Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (38 page)

“Mornin’,” he said, tepidly, since he and Bill had differed the day before over what pasture to put some goats in.

Bill said: “Nice day.”

“Sha,” Davis said. “I wouldn’t take nothin’ to live in that old siiake trap. Wha’d you eat for breakfast?”

“Doves.”

“Chicken eats better.”

Bill said: “I’d like chicken better too if I couldn’t hit doves anyhow.”

“Be damn!” Davis said. “Oncet I kilt thirteen with one shell. Not no two whole boxes.”

He doesn’t discern the logic of wingshooting—because, of course, it has none. He said: “What I come for, somebody wants you long distance up at the store.”

Rising, Bill said: “If you want to, we can play a nice long game of mumbly-peg before we go see about it.”

“Sha,” Davis said. “They done waited this long.”

They rattled away. I washed the breakfast dishes in the trough by the windmill, cleaned my shotgun, and sat around listening to a tribe of chickadees quarrel in the ailanthus trees, and in a while they came back. Bill said the Jaycees in the city where we’d both grown up had been saddled with the entertainment of some foreign dignitary, and one of them, an official in a bank to which Bill owed money, or had owed it, had decided that it would kill time to show him a ranch.

“This one?” I said. It was not much to see at that time, a thousand acres or so and only partly cleared of cedar.

“Flat Top,” Bill said. “But they don’t know the Flat Top people and they don’t know their way around this country, so I guess we’re elected.”

“You are.”

“We are,” Bill said.

“France,” Davis said, his tone less unconcerned than usual. “Hit’s a big Frenchman.”

He doesn’t lack curiosity, and an hour and a half later when a seven-passenger Cadillac eased to a stop at Bill’s gate on the highway, Davis was with us. The bank official was driving, a plump fellow I’d known as a boy. Call him Seagrove.… He introduced us to a little mustached Frenchman named Ratineau, seated beside him. A newspaper photographer in the back seat looked boredly away.

Ignored, Davis stuck a hardened hand through the window at the Frenchman. “Birdsong,” he said. “D. M. Birdsong. How do.”

M. Ratineau blinked and was again charmed.

“I was borned and raised around here,” Davis said.

“Yes,” the Frenchman said.

“He doesn’t understand much English,” Seagrove said irritably. “We better get moving.”

We climbed into the back by the photographer and Davis took one of the jump seats. I saw Seagrove’s eye flash coldly around at him, and saw too that Davis hadn’t missed it.

Driving, Seagrove said with wide gestures, gravely: “Ranch country. Much cow, sheep, goat.”

M. Ratineau nodded politely and gazed out.

Davis snorted. “What kind of movie-Indian talkin’ is that?” he said.

“Please?” the Frenchman said, turning.

Seagrove said: “I told you, he doesn’t understand.”

“What is he, anyhow?” Bill asked.

“Well,” Seagrove said. “Secretary of something or the other. Treasury, I think.”

“Commerce,” the photographer said.

“I think Treasury,” Seagrove repeated.

I tried out a stumbling, polite remark in French to the Secretary, and he spouted back happily. I had to ask him to slow down. He said he had a hard time understanding Texas English, and began telling me, too fast, about some unjust experience in a hotel.…

“Pretty talk,” Davis said, listening. “But damn if it don’t look stupid, comin’ here without knowin’ no English.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say right in front of the man,” Bill said.

“He can’t understand,” Davis said. “Fatso there done said so.”

The photographer snorted. Seagrove’s thick neck was pink. The Secretary asked if I was familiar with the combination of the little peas with the carrots, at luncheons.

Was I not.

“Sacré nom!”

Where it seemed I should, I murmured.

But at the big ranch, a show place used to celebrities, a foreman took over and drove Seagrove and the Secretary and the photographer around the pastures while Davis and I and Bill waited at the auction barns. When they got back, the little Frenchman had his picture taken aboard a palomino stallion with someone else’s big Stetson down around his ears, and taken again holding a rope attached to the halter of a prize bull.

