Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (37 page)

What the cedar people are, mostly, is sort of more so. More Anglo-Am, more belligerent, more withdrawn, more hill Southern, more religious, or more hoggish in their sinning if they lack religion or backslide from it …

More tied to their country, too, in various ways … Since the country as they know it is so sorry, that’s a paradox, but it’s so.

Davis Birdsong was walking through the shinnery one day behind old Sam Sowell—I forget why; maybe he was going to chop some posts on the old man’s place on shares—when Sam stopped short, then slowly, felinely backed up. Davis looked over his shoulder. Coiled in a bare spot, rattling his rear off, was a diamondback as thick as a two-bit post. Davis eased his hand back along the oiled helve of his ax.

“Le’m alone!” Sam Sowell said.

“What?” Davis said.

“Le’m be!” Sam said. “Hin bi’ me. Hin bi’ oo. Le’m be.”

Davis said he needed more explanation than that before he was going to give up the idea of killing a rattlesnake, but the old man gave it to him. He said, as nearly as Davis could
follow, that the snake from its looks had been around that country as long as either of them had, that it had given fair warning and hadn’t struck when it could have, and that by God it had as much right there as Davis Birdsong or he, Sam Sowell.

“Looked like a old snake hisself, a-hissin’ and a-spittin’,” Davis said, telling it. “You kind of had to dodge, talkin’ with Sam, if you didn’t want no sharr bath.”

Therefore they made an arduous half-circle around the rattler’s sunning-spot, and went on with their trek.

Davis, though infected with that fungus which presently diseases roots, is himself inextricably a cedar man. He has trucked transcontinentally and lived in a trailer in Michigan and worked a stretch at Convair in Fort Worth and slouched through the nation’s far dust traps in a mustard-colored army uniform, but he has always come back, having in a major sense never left, and for some years now has worked, quarrelsomely but hard, for a friend of mine who has built a grassy ranch on the cleared hills. He is good at land procurement, at finding another little neglected homestead to tack onto Bill’s holding, and at persuading the reluctant ones who own it—townsmen often now, needing money and not the brushy unproductive land, but distrustful—to sell at a fair price. He is of their breed and they know him honorable, as men in that country from long storytelling and long watching clearly know one another to be whatever it is they are.

In general, I think Davis likes the changes that are taking place. He hasn’t been fenced off from their fruits. The old way was cob-rough on him and his, back through his parents to his old grandmother, who was another thing and had seen The People in the time before the cedar.… He recalls
years when his wife had to make her housedresses out of flour sacks, and the milk for his kids was short. That’s past now. He prospers reasonably from the change, and his razor-minded son will go to college.

He likes a bulldozer, crushing agent of change. Likes lowering its bright-worn battering blade and aiming it at the thick gnarled junipers and knocking them down and leaving behind him a strewn path full of edge-standing limestone boulders clutched by the roots that, uptorn, still hold on. Likes “chaining” best of all, another bulldozer howling parallel to his fifty or seventy-five yards away, and stretched between them a fat cable or anchor chain that inexorably, with a racket like the world’s own end, smashes out its mighty swath in eighty years of brush while little creatures flee. Likes clearing, cleaning, burning off the dried debris. Likes watching the doveweed and the sunflowers and the Johnson grass break through the bared ground the first year, and then the grain-rich native pasture stuff that, nursed, lays itself down on the hills’ slopes in a rug that soaks up rain and opens cool seep-springs all along the draws. Likes too the fat cattle those pastures will maintain. Once, in an access of enjoyment, he leveled an excellent log house on one of the homesteads they were clearing; it made Bill sore as a skunk for a time. Davis will even knock down live oaks if not watched.

And yet his gaze can turn back, too. Not long ago he and I went to look over a lost 140 acres on a dry creek, far back in the cedar. After the road to it played out at a wash, we left the pickup and walked, and along the way we came on a place with junk scattered around and a concrete well curb and the tumbled fire-blackened stones of a foundation and a fireplace under a pecan tree. Davis stopped, and grunted.

