Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (9 page)

I SAW my first deer of the trip there in the morning, a medium-sized buck in the cedars above camp where I went to get wood. He coughed at me before I saw him, and I ducked down to glimpse him beneath low-hanging branches as he ran off, flag high. The season would open in three days, but not for a lone man with one average stomach.… Despite drouths and people and domestic stock, there is still a good bit of game in the Palo Pinto country. Little, probably, compared to what the old days knew when all the country’s productivity went cyclically into the nourishment of only wild creatures … But the brush and harsh hills still hide deer and turkey, and the goats and cattle have not yet reached an exact balance point against the supply of grass and hardwood browse. The last lion was shot in that country in the twenties. Occasionally someone claims to have seen bears, and a friend of a friend of mine, truthful, Fm told, was hunting there a few years ago and heard a funny snuffling on the other slope of a knoll, and when he walked up onto it a full-grown buffalo was grazing just be
yond it. It looked at him without fear until some swirl of the air carried his scent to it; then it lumbered off into the brush. He couldn’t account for its being there, nor could the landowner, nor could I unless it had escaped from one of the big ranches a good bit farther west, where well-to-do descendants of the old ones have a few small keepsake herds under heavy wire. Even after ten or twenty generations of captivity, there is something in buffalo which doesn’t accept wire, and sometimes it isn’t heavy enough.

Fog, but bluing above into the promise of a clear day … And a little after sunup a stout south wind came to scour the air clean again. Stewed apricots and coffee … Neat mud-printed coon tracks lay along the gunwales of the canoe when I went to load it. Around the turn there, two drinking does stood still thirty yards ahead of me as I drifted, and let me take their picture before easing, not much alarmed, back into the brush, and a big flight of ducks passed over the river high. Then the wind slapped in behind us. I cut a little willow and jammed it upright in the bow and we sailed up out of Post Oak into Hart at a good five knots with no paddling, even though the river was down a foot or so from the day before. Sand bars were close to the surface now, and I had to watch for their telltale pallid diagonals and zigzag with the channel, though in most places the canoe could slip over. With normal low water in the river it can’t slip over; navigation turns into a hard game of second-guessing the sand bars and tricking the breeze. Wind and channel, channel and wind …

Speeding along with no effort was pleasant for a change, though the wind was cold and I disliked the thought of fighting it later when the river twisted back south. Canoeing, most of the time, you prefer no wind at all; it destroys
quietness and whips your scent about and makes animals lie low and even squelches the birds. And if it turns against you. it makes a trip pure labor. But preference hasn’t got much to do with it; days without wind in West Texas are few.

Goats, wild as deer … The herds of them in the Brazos country mushroomed with the grassless drouth and the Japanese market for mohair. Cattle went gaunt and were sold off, even cherished private herd-strains built up through forty years, but the Angoras stayed healthy on the tough bitter leaves of the oak brush. They are little trouble to own. If the screw worms eat one up, you are only out five dollars, and if he lives his hair pays that much every year. Some say they ruin land; some say not; I don’t know. They have yellow, wise, evil eyes, but also a self-sufficiency that I like and that our present blocky kinds of beef cattle have lost.
Kowf!
one says, reading your presence on the wind, and the whole bright hair-haloed herd goes twinkling off into the brush on sure legs.

Whatever their effect, I tend to think they symbolize a further degeneration of the country; there is about them a smell of the burnt Near East where their breed began; they seem a portent. This region raised antelope and buffalo with rich fat on their ribs once, and later its longhorns were the sturdiest that went up the trails. Now the cedar has spread its sterile shade in the flats where grass no longer grows, and though some of the upland ranches with sentient owners still show thick carpets of curly mesquite and grama and buffalo and blue-stem grasses, and some even of the damaged parts can be brought back, most of the earth’s surface there will never again be what it was. Goats and other such Mediterranean fