Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (7 page)

M
ORNING CAME
damp and dark with a low fog and ducks calling as they flew half hidden in mist overhead. The rain had stopped, but the dark green weeds around the tent were dripping and quickly soaked the passenger and my boots, socks, and pants. The rapids’ sound was muted; what water I could see lay like murky glass. My gathered wood was saturated; I gave up frontiersmanship and used a dollop of my scant lantern gasoline to start a big roarer for warmth and coffee and stewed fruit.

The fog had a fine privacy. In a jacket pocket I found a little rosined bird squeaker that someone had given me, and tried it, and called up a wintering house wren that sat in a scrub hackberry and scolded me much like a chickadee. Then I walked up a hillside behind camp, wooded with mesquites and elms and drouth-dead stubs. Birds were thick there, feeding and moving about with the want of fear that quiet foggy air, like brush, seems always to give them. I picked out two kinds of flickers, Mexican and red-bellied woodpeckers, lark sparrows, cardinals, and more wrens, and sat for a time trying to see specific distinguishing marks on a flock of streak-breasted finches that flitted about singing a clear little finch song. But I’m not a meticulous enough student to keep the less flamboyant Fringillidæ straight in my mind, and finally gave it up.…

Before leaving, I paddled up Ioni to the crossing where Jesse Veale died. It is still there, though dozed out wider for present ranch use; I looked for the old double elm’s stump, not remembering whether I’d actually seen it when young
or only had seen a photograph, but however that may have been, it was no longer there. Mesquites stand thick on the flat above the crossing now, though probably in the old days they didn’t; like cedar, they move onto overused land. Except for a few birds, it was a silent place.

Across the creek the black bulk of Crawford Mountain grayed upward into the overcast; the Comanches went there after the fight at the crossing, and the next day a big mob of avengers swarmed out from Palo Pinto and trailed them up among the cedar and the rocks, and found a dead one wearing Jesse Veale’s hat.… Live ones were waiting, too, slowed down probably by wounds, since they rarely stuck around to fight after a raid—not in ’73, not that long after the old arrogant days when they stormed Durango and San Antone. They winged a couple of citizens before being run into a cave under a high cliff. The Palo Pintans besieged them there all night, using up a lot of ammunition on the cave’s dark entrance, and in the morning, fired with rage and maybe other stimulants, Jesse Veale’s brothers ran in with pistols in one hand and knives in the other. But the Indians had slipped free during the night; later someone found their signs up near Shut-in, where they had passed on their way out to Oklahoma.…

That had been a long time ago, but the place was eerie in the fog with a little of the held-over eeriness of my nightmare. Feeling it, the passenger got back into the canoe and sat on top of the tarp and barked, scattering ghosts with sharp sound.

If any were there to scatter …

THAT afternoon I got only to Eagle Creek, still probing uncourageously against weather’s ire. Rounded gray-stone cliffs stand beside the creek mouth; in the river itself massive, split-away, rhombic blocks twist and slow the green current of a long pool. Big oaks gone red, and yellowed ashes rose precariously from slanted alluvial soil beneath the cliffs, piles of drift against their boles in prophecy of their own fate; it is on the outside tip of a bend, and in those places the river lays down rich sediment for maybe centuries and then in a fit of angry spate cuts under it and carries it away, trees and all.… A canyon wren was singing there; one always is. They love high rocks above water, and the wild falling song itself is like a cascade.

For want of other level ground, I made camp on a high yellow sand bank under the oaks and the cliff, and built a big drift-hardwood fire against a boulder to drive back the chill damp and to dry my wet feet a little. Before dark I crossed the creek to look for the stones of a little circular Indian rock shelter I remembered there, but couldn’t find
them; in their place was a great hump of gelatinous silt piled up by the springtime floods.

I ate creamed chipped beef on the last of my store bread and drank coffee laced with whisky and honey and slept hard despite an old chariey horse’s digging under my shoulder, the pup an established bedfellow now. What old man had it been, somewhere in books, who’d slept with a dog to cure his aches? I couldn’t remember. The passenger cured none of mine.

In the morning it was raining again, with thunder. I waited it out in the tent, and when it had stopped I ate, washed, and loaded, cursing sore hands and slick riverside mud and the cumbersome boxes and bags, though still without knowing how I’d have managed with less gear at that time of year or how, having what I had, I could handle it more easily. In summer or a drouthy fall, when the river is low and you know it is going to stay that way, you can camp on low bars almost beside the boat and can reduce lifting and staggering and sliding to a minimum, but not with the big water running and two-foot rises and falls commonplace.

The big water scooted us on down—I know the “us” is an anthropomorphism, but in the absence of other company a dog makes a plural, and not a bad one either—and through a fine, pounding rapids above the Boy Scout Ranch at Kyle Mountain. I wanted to go there as a kid, but for some reason never made it. Maybe it was the smoking; most of us started that when we were thirteen or fourteen and felt morally obliged to give up Scouting with its insistence on physical rectitude.

After that a quick sweeping shower wetted us. Chilled, we passed under the east face of the Chick Bend mountain, where they once bushwhacked an old warrior at dawn while
he stood guard for his companions, and to the right around the Dalton Bend, named for Marcus Dalton, who settled there. This region was thick with cattlemen in the old days; they had brought the craft with them from the south of the state, where their fathers had learned it from the Mexican vaqueros. Many of their families moved west and north with the frontier and the cattle trails, and their names are familiar all the way to Canada now—Reynolds, Goodnight, Loving, Slaughter, Waggoner.… Once after the War, not for the first time, Marcus Dalton took a herd to Kansas and sold it. When he was back in his own county again, headed home (home for him now was up the river a way) in a wagon with two friends, the Comanches killed them and scalped them and looted their baggage, but overlooked $11,000 in cash in the toe of a boot. Dalton’s little dog that had gone all the way to Kansas and back with him (sleeping in his bed roll as they camped?) was still alive to yap at the whites who found the mess.