“What?” I said.

“Nothin’,” he answered, and leaning over stared down the dark eight-inch tube of the well, crisscrossed at its mouth with ragged spiderwebs. Davis said: “Went dry.”

“You can’t tell just looking like that,” I said. “It might be a deep one.”

“Used to run over like a sprang,” he said. “Hit was artesian.”

“You knew it.”

“I reckon,” Davis said. “I growed up where you see them rocks.…”

We walked on parallel to the dry creek, ascending, but the ghost place had reached him and he felt like talking.

“We didn’t have nothin’,” he said. “I mean,
nothin
. Two mules and a wagon to rattle into town with ever’ two weeks haulin’ a load of posts. A ridin’ horse, wind-broke. Some old pieces of arn you could farm with, a little. Choppin’ cedar. Putt coal oil on ever’body when they got hurt or sick. Coal oil on a cut. Coal oil on a rag on your neck if you tuck down with flu … But you know somethin’?”

“What?”

“We didn’t
live
bad,” he said. “They was a garden patch under that artesian well and it’d grow might near anythang. I mean. And we kept a cow most of the time, and hogs. Good house. Plenty of wood to burn in winter. And old Maw she kept thangs right.”

Maw was not his mother but the female grandparent who, alone against the lassitude of soil exhaustion and demoralization, had held stiffly upright those members of the clan within her touch until she had died a few years back, at ninety-seven. I’d only seen her a couple of times, but she had black eyes that burned you.… She was “good stock,”
in the old phrase, Tennessee-born and brought at the age of three to Texas where The People screech-owled in the moonlit brush and you hunkered down clutching your mother’s skirt in the lightless, fireless cabin while outside the men lay watching with rifles. Once, young, she passed a band of Comanches beside a trail near her father’s house. They’d killed a paint mare belonging to a neighbor and were roasting its hind leg over a fire. They looked at her. She looked at them and walked on.

And if, later, the man she’d picked had chosen the wrong place to stay, and if dependence on that wrong, exhausted place had eaten at the fiber of her sons and daughters and grandchildren, those things weren’t her fault, and she’d kept the erosion from going as far as it had with other families. None of her children had turned out to be whisky makers or brawlers or shifty-eyes. Only a couple of the grandchildren had. She’d seen what there was to fight and she’d fought it. She’d kept thangs right.

Are we then praising the Noble Pioneer Mother? No. Just praising Noble Anybody who could shore up a clan’s pride against cedar and bitter indigence … And there were more than you’d think who could, with the help of Old Testamentalism. That was always there. It’s why one can’t laugh too hard at Bug Eye Tinsley, wallowing on the ground.…

Meeting me, Maw had said: “Where your folks from?”

South Texas mostly, I told her, and before that Carolina and Mississippi.

“Flat country,” she said with the reserve of her people to whom for two centuries or more flatlanders had been aliens.…

Davis said that that home place, which he hadn’t visited
in twenty-five, nearly thirty years, had then had three pecan trees instead of one, and the well had flowed all the time, and so had the creek, with good fish swimming up it from the Paluxy as far as a little waterfall just under the house.

“Maybe hit’ll run again, though,” he said. “We git some grass around here.”

We crossed a rusty fence, sprung from its staples, into the place we were looking for, and started up a hillside streak of crumbly white caliche and rock between cedars; even the mud-daubers’ nests in parts of that country are limey white.… The trail narrowed and disappeared, overgrown. Davis paused, searching with his memory.

“Used to run here,” he said, pointing to a blank thicket wall of cedar.

It still did, on the other side. The family who’d lived on
that
place, he said as we went on, had been named Applegate and had had eight kids. They hadn’t owned the place or rented it, but whoever did own it had given up the idea of making it pay and didn’t care who did what with it. For hauling and plowing and the other unhuman work of the place the Applegates had used donkeys. Little old Meskin burros … Maw hadn’t entirely approved of the Applegates, though the donkeys had nothing to do with that. The Applegate girls would teach you things back in the cedar, was the trouble.

