Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (36 page)

Others stand in the De Cordova Bend, but not from his times. In the teens or twenties of this century, a Midwestern Dane named John B. Christensen, who believed in Scandinavians, built. Utopia there. He bought land, parceled it out to the Norwegian-Texans he invited up from down the country, furnished them cows, and launched them on a course of ideal, rustic, those-who-work-eat semi-socialism. The country people around there sometimes refer back to the experimenters as “them communists,” but they appear to have been a pleasant, quiet lot who had their own marketing association and commissary and token money for use inside the community; built their own houses and buildings of native flagstone; produced for sale chairs, wild-grape juice, dried herbs and medicinal plants, and post-oak charcoal; farmed at their peak (some 200 strong) about 1,200 acres; put out pamphlets and a newspaper from their own publishing house (the last time I saw it, the water-stained tracts still lay strewn about); and when the depression roared in and smashed their cottage industries, hoped religiously for a dam to be built on the river which somehow would change things a little.… Kristenstad, it was called. Its founder, who was its personality and force, died in ’36, and not much of the experiment long survived him. The lump of land he had amassed probably made it easier for the bend’s present owners to build up the acreage for their pecan operation. The
dam the quiet Scowegians dreamed of will probably go in soon, far too late to do them any good, if it would have then. Maybe they could have opened rustic Utopian ski-boat centers.…

Across the river from the bend’s other side, Charles Barnard built his log trading house in the 1840’s, a New York Irishman and the only white around those parts except for occasional rangers and lone-wolf itinerants. Tame Indians clustered about the place (you can still find their manos and other trash there) and brought furs and hides, and the glittering-eyed People rode in from time to time for a little arrogant swapping. Charles Barnard once swapped them something or other they wanted for a wife, “a Mexican lady of the family of Cavassas,” whom they were dragging captive along with them. Husband and ransomed consort both survived into EwelFs time, and people still alive remember them.

Old Man Rush did … “Old Tomassy,” he said, wagging his waxen head as we sat on the ripple-boarded porch. “Old Tomassy. You art of done heard her skin a man with that tongue.”

Charles was quite a type, too. In historical records a confusion exists between him and his brother George, another trader, though few people are likely to get very sweaty about it now. Charles did much that George got credit for, but George wrote his memoirs. At his post on the Brazos, Charles was host to Port Smythe,
M. D
., and to all the other expeditions and drifters that came into that country when it was empty. Of stone he built Barnard’s Mill down on the Paluxy; it still stands, a hospital these days, nucleus of Glen Rose. He resented civilization and liked Indians, and moved out west for a time after white men came. But finding them
where he moved to as well, he came back to the trading house, and the little town that grew up near him there was called Fort Spunky because of all its fights. Ewell characterizes him as bright and adventurous, and says that “except for an unfortunate thirst, which long ago mastered his intellectual powers and consumed his considerable wealth,” he might have made a splash on the waters of his time. It is told around that Tomasa gave him decades of hell about that Celtic thirst, but that it did her no good at all; it probably only succeeded, as wives seem never to learn, in making his throat burn worse than ever.…

You wonder sometimes—say, looking across the brown-flowing Brazos at the tangled shore below a millionaire’s pecan operation—about the impulse that leads city people into the absentee possession of land. You wonder perhaps especially hard if something in you believes that land is really owned more with head and heart, with eye and brain, than with pocketbook and title deed. It’s easy enough to understand city people who live on the land they buy, or who even go there often. We will be nearly finished, I think, when we stop understanding the old pull toward green things and living things, toward dirt and rain and heat and what they spawn. Most of us still have it in us, whether as would-be squire or peasant or drifting, poaching gypsy.

The other kind of ownership, not living there, may sometimes come from the same impulse. An occasional brief glance at green things and growing things for whose existence one is responsible financially if not personally may assuage the pull a little. And I guess there are people for whom ownership of land is only ownership, an investment.

Sometimes it seems to be bred from a kind of anger. Not all city people were city people always, and many of them, as
persons or as families, remember back to sour defeat by the land. Drouth and flood and bugs and money cropping have hounded many a farmer into town who didn’t want to go. Later, maybe, having money, he or his children or their children return for another bout, and sometimes win. If, scientifically and with the surging horsepower of cash, you can bulldoze a whole countryside into gainful new growingness, you may have wiped out a little of the hurt of that old wound.

That is, if it hurts … A friend of mine once tried to talk his father-in-law, an oilman with an East Texas country background, into buying a farm or a ranch. It was a certain place to put money, he said, better than gold. And besides, he said (he is city-reared), there was something good about it; owning land was pleasant.