Then we left. It was hot in the car and no one spoke for a time, until the Secretary said to me: “One prefers vineyards. Listen. That bull. Thirty-five thousand
dollars?”

“Yes.”

“What folly!” he said.

Davis tapped his shoulder. The Secretary looked around. Davis said: “Like I told you, I was raised right here in these cedar hills. Now looky here what I can do.”

Reaching down, he grabbed his right boot heel and then, with a quick thrust upward, placed his leg around his neck. “By God!” he said. “Looky here.”

The wonder in the Frenchman’s face became a smile, and then abruptly he let out a squeal of such genuine laughter that it made Seagrove in the driver’s seat leap.

“You look too, Fatso,” Davis said levelly from beneath his own knee.

Seagrove glanced around briefly, the heavy flesh about his mouth twitching with fury. But the photographer was laughing, and so was I, and M. Ratineau was wiping away tears while he sobbed to himself: “Ah, the droll! Ah, the marvelous peasant!”

And later, as the three of us stood by Bill’s gate watching the Cadillac vanish ahead of an irate wedge of white dust from the road shoulder, Davis said: “That Secretary of France, he was all right. Wait till I tell ’em in Glen Rose.”

“How would you know what he was like?” Bill said, pausing with the gate half opened.

“I could tell,” Davis said. “But that Fatso …”

“What?”

“I got his goat,” Davis said. “I guess I showed that jessie.”

We passed through and Bill latched the gate behind us, grinning a little off center.

“Dog gone you,” he said. “I guess you did.”

T
HAT RANCH IS A GOOD ONE NOW
, 4,000 acres or so, ragged in shape because of the way it was built up, homestead by homestead, dollar by dollar that Bill could make or borrow. It’s a “good investment”; he could sell it now for two or three times what he has in it. He’ll cite that justification for its ownership to people who think in those terms, but he doesn’t need it for himself. He spends all the time out there that he can, and wanders around the pastures alone for two and three days at a stretch, chewing the stems of the good grasses, studying out places for stock tanks or terraces.… He knows pretty well what the birds and animals are that wander there too. A city boy, he is the cedar people’s successor, as the cedar people succeeded Cooney Mitchell and Cooney Mitchell succeeded Bigfoot Wallace and the Comanches, and because Bill has some notion of what Cooney and Bigfoot and the Comanches were, the good and bad of them, he isn’t a break in the country’s continuity as the big absentee “operations” nearly always are.
I think it’s not sentimental to say that Bill belongs there, and if he has anything to say about it his children will belong there even more than he does.

The cedar people don’t always leave happily. They drag their heels, and have to be waited for and bought out at the right times. The reluctance is not really rational and economic, though more often than not they say it is (“Land’s a-goin’ up. Sommidge wouldn’t want it if it weren’t …”), but is built on a dread of breaking the stringy line between themselves and the old ones.

Davis’s Uncle Herb dragged his heels for years in regard to one quarter-section that had no link at all with his own personal old ones. It had come to him through his dead wife and was five miles distant from the place he lives on with four hounds and a few chickens, hauling his water in buckets from the well and achieving nocturnal illumination, despite a cheap R. E. A. line that passes a quarter-mile away, with kerosene lamps.

Bill and Davis wanted the quarter-section because it adjoined them. He wouldn’t talk about selling. One time—I was there—they persuaded him to ride over to it with them and look around, but it was a mistake. When we had him there he stood bowlegged under the chinaberries before the place’s ruined main house (remember the shack where Davis and Jim Lemmon and Bert and Ike planned a dummying, long before?) and told how his wife Stella’s grandfather had exchanged fire with enemies from that same spot. On a nearby hill—“Yonder, see hit? Looks like a titty”—he said someone else of that collateral clan had once, on a certain night of a certain year because that was the way it had to be, glimpsed the flickering shaft of light that shows where gold lies buried.

He said: “I done tried a dozen times to witch it, with a gold cuff button. Couldn’t do no good.”