Davis said: “I guess you’d call ’em … poor folks.”

In his pause and substitution was sad awareness that everybody around that country for a long time had been so close to being what you’d call the Applegates that it would hurt a little actually to call them it.… Like an old twenty-two Hale used to have that would speckle fire across your forearm when you shot it …

He stopped. He said: “Right about here is where we berrit Bud Applegate’s thumb.”

“Whose?”

“They had a little old post-haulin’ wagon,” he said. “Pulled it with them donkeys. Didn’t have no regular wheels; Model-T rims, they used. Bud he was a little old kid and he was playin’ around the wagon one day when the old man was a-cuttin’ posts. Old Man Applegate he clucked to them donkeys and they started up and old Bud he had his thumb under one of them rims. Sliced it off like you’d slice a sausage.”

And after Bud’s stub had been fixed up fine with coal oil and a piece of somebody’s shirt tail, all the kids—the eight Applegates and Davis and his brothers and sisters—had laid the severed digit in a little cardboard box and carried it into the cedar and held a funeral for it, with speeches.

Davis said: “I bet I could putt near go to it and dig it up, right now.”

He lingered. He said: “I bought Louise a warshin’ machine last week.”

“Save a lot of work,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, but kept looking around on the crumbling white soil beneath the cedars.

“God damn it!” he said finally.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothin’. Just God damn it …”

H
E HAS AN UNCLE
named Herb who can witch water and has something wrong with his taste buds, so that he puts ketchup on peach cobbler and once drank a glass of coal oil for water, not knowing it until somebody told him.

“Then he said he’d noticed his stomach was a-burnin’ a
mite,” Davis said. ’Twenty miles to town. That old wagon. We all sat up to three o’clock waitin’ to see if it was a-gonna kill him and it didn’t and we went to bed.”

He has a friend whom he admires named Clarence, who went to Waco young and made some money finally in contracting, and bought a little place in the cedar hills where he comes for weekends, a city owner. Clarence drives a second-hand Cadillac and drinks Mögen David wine, and on Saturday nights he and Davis and Louise and occasionally a lady friend of his from Waco, a Miss Antelope of Apache derivation, drive thirty, fifty, sometimes eighty miles to country dances with fights and heel-stompings and all kinds of added amateur attractions. Once, coming home, they hit what Davis called a “bear cage” in the road—it took me a week to get “barricade” out of that one. It took Clarence longer to get his Cadillac fixed up.

Davis will work in cotton clothes under January’s sleet for twelve hours in a row if he wants to get something finished, or in the frying glare of August, hurling prickly seventy-five-pound bales of hay onto the back end of a truck in a windless bottomland field. Air conditioning and the silver-blue lure of television have little pull for him, and he’ll eat chicken-fried steak and beans every day for lunch if that is what is put before him, or alternatively mustard greens. He is thus an ascetic, though I’d dislike having to weave the logic of his kinship to Saint Henry.… Like many people in that country, he mistrusts the right names for things, the special vocabularies that go with specialized activities, so that pullets, cocks, hens, and capons are all just chickens, and in the strips of cow country even leathery experts may call chaps “leggins,” and lariats “ropes,” and corrals “pens,”
and a cantle “the hind end of the saddle.” I don’t know why.

Davis quietly knows himself to be as good as any man, and can show it if he has to, if at times in strange ways. One September during the early years of my friend Bill’s ownership of land out there, not long after the war, Bill and I went out to spend a few days hunting doves. He hadn’t yet built a house to tempt his wife into bringing the children for weekends, so we were staying by ourselves in an old tin-roofed shack, a couple of miles across brushy pastures from where Davis lived in a new concrete-block cottage.

Early one morning Davis rattled into view in his pickup. Getting out, he stood looking at us where we sat on the edge of the sagging porch. He wore a straw hat curled cowman fashion and a suit of pinkish khaki.