at the shotgun three feet away from me, and back at him, and wished him well. I was finished with burgoo for that trip, if the ducks and fish held out.

A big wind was starting to blow out of the north above the hill, and navy-blue-gray clouds were scudding solid across the sky. Across the world’s air …

Out of the wind, out of the world’s air, came small shrieking female voices. Unpleasantly I remembered it was
the long holiday weekend, and hoped maybe they would stay up at their camp. But minutes later as I slogged across an open patch of sand beneath the limestone rise, carrying a bucket of water from creek to camp, their advance guard in dark skirts and beanies and sweaters and white blouses poured over the cliff and onto a wooden descending set of steps. Partway down, the lead ones saw me and stopped. I supposed I didn’t look like much.… We stared at each other, and behind them their stacked-up cohorts froze in tiers. One at the top of the stair called back over her shoulder to unseen legions on the hill: “There’s a
man!”

Down a way another said: “It’s the caretaker.”

I said: “No, I’m not, but I won’t hurt you. Come on down.”

Squealing, they turned and panicked back up the stair and out of sight. In a moment a woman, harried-faced, peeked down at me, and I repeated, trying hard not to look like an itinerant rapist but handicapped by three days’ beard, that I was harmless. She frowned. Beside me the pup started barking, tainting my kindly aura. I kicked at him lightly but caught him hard in the ribs. Bellowing, he lit out for camp. The woman disappeared. I picked up my bucket and carried it on, feeling guilty and brutal and grubby.

In a few minutes, though, they all came down, fifteen or sixteen Campfire Girls and half as many parents and counselors, bearing thermos jugs and paper sacks of sandwiches. Snaking widely around my camp, they moved down the shore to where some of the ruined masonry of the old grist mill still shows, and parents as they passed walled white-eyed, sidewise glances at me and my stained chattels. One of the counselors was handsome, but did not look as though she thought I was.

All right. I would have preferred to hang there in that place until the big wind had blown itself out or shown its intention; it was huge, raising even under the hill and the live oaks sting-pointed puffs of sand and scattering fire sparks among my gear. Its cold lacked the cut of the true norther, but it was damp and I knew it would make things grim on the river, whether it was for or against me in its push. Not wanting to be the tramp who spoiled the picnic, though, I guessed I’d move on, and went down to the canoe to clean it and get it in the water.

Squeals, nearby … A clot of Campfire Girls had taken up with the pup, who leaped and tumbled enchanted among them. He led them near where I knelt scrubbing with a sponge at mud between the boat’s ribs, and they ended standing in a little tense line and watching me.

“Do you
live
here?” one said.

I looked around. She was a darkish clean-skinned imp of maybe thirteen, poised for flight. I said I lived on the river, up and down, all over.

“All the time?” she said. “Who
are
you?”

Lohengrin von Schnickelfritz, I told her, but she seemed disinclined to believe. In a row, teetering, the others giggled; they were all of those years on the edge of puberty when everything unknown frightens, and fear itself is sweet.

“Karen!” an adult called from their picnic spot.

The dark little girl flicked her head around and called frowning over her shoulder: “He’s all right. He’s just
silly!”

More tittering, more teeters … What did I eat? Snakes and snails and catfish tails … No,
really!
Well, really, I guessed, going on with my Loat-scrubbing, I ate beans and rice and squirrels and ducks and fish and whatever else I
could get, when I could get it. It was a hard kind of life.…

Karen pushed out her lip and stuck her hands on her hips and glared with the exaggeration of gesture that spoiled pretty little girls often have.

“So!” she said.
“You’re
the reason there are only five ducks by the bridge now.”

I said what ducks by what bridge?

She said with genuine anger:
“You
know! Oh, you …”

A parent named Potts edged shyly into the group and introduced himself to me, sent, I supposed, by the women to take the measure of my degeneracy. The little girls swirled away with the pup, noisy. Potts lingered, watching me and the boat and glancing up toward my camp. It looked great, what I was doing, he said.

“Well, it is if you like that kind of thing,” I said.

