Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (40 page)

Le’m be.…

A church camp … A cleared ten acres or so planted in Bermuda and dotted with live oaks, with green-roofed white buildings set against the dark hills behind … People with children—it was Sunday—walked along a path by the river and looked at me. A good place, a pleasant frame for Old Testamentalism, its structures Old Testamentally stark against the country, not blended in … Except in those southern and central parts of the state settled by immigrant Germans a century ago, Texans, like most Americans, lack much devotion to the idea of building into the country, or into a river’s shore. But there was no point in wishing, on the Brazos, for the kind of organic houses and inns and cafés which Europeans build overhanging water that’s practically tailored into beauty. You can’t tailor a river whose yearly custom is to undercut, sweep, tree-bash, and dissolve its shores, not without a millennium of accumulated masonry.

Nor would I want to see it tailored. I didn’t want to see it dammed, either, but it was going to be.

All to go, like the breed of people, like the wild things along the shores, like autumn … What is, is. What was, was. If you’re lucky, what was may also be a part of what is. Not that they often; let it be so, now …

W
E DID
the Channel Waltz for a long long sandy piece, the river still dropping. Zigzagging with the diagonal bars, getting caught occasionally and having to labor across the shaking lips to the green water below, standing up sometimes while poling to see better what you’re getting into, you attain a sense of the channel after a while, though you can’t trust it.

You attain a sense of a lot of things, mostly unimportant. Days have songs, for instance, like rapids and steaming logs. The songs take the beat of your paddle’s dip, and are likely therefore to be old, slow, sentimental, Gothic things. One day sang “Drink to Me Only” all day long. The next insisted on “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” and those lyrics which, in spots, are so bad that they can only be comical for a time before they start to dig at your nerves:

I charge thee, disturb not my slumbering fair…
.

You could go on forever. You know it. Your muscles have gone supple-hard and your hands as crusty as dry rawhide, and your head has cleared, and your boat goes precisely, unstrenuously where and how you want it to go, and all your gear falls into its daily use with thoughtless ease. There is merely not enough river, not enough time.… You don’t miss anyone on God’s earth’s face. You’re no more bored with the sameness of your days and your diet and your tasks than a chickadee is bored, or the passenger on the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day has its fullness, bracketed by sleep. In the evenings by the fire and in the clear mornings
are when you have it strongest—the balance, the Tightness, the knowledge.

Or when you think you have it … And does it especially matter that, like the dead duck and the river and the shifting cedar hills behind, the knowledge may turn out to be illusory? Illusions are worth having.

You were spare, bare, and ascetic. You knew Saint Henry, Yankee moralist though he might be, and knew too all those other old loners who’d ever baked their bread by fires in manless places. You knew the sovereign pulse of being.

Or you thought you did …

T
WO BOYS
were machine-gunning chips in the river with automatic twenty-two’s at a place I liked for stopping—a humpy pod of gravel and willows and drift strung to shore only by a low spit of mud. It was mid-afternoon, but I was going consciously slow and the spot looked good. As I neared them, the boys stopped firing and we spoke. They were nice-looking kids, gangly and restless.

One said: “How about a ride?”

“One-way boat,” I told him. “I can let you out at Sixty-seven tomorrow or the day after.”

“Aw! …” he said, and waved me on. Below the bar and out of their sight, I turned the canoe up into quiet water and waited, smoking. In a while the sound of their shooting moved back to shore and into the woods; ricochets moaned around and one came over my head. Then I heard the straight-pipe blast of their car, and paddled up alongside the bar to unload. There’d been no good reason for not stopping while they’d still been there, but I didn’t want to talk. The river’s aloneness was on me and I liked it and was going to hold onto it while it lasted.

That was a good camp, but the weather went very cold in the night, and the feathers in the old sleeping bag had shifted to head and foot so that my middle parts, where I was touching ground through the leaky mattress, felt ninety years old. I knew what it was, but couldn’t wake up enough to get out and shake the bag right again. At dawn there was a raw wind and my throat hurt and the sky, what I could see of it, was whitely gray with low fast-moving clouds. Someone across the river was shouting.

All right, I thought. I’d be able to make it on down that day to a pull-out place. I’d been lucky on the weather anyhow, clear and bright most of the time on into December, on into winter.…

“Goatie, goatie, goatie!” the voice across the river hollered, in harmony with a banging on tin.

I crawled up on my elbows until my face and shoulders were in the biting air outside the storm flaps, and looked across. A man and a woman were walking through the brush under pecan trees and calling up Angora goats, maybe to get them to shelter before a blow. They carried buckets with a little feed in them which they were beating and rattling. The woman wore denims, a bright blue jacket, a red scarf, and an orange hunting cap, and jiggled as she walked, goatie-goatie-ing with that excessive zest that women bring to men’s tasks, making them caricatures. Even without knowing he had an audience, her quiet husband looked a little embarrassed. But the goats were following, a jostling flock of them that sniffed and shoved at the bucket she carried as she led them up to a higher flat where a new car was parked.

