Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (39 page)

Or for the man who rides a bony horse into Glen Rose on summer Saturdays, barefooted but with big roweled spurs on his heels …

Or for tales of whisky, so central … No room for whisky, fuel for the northern peoples’ empires? There must be. When empire had burned its way on through and far beyond the Brazos country, the Brazos people kept on using the fuel, imperially. The gentle, genteel people and the clear
sighted ones like Maw among the older stock have been fighting it ever since, with varying success.

It’s hard to blame them, even if you’re a drinker. Mostly these days beer is the beverage of joy in those parts, hauled in from the wet territory to the east and sold at double price. It causes a few fist fights and wife beatings, but not much else. Whisky is for the blow-off, for the real overspew of that breed’s boiling violent illogic that builds up pressure underneath the slit-eyed quiet, and has to go somewhere. It comes out wild; it comes out Cooney Mitchell and Bigfoot Wallace and the cowboys in the Kimball Bend, and makes the midnight horrid and the afternoon, too. So that even drinkers sometimes vote dry, hoping that the voters in the next county will be damned fools enough to vote wet and give them and their friends a nearby swilling place out of earshot of their own kids.

The bootleg kind of liquor doesn’t locate itself by law, though. In the cedar hills they make it white, running the steam from soured corn meal and sugar out through copper tubing and selling its condensation right away at two dollars a raw oily half-gallon, though cedar clearing and lawmen in airplanes have hurt the profession’s privacy. During the brief glory that was Prohibition, Glen Rose became a resort, hub for a wide ring of thirsty country. There were sanitariums run by chiropractors, at least one of whom wrought witnessed, attested miracles. There were mineral springs, and boosters who spoke of almost every attraction except the real one. There were parks, standing weedy now with bandstands of red petrified wood which testify that here the tip of wanton prosperity’s wing once brushed the ground.

In 1932 that boom naturally broke. Now most of the
homemade soul balm is drunk up locally, with a little going to outsiders who for one reason or another like it. West Texas, too, dry and wide, offers a field for enterprise. One part-time maker told me that starting from scratch, keeping no still around between times to be found and blamed on him, he could stew up a truckload batch of white whisky for $800 which, after an evening haul to Lubbock, he could sell for $6,000. He said it was fairly safe if you didn’t do it at regular intervals; if you were regular they’d lay for you.

One short tale? There’s an old moonshiner around—call him Else. He is a man of dignity and of harsh ethics, few of which fit the interstices of the law or the philosophy of patio living. A long time back he got caught at his chosen trade, though to toll him out of the brush they had to break the law themselves and hold his family hostage. He was tried and given a year or so in jail but, somehow, was allowed a little time out on bond before he had to turn himself in. On the night before his freedom expired, his friends gathered to give him a party. Everybody felt bad. There was whisky, some of it even wood-aged for a month or so.… They gloomed.

“Hod damn it,” one said. “This ain’t it. We don’t want old Else to recollect us this-a-way, all that time. Like a funeral.”

Another said: “What you gonna do, sang songs?”

He said: “Le’s have a jury trial.”

“Who you want to try?”

“Else, that’s who,” he said. “I’m the judge.…”

They held it, drinking hard. At the end they had Else, swaying with whisky, stand up before the bench and the judge said: “They done found you guilty of bein’ damn fool enough to git caught. What you got to say?”

“Sommidgin’ thang,” Else answered. “G’lty.”

“All right,” the judge said. “I hereby by God sentence you to git beat up. Now.”

And they all piled on him, swinging and kicking. After a while they lost track of who it was they were after and just fought, a flailing mound of them, until nobody had any fight left in him. Old Else, who lost four teeth and had a thumb broken, still says it was the nicest party he ever went to.

A
LL TO THE FACTORIES NOW
, all to towns … Selling whatever they happen to own, they leave the places which their breed wore out and which in reciprocation wore their breed out, too. They go to Fort Worth and Dallas and Los Angeles and Detroit and almost everywhere, and few come back, for there is no reason to. In corporation plants they learn well or badly those technical specialties that hour-pay requites, mingling there and in the beer halls and in the suburbs into a new and future breed with other kinds of people. With migrant hill Southerners, kinsmen in religion and honky-tonkery and fierce schizoid polarity, and probably often in blood too … With that drifting, truly rootless worker mass that two or three generations of big production and war have brewed among us, on all levels from corporation president to shop sweeper …

A lament? Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey? Not necessarily. A good many ills have been hastening around the Brazos country for a good long while. And besides, what is, is.

But what is, too, is of concern to a farewell-sayer like me, and what is, there, is the slow, sometimes reluctant, some
times glad end of a people. Davis Birdsong’s people, the more-so people … The breed is changing.