Davis said: “Herb, you know they was just a-tellin’ that.”

“Naw,” Herb said. “Hit was there. You need a coin, is what you need.”

He grew indignant, thinking. He said: “You take me God damn home, Dave Birdsong!”

And went … Sourly, in the pickup after we’d dropped him off, Davis said that he knew the old man was kin to him, and that he was a good old man, but that sometimes he crapped too close to the house.…

He did sell finally, though with stipulations written into the instruments. He said he wanted to be able to wander there if he wanted.

Bill said: “You can go anywhere on my place, any time. You always could.”

He said: “I want it on the paper.”

He wanted ownership of another old shack back in the place’s cedar, worse ruined than the main one, with a rotten perforated shingle roof and one of the windows made out of an old Model-T windshield, the hood’s arc faithfully reproduced along its lower edge. Not ownership of the land under it, just of the shack … The provision was typed in, and three months after that he went over with a double-bitted cedar ax and a wrecking bar and tore the old shack board by board apart. It took him a week. If you happened by he wouldn’t keep up the work, but would sit down and watch you tight-lipped till you left. He carried none of the wreckage away, and when he’d finished what remained was a square of foundation stones and a chimney’s shaft and a jumble of boards, rotten furniture, broken churns, and maybe a thousand Mason jars. And the Model-T windshield …

Davis said it must be more treasure foolishness. lie said his Aunt Stella’s uncle, who’d once lived in the shack, had been supposed to have money hidden somewhere.

“But it might not of been that ay-tall,” he said. “Old Herb he takes a notion.”

“Wonder if he found whatever it was?” I said.

“Shoo!” Davis said. “Won’t nobody ever know. If he’d of found a million dollars, he’d of just hid it again somewheres else. Without even buyin’ no electric lights.”

The heap of lumber and glass and crockery sat there for a good while until Davis, burning downed cedar one winter, squirted distillate on it and set it afire. Now there are only the fireplace and the foundation and ashes and molten glass and blue-scorched rusting rods and straps of iron, and Davis says the first time he has the dozer down that way he’ll shove it all into a draw.

So many tales, and every time you go to that country you hear a dozen more—good ones, if that’s your kind of thing. Too many to put down here, too many for a book not just about the cedar people …

No room, then, for Herb’s boy Clint, truck driver and rodeo rider, who though perfumed with dark charm is, like Jim Lemmon, about half mean when he gets mad, and who once, after a trouble with his first wife, sought her out at her parents’ house where she’d gone, and kept the whole family up under bright lights all night (they deserved it, but there is no room) while he twiddled a thirty-eight by its trigger guard and nipped at a bottle and swore he was going to shoot them all dead by dawn, but with the first light outside started laughing hard at the looks on their faces and walked out and took up again his 30,000-mile truck route. No room …

No room either for tales of “burning out,” of pastures blackened by revenge and houses gone the same way, or for what Davis Birdsong said to the air-force lieutenant colonel over long distance after a jet bang put a stair step crack across one wall of his house … Or for the cedar-country man who went to college and won a Rhodes and studied at Oxford and was a bright gleam of the Dallas bar, prosperous, only to drop it all one day on impulse and go back alone to the cedar hills and live in khakis, barefoot in the warm months, impartially inhabiting caves and abandoned houses, they say … Sometimes you’d see him hitchhiking with a brief case, hatless and bushy-headed and still in khakis, to litigation in some little county court, because the cedar people always wanted him when he’d take their cases.

Or for the big cockfight out in the brush in Bosque County one Sunday when two city ducktails tried to hold up the crowd for its betting money, and everybody ran for his car but not to get away, and even after the ducktails had roared off, shot to pieces, to a city hospital, the happy fusillade kept up in and around the cars where old enemies were shooting at one another, the cockfight forgotten … Chicken fights, they call them, partly from a distaste for right names and partly because of the old Anglo-Am tabu on the sexual homonym.