Just below the Dalton country old George Slaughter lived, a book in himself if you wanted to write it—a Mississippian who reached Texas in time to fight the Mexicans and, they say, deliver a message to Travis at the Alamo before it fell, and moved to the frontier when he was nearly fifty to preach Baptist hellfire and fight Indians and punch cattle and found a range dynasty. In Andy Adams’s book, it was a Brazos-bred Slaughter who showed the stopped trail herds how to get across a flooded river. The Slaughters showed lots of people lots of things.

It showered yet again. I knew that around the next curve, a mile and a half below, I’d be able to see the Dark Valley bridge, and knew too that that was the place to quit. But the river was pretty where I was—wide and clean and even
flowing, with curious, arching, limestone overhangs along the right shore—and after the rain had stopped I dawdled, reluctant, only steering in the current, wondering if a house I remembered near the bridge would have a telephone, or if I’d have to hitch to Palo Pinto. On those country roads the first car along usually gives you a lift.

Except that just then, with the abrupt autumn changefulness that I’d just about quit believing in, a big wind blew up out of the southwest and cleaned the clouds from the sky in a scudding line, and all of a sudden everything was the way it was supposed to be. The pale green of the willows came alive; big frost-golden cottonwoods flared where I hadn’t noticed them.… A cardinal flew dipping and rising across the river, red as a paint splash in the washed sunlit air, and five feet under the canoe I could see stone by stone the texture of the bottom as it slid past. The passenger came out of his hide-hole to climb up onto the tarp and growl at a Hereford cow and her calf, dubious-eyed, who watched us move by.

There was no guarantee the weather would stay good; I doubted that it intended to.… We rounded the curve. The new bridge was there beside the creek, skinny and tall on its concrete piers.

(It was up Dark Valley that settlers saw the last of 600 good stolen horses in one bunch, pointed north to the Territory ahead of the big band of Indians who had hit the Landmans and the Gages and the Browns and the Shermans, cruelly hard. But that story goes later, if it goes at all. You can’t get them all in.)

I said: “Hell, bridge.”

The bridge said nothing.

I said: “Passenger, are we going to quit?”

The passenger construed it as an invitation to play, and came scrambling back to gnaw on my pants cuff. There is a big rapids under the bridge, an ugly one. It has old rusty car bodies sticking up out of it, and crashes straight in against a rock bank before veering left into a long shallow chute. Smart boatmen don’t run it when the river’s high, but walk the gravel bar on its inner curve, letting the boat down gently by a line.

But I had the feeling that if I stopped there, I might be obliged to quit, and dawdled still until the sucking funnel at the head of the rapids caught me. Because my stupidity didn’t deserve good luck, I had it. We flicked the jagged remains of a Ford and then I was pulling deep and hard on the right, the paddle spring-bending in my hands, to bring the bow left and clear of the stone bank at the turn, and did bring it left, and rammed the paddle head-on against the rock to keep the stern from hitting, and yelled aloud as we straightened into the long run.

Then I was ashamed in the way that you’re ashamed when someone else hears you talking to yourself. A man and a woman were fishing at the lower end of the chute; those are the places where the countrymen drop their lines, the places where the big catfish feed. They watched me slide down toward them, and as I passed the man tossed his head in resentful greeting. They were alone and liked being alone, and hadn’t liked my crazy shout. I resented their being there, too, and so respected his right.…

Hungry, I stopped on a gravel bar and made bouillon on the little alcohol stove, and with it ate crackers and cheese and slices of onion. The sun bit warm into the knotted muscles of my back as I ate, and relaxed them. The sky and the water and the multicolored chert gravel of the bar shone
with a brightness that I’d forgotten, and made me a little sleepy. It was payment for three bad days and I took it so, and lay down for a while, and threw pebbles up into the air and heard them fall in the current, and drank coffee and smoked.

Across the river a gap showed in the cottonwoods where Elm Creek comes to the Brazos from (inevitably) still another historic spot, a vale they used to call the Indian Hole. People are less “married” now, in Yeats’s sense, to surrounding rocks and hollows and prairies, and think less of them, so that the old names get lost. I don’t know whether they still call that the Indian Hole or not, or even if anyone knows just where it is. A friend of mine and I walked a couple of miles up the creek once, trespassing, and thought we’d found it but were never sure.… There, in 1858, an old fellow named Choctaw Tom, together with a band of his relatives and friends, learned what an ineluctably sweet privilege it was to be a red man on the white man’s fringe of settlement. The lesson didn’t do most of them much good because they didn’t survive it, but they learned it anyhow.

They had all been jammed together on a reservation up the river by then, scraps of ten or a dozen tribes—all but the Comanches and Kiowas, a few of whom were resisting agricultural education on their own reserve up the Clear Fork while the rest ran as freely as ever in West Texas and Oklahoma, raiding down into the settlements occasionally for horses, or for cattle to trade to the New Mexican comancheros at plains rendezvous, but not usually for scalps. Not yet … It had been a number of years since any major bloodshed, and that had been farther to the south.