Not my people, not in lifelong neighborness or the real scaffolding of thought … South Texas gets into it, and so does the city, and the wandering.

But if one cares about people at all, he has claim to more than just one kind of them. Young, I breathed in these, like pollen, from the air.…

BARNARD’S … Above a good hard-bottomed ford you scale four levels of shore, all different—first mud over sand with weedy willows’ roots bonding them against the river’s wash; then a belt of dry sand nourishing ash trees; then a fine shaded flat of alluvial flood dirt with great cottonwoods and Spanish oaks; and finally, after you mount through sloping thickets, an open uprolling prairie of worn-out fields and pastures, red-gullied, scratchy with poor-land brush and weeds, loud with meadowlarks and doves. The tame Indians raced ponies there while Charles Barnard watched and bet with them, and The People came in arrogant with loot to trade for what whisky-Charles’s unfortunate thirst might be able to spare them.… All that’s left now is a dim rectangle of stones beside a new windmill, and an archeological layer, excavable by boot toe, of harness buckles, sun-purpled bottle glass, horseshoes, and porcelain doorknobs. And the feel of old Tomasa’s scolding … From there, back across the river, you can see a roofless ruin in Kristenstad.

Sand … In your ears, your eyes, your bed, your food,
your pipe, your shoes … You adjust to the fact of it, and move your feet slowly while cooking.

Turkeys, undomestic blue-headed ones, gobbling on a hill. The brush of those counties is good habitat for them, though there aren’t many. They lack wile (does any gallinaceous bird have it except in the defensive mythology of hunters?) and besides are savory enough eating and big enough to attract country persecution, in season and out.

Weather of yellow quietness … Gossamer shreds floated shining across the clear air and hung waving off the canoe and laid themselves ticklish athwart my face. In the bottom the deciduous trees were leafless now, winter-stripped; on the hills the dark cedars and live oaks still shaded the white ground. The river had been subsiding day by day, scouring itself clear in the sands. Full of driftingness and sloth, I let it carry me along, dallying, stopping for explorations and to lie in the sun, making no speed at all. I had a feeling that I could go on forever, if there were only river enough and time.

But there weren’t.

Ducks … You can get a little tired of eating them, though in that country they’re good, the short-fibered brown meat untainted yet by coastal fishiness, sweet still with the taste of grain and fresh-water green things gathered all the way down from Canada. Roasted, broiled, or stewed as chunks of breast with bacon and onions … There were a lot of them in the long slow stretches between the rock-bottomed rapids—widgeons and mallards, teal and blue-bills and pintails. As I paddled down, groups of six or a dozen or more would swim out from the banks, not much afraid, and would keep on ahead of me downstream, accumulating until at times I’d be herding maybe a hundred. Then the
paddle’s flash or a rapids below or some other small spur would flush them on short, frantic, sure-beating wings to the sky, and maybe a few would cut back to give me a shot, if I wanted it.

Most of the time I didn’t. If I felt like eating ducks I’d usually have killed them by noon. Thanksgiving’s brief gluttony was past, and I’d come to some sort of terms with sportsmanship, or whatever you want to call it. I made no more pot shots, but the thrill of using up shells and killing things in quantity had no application there, floating, just feeding myself.

An illusion … Three green-winged teal from a big flock of them turned and bulleted back past me very high. I led the lowest one by perhaps twelve feet and fired, and he came down in that long graphlike parabola that charts clean death, to splash hard into the water up and across stream from me. The river was shallow and wide and sand-bottomed there, moving fast though smooth on top. As I turned the boat and paddled toward the duck, the passenger on the bow howling blood, I got suddenly dizzy. On the glassy water I had the feeling of making easy progress upstream, but in fact the river was carrying both me and the duck fast downward, and the cedar hills beyond the flat land of the shore were shifting in what seemed to be the wrong direction. Even after I understood, it was still dizzying, and I had to squint my eyes down so as to see only the duck and the water. I found myself tempted to draw, in the manner of Saint Henry, an allegory between the mixup and our world. There seemed to be a connection, but trying to figure out what it was made me dizzy in another part of my interior, and I gave it up.

That afternoon in the Mitchell Bend (now we’re there in
place as in backward-looking time, but the story’s already told) I dropped around a little turn, and five more teal were sunning themselves, asleep, on the sixty-degree caved-away slope of a sand bank, just above the water. They sat squatted back on their tails, cinnamon heads down against protruding white breasts. I drifted almost on them, then rapped the side of the canoe. One by one they came awake, stiffening their necks and staring in a kind of low-comedy double take, and flushed in confusion. With a twinge, I swung the gun on the last one as he went, to fill out supper, but he was flying faster than I’d thought, or maybe the twinge had thrown me off; I only speckled the river behind him with both barrels.