When they had left, driving the car slowly and drumming on its sides so that the goats kept tumbling along behind, I crawled out and put on all the clothes I had and built up
the fire. My boots were damp; I shuffled them down into the ashes and red-burnt sand that a part of the bigger evening fire’s coals had kept warm. The pup came out, more doubtful than I of the day. He saw what I was doing and sat down against my feet in the warm spot, but hit an ember and yipped and fled back to the tent, scattering ashes.

It didn’t go on forever, the river.…

That
day’s song was a piece of Reconstruction jaggedness they used to call “The Good Old Rebel.” It had a line about catching the rheumatism a-campin’ in the snow that went along with the way my back felt in the region of my chilled kidneys, even after I had on all my clothes and was paddling on the river with hot coffee and fruit inside me. It ended:

I hate the Constitution and the uniform of blue;

I hate the Declaration of Independence, too
,

And I don’t want no pardon for what I was or am
,

And I won’t be reconstructed and I do not give a damn
.

And then the blustering, cutting day started it all over again, to the tune of “Rambling Wreck.” That isn’t the right tune, but it was the tune the day used.…

A blast of a day, yanking the canoe crooked on the water, riffling the surface so that I couldn’t read the channel, making me feel even colder and worse than I’d felt when I awoke … None of it seemed to matter much, though. December was a right time for bad weather, and I’d gone about as far as I needed to go to tell my stretch of the river goodbye. I’d made the trip and it had been a good one, and now they could flood the whole damned country if they liked, chasing off the animals and the birds and drowning out the cottonwoods and live oaks and sloshing away, like evil from the font, whatever was left there of Mr. Charlie Goodnight
and Satanta the White Bear and Cooney Mitchell, and me.

As they would, for praiseworthy purposes … We’ve learned to change unchangingness, and it seems we’ll keep the knowledge working. That long and bedrock certainty of thoughtful men that regardless of the race’s disasters the natural world would go on and on is no longer a certainty. It’s an improbability instead. Saint Henry’s bottom comfort has been yanked from under us; old Hardy’s sad assuredness in the time of the breaking of nations is no longer sure. Not just in terms of dams on a salty river unloved, unlovable except by a few loners and ranchers and cedar-hill misanthropes … Consider the bug that bites a bureaucrat or the bureaucrat’s friend’s spinach, and calls down not only on itself but on a stretch of country, which thereupon dies for years, the mimeographically prescribed revenge of a planeload of heptachlor or dieldrin. Consider warblers and television towers, and the ceiling lights at airports. Consider radiation and the sea life of the coral islands.…

Consider too, though, and again, and germanely, that it had been a good trip.

Two or three miles above where I thought to pull out, I stopped and ate cheese and onions and biscuit bread on a bar. A line of willows with some leaves left on them baffled the wind a little; I sat with the sun shining out from time to time through rifts in the cold clouds, and juggled gravel. It is whiter down there than in the Palo Pinto country where I’d started, with fossils and other bits of limestone thick among the multicolored chert, a pinto-pony kind of gravel, pretty. I stuck a fragmentary trilobite into my pocket and a couple of bits of white-veined red stuff, aware that when I found them there later, I’d throw them away. It didn’t matter:

That was what the day sang, to the wrong tune.

I
GOT TO THE PLACE
at about two thirty, fought eddies and quicksand to get the canoe beached on firm gravel, and wet to the knees walked up a little road that comes down to the river past a shack with a
MINNOWS
sign nailed slantingly to a big sycamore. I knew the spot from driving around that country, but had never stopped there. As I climbed the hill a very ugly bloated old man rose out of a cane chair under the sycamore, a sunny nook sheltered from the wind.

He said: “What the hell you up to with that thang?”

“Which?” I said, not knowing whether he meant the pup or the field glass around my neck or what.

He meant the boat, having watched my maneuvers. I told him, and asked if there was a telephone nearby.

He said: “You know all about Indians, hey, neighbor?”

Not much, I said; I’d just kicked around a few old campsites.

“Naw!” he said, staring into my face with that disquieting steadiness that some children and drunks have. “Crap, I don’t believe you’d know no Indian place if you was to find it.”

Probably not, I admitted. Was there a—

“Listen, neighbor. Can you read sign?”

The wind swirled his aura at me, and I got the white cedar-country whisky smell, strong.

Coon and fox tracks, did he mean?

He said: “Crap! I mean
sign
. Indian sign, neighbor, where they buried gold and such.…”