Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (4 page)

From inside the tent the pup watched me with houndish melancholy, never having seen a tent before but knowing it to be better than the wind and the rain. As the evening light failed, the wind dropped; the rain kept on, a steady, soft, autumn drizzle. I got a fire started between two sandstone blocks, piled logs on until it roared, dropped in a foil-wrapped potato, and settled back with a cigarette in the tent beside the pup, the rain’s tapping on the canvas full of remembrance of other rains, on other tents, in other places, back through a war and into childhood. I hoped it would let up a little when the time came to cook bacon and eggs, or whatever, though I wasn’t yet hungry.

The aloneness of it was good. I didn’t know how long it would remain good, but at the moment it was. I would have liked to have Hale along, but not many other people I knew.

“All by yourself?” the little man at the dam had said.

It is a nasty question to answer, the way he put it. It is the
question of gregarious, colonial man, and it contains outrage, and it means: What the hell’s the matter with you? Few people are willing to believe that a piece of country, hunted and fished and roamed over, felt and remembered, can be company enough.

I don’t always believe it myself.

But what you answer them is simply yes. And they say they’ve got no use for canoes, for which you can be maybe a little grateful, since if they did have, they’d pullulate all up and down the river.…

From nearby on the mountain above, a goat bell tinkled, and then a barred owl put
his
old peremptory ungregarious question:
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for YOU ALL?

The pup edged against me. He was a six-month-old dachshund and weighed about twelve pounds, and even after he was grown he wouldn’t be a very practical dog, but he was company, too—more concrete, perhaps, than memories and feelings.

“Passenger, you watch,” I told him. “It’s going to be a good trip.”

In the firelight he registered disbelief, and I was afraid I shared some of it. Rain already, and the damned river high …

LIKELY there were few Spaniards who came this far up the Brazos, and those who came didn’t stick. Ad majorem Dei gloriam, they wandered through in their dented armor, sweating or freezing according to the seasons, hard and enduring as bleak Castilla and sad Estremadura that had bred them. They named the river, though which of them did so and why he called it the Arms of God are lost lore. Over the past century local chroniclers have built legends around that name: that some strayed Iberians out on the drouthy plains shrank their swollen tongues in the river’s salty pools; that a divinely-original head rise hissed down just in time to save a party’s rear from whooping savages … But those accounts smell of romantic wishfulness, and nobody seems really to know. They were here, the durable Moor-Visigoths, and left place names and casks and chests of gold at each night’s stopping place—“Ef a man only had him a good witchin’ stick”—but for the most part who they were and how many and when is unknowable, unregistered in that scattered, paper-and-parchment, half-reliable racial remembrance that we call history.

They were a swarming and persistent folk, the Spaniards of the old breed, and that even their missionaries did not manage to knot their toes into the grasses of northern and western Texas is testimony to the greater persistence of another, tougher breed. This was the Comancheria, this and eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma and big swatches of Colorado and Kansas, or the lands we call those names now. And by the time the Spanish were set to extend themselves into those lands, the Comanches had the horse.

“Had” is inexact. The Comanches were squat pedestrians, incapable on the wide grass, until probably the early 1600’s, when they began to learn to use the strayed Spanish stock for something other than barbecues. Then, within a century, they made themselves into one of history’s great races of riders—and made riders too of the other plains tribes northward and westward to whom they traded ponies. During all human time, it seems, the Comanches, like their cousins the Tatars and the Cossacks and the Huns, had been awaiting that barbaric wholeness the horse was to give them. “Had”? If it was having, it was having in the sense that a man has a thigh, or a hand, or a heart. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the South Plains the separate abstract ideas of Comanche and Horse were not in fact separable.…

Within a simply attuned natural-religious framework, they existed for pleasure, but their pleasures were war and hunting and ravishment and kindred proud patriarchal violences. No other breed within their reach could or did like them except, finally, the closely similar Kiowas, but that fact sweated them very lightly. Those who did not like them could not whip them, either. They were The People, only a few thousand strong in their most numerous times, but total possessors
of an empire of grass and timber and wild meat, and constant raiders, for pleasure, far outside the limits of that empire.

The Spaniards had horses, too, and guns, and a stark shoving religion, and a pride and greed that had carried them through conquests that nobody still would believe if the results weren’t there to see. But the horse to them was a caparisoned pride, a tool rather than an appendage, and more of them now were comfortable mestizos and criollos than tough Spain-spawned seekers, and maybe a good bit of the shovingness had bled out along the flinty rich road from Vera Cruz.… What is certain is that by the middle of the eighteenth century the Comanches had them content to remain in their settlements in New Mexico and South Texas, and fearful enough to pay annual tribute in addition to the stolen horses and mules and women that flowed steadily outward to the plains. Braves with greasy ribboned braids lounged sardonically about the streets of San Antonio. Raids stabbed Old Mexico as far south as Durango. It was a kind of tangential retribution for Moctezuma and the burned libraries of the Mayas—not that the Comanches thought of working retribution for anyone’s wrongs but their own, if they had any at that point. They were The People.

And that’s what one forgets, looking back, feeling sorry, knowing the shame of what his own people did to the Comanches when his own people came and won. Forgets that for two arrogant horseback centuries they
were
The People, steady winners, powerful beyond any reverie of power their foot-bound Shoshonean ancestors could ever have shaped in the smoke of northern campfires. Dominant in the world they had selected, rich in the goods they prized, dexterous, cruel, wild, joyful, unbearable, lousy, bowlegged, and
magnificent … So that the pathos one is prone to see in their destruction—apart, different from the destructions of the other red peoples to the east—is not pathos at all, because they had ejaculated the germs of that destruction into the womb of fate, and it was right. They had accepted the magnificence with its risks, and in accepting they chose. Not pathos, no …

But that is Big History, and beforehand, too, for that matter. What has relevance here is that the upper-middle Brazos was a part of what they owned. Other Indians lived along there also (the Comanches lived nowhere, but moved with whim and the north wind and the buffalo), docile farmers for the most part, scraps of Caddoan and other tribes who had fled as the Anglo-Saxons advanced unsharingly from the east and the south, and who in their common, constant disaster lived near each other without much friction now. In the flat bends and up the creeks they built villages and raised pumpkins and corn and squash, and the Comanches, granting them no respect and no claim to any corner of land, half tolerated them perhaps because it was pleasant to have them there to raid occasionally.

That the upper-middle Brazos ran through the Comancheria had a good bit of relevance a century ago. Because, though the Comanches were still calmly certain of their ownership, a new brand of un-Spanish whites had been moving in with the odd notion that
they
owned it, if they could grab it. Anglo-American téjanos and Comanches had been feeling each other out in the south of the state since the 1820’s, and each breed had found the other rough, acquisitive, and treacherous. Neither was to change its mind in the Brazos country.…

RAIN … Even in gray heaped cities it has a privacy and a sadness. Tented, cocooned in warmed quilted feathers (the pup lumped snug between your calves; you had sworn you wouldn’t, but in the night he wheezed and shuddered on the chewed blanket brought for him), you come awake to its soft-drumming spatter and the curl of the river against a snag somewhere, and move your shoulder maybe against the warmth of the bag, and the shoulder prickles in separate knowledge of its wellbeing, and the still cold is against your face, and that tiny blunt wedge of sheltered space is all that exists in a sensed universe of softly streaming, gently drumming gray sadness beyond the storm flaps. And the sadness is right, is what should be. Knowing you do not have to get up at all, for an hour or for two hours or for a year, you lie there warmly sad and then you go back to sleep without dreaming.