“I guess I would,” he said. “I never did much of it. It looks like fun.”

There was a poignancy about him, spectacled in a green corduroy sport shirt that looked wrong against his pink-gray skin and the hollow way he held his chest. He kept picking, cranelike first on one leg and then on the other, at needle-grass spears in his thin green socks. He said he got most of his exercise mowing his lawn, and the winter before had built a picket fence around his back yard.… That was what he told me, or rather told himself in answer to the discontent that sat plain on him as he looked at me and the boat and the Brazos River.

He said: “There’s never enough time.”

Sluicing loosened mud from the propped-up canoe, I found myself wanting to tell him that for God’s sake there was plenty of time always, and why didn’t he come on along with me, telling whichever of the big-jawed women it was
over there he belonged to that he’d see her in a week or so, or a year?

But she might not be big-jawed at all, and a man nearly always picks centrally the channel of life that best suits his boat. If free will exists, he does. The parent Potts seemed engineered for patio living, and probably would feel the cozier there for having seen me lean and filthy on the river, even if at the moment I looked romantic to him. I didn’t feel romantic. But I liked him and his wistful openness, and we talked for a while longer before they called him to the gristmill place to help distribute sandwiches and drinks. They were feeding the girls early and leaving, he said; the sky looked bad.…

In that case, the tramp wouldn’t have to leave. I went up to tighten my camp against the wind, cutting longer tent stakes from the willows and lashing a tarp upright on the side of the fire toward the hill whence the worst gusts hit. From time to time I caught glimpses of the passenger sitting up for outheld frankfurters or cookies, and another pair of the little girls came to eye my housekeeping and to ask questions. But none of the women came near; the handsome counselor went stiff in the face whenever I caught her looking toward me. I didn’t mind much. Her voice when she spoke to the girls was like a man’s, and the defensive urban offishness of all of them was different enough from the river people’s occasional quiet dislike to be a little funny.

Karen returned, alone. In her hand she held an elbowed willow branch with a short line tied to it and a cork and a worm-wiggling hook too big for bream.

She said: “Do you really eat ducks?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “I don’t eat many, though. Have you caught any fish?”

She said she didn’t know how. I took her down to the gravel bar and had her drop in her line and close her eyes tightly, then took one of the little bass from Square Jaw’s creek off the stringer and put it on her hook. When it pulled, she began to hop up and down, and loped yelling, the fish still on the hook bouncing behind her, toward the place where the others were gathered. Squeals … The whole outfit swarmed at me and wanted to be shown how to catch bass, but Karen’s reproachful dark eye was on me and I wouldn’t.

She’d peeked. As they were leaving, adult-herded, she dropped out for a moment from the procession, winked, said: “Thank you for the
fish!”
and giggled, and skipped away. Behind women’s backs the parent Potts grinned and waved, and then they were gone, leaving the world to me and the swollen-bellied pup and the strewn wads of brown paper and tissue and cellophane that danced along the shore under the wind.…

Arranging, I found a big planklike curved slab of cottonwood from the unrotted shell of a trunk that whole must have measured four or five feet through, and leaned it against two stakes on another side of the fire, at right angles to the stretched tarp. The sky had gone a lighter, frostier gray and looked a bit like snow, so over the whole I rigged a sort of shed roof out of a poncho Hale had left with me. The resultant hodgepodge would have given old Kephart nightmares, but it was tight, and I sat there and heard the wind topple great dead trees somewhere in the woods up the creek.

The land across the river from that place is in the De Cordova Bend. Falls Creek comes in opposite the first hump of its trifoliate sprawl. The bend was named not from Spanish connections but for Jacob De Cordova, a Sephardic
Jamaican who served Texas as “Publicity Agent for an Empire,” lecturing through the world on her riches. He tested those riches for himself, amassing a personal million acres of land script, and died in 1868 in Kimball’s Bend down the river, where alongside the Chisholm Trail he was looking over into the next era and trying to harness the river’s thrust for textile mills. Stone ghost buildings stand there now.