“Play hell,” the old man said. “Listen, boy. When I was seventeen I was plowin’ one day with two mules in a bottomland field with a railroad levee runnin’ right alongside it. It was hot. There was a slow freight train passin’ on the levee. All of a sudden I looked at those mules’ butts, and I looked at that train, and I stopped, and I took my hands off of those plow handles and walked over and got on that train. And I’m not goin’ back now. Land! …”

Good or bad, sentimental or hard-headed, city ownership is an extensive fact now. For the land it’s mostly good. Whatever one’s view of businessmen in general, it’s most often true that if a man has the shove to want a lot of money and the sense to have made it, he generally has the sense too not to abuse the thing in which he invests it.

For country people and the old way it’s destructive. But old ways seem usually to be fated for destruction anyhow, under one ax or another, and maybe our old way most of all.
It was self-destructive. I mean the real old way, not the way it should have been.…

For the natural world it can mean either thing. Too efficient operations are rough-edged for wild creatures; fence-to-fence cultivation uses up all cover, and the fell insecticide one plane can defecate in a day can kill a million song birds. A good many owners, whether city or country in root, don’t care. Others do, and maybe those who buy land (admitting it or not) because of a warm pull in them toward dirt and rain and heat and the things they spawn are likely to care most of all. One hopes so.

But, buying land for any reason, you need to remember a thing. A rooting, poking, dog-trailed child turning over stones in a creek bed, or a broke old man wandering back from a pulp mill in Oregon to toe-nudge rusty cans and the shards of crocks at the spot where his father’s homestead once stood, or a drifter in a boat on a river, can all own it right out from under you if you don’t watch out. Can own it in a real way, own it with eye and brain and heart …

The big wind didn’t amount to much. It blew hugely, but brought no change, and I sat in my shelter all afternoon under its roar and read, and found in Deuteronomy an injunction:

   Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the LORD dwell among the children of Israel.

   It blew big into the night, unnaturally, but did not depress me as that other wind had so short a time before—and so long, too. In the morning it had stopped, and I packed up and pushed on down.

AFTER the eighties the Brazos country needed rest. It pulled up its blanket of scrub oak and cedar and had itself a doze, a long one that is only now ending as the city money pulls away the blanket. The frontier had moved on and petered out, with most of its violence. The Brazos country ranched and farmed, or its people did—without knowing, most of them, any more about soft treatment of the land than their fathers and grandfathers had, so that they went on compounding the old error. They money-cropped when they could make the money crops grow; little Somervell County at one time had sixteen cotton gins (you ought to see the stands of needle grass in
those
old fields), and where nothing else would grow they ran cattle, too many of them always, so that the grass went from the slopes and then the dirt, and the white lime rock showed through and the brush spread, and we’ve gone into that before.… In the end the country’s sleep was one of exhaustion.

The cedar country went perhaps more solidly to sleep than the other stretches along the river. It was tireder, and had less left to stay awake about. Hidden by the aromatic
scrub that covered their hills and had to be fought back out of their leached valleys, the cedar people grew separate, grew different as people will in a generation or so of living on separate, different country.

Not much different … Country in a generation or so can’t scallop the contours of a breed of people in the way it has in a thousand years in mountain places in Spain and Italy, where you can stop at a village which, though moneyless nearly always, is rich enough in things that matter—in oil and wine and wheat and fruit and the flesh of animals, the valley around it providing—and then can wind on up the valley toward gray crags where the soil thins or disappears, and can find within four or five miles a grim unmortared rock pile whose people glare at you from doorways and subsist during the year’s five or six leanest months on porridge stewed out of acorns or chestnuts from the wind-warped trees around them. In the one place there is music and tough humor and wholeness—in the other, sickness and silence and hate. For me, the kind of people that hard living carves are usually worth having around, but there is a point past which that doesn’t work at all.

On this continent, place dependence doesn’t get quite so intimate. Between a skinny grim New Hampshireman and a Cajun laughing on a bayou there is difference, and much of the difference has to do with place—with dirt and rain and heat and the things that grow. But a lot of it has to do with distance, too, and there isn’t enough distance between points in my piece of the Brazos to matter that much. If a tuned ear can pick out a progression in the dialect, it’s nevertheless still all West Texan, hill Southern, in its ring. If the Palo Pintans run a bit more to real ranching and the big Western openness of view that goes with it, and the Parker and north-
Hood Countians to prosperous sandy-land farming and to farmers’ shrewd philosophy, and the cedar people to small marginal freeholdings and to slit-eyed exclusion of outlanders, those are certainly effects of country. But in no place along there does no ranching at all exist, or no sandy-land farming, or no small hard-scrabble freeholding, and a man would have to live more continuously among those people than I ever have, to speak with weight about real difference. There’s more of it than there was in the beginning when all men started the joyful rape of the land with equal fervor and from like backgrounds; there’s less than during the long stasis, the doze before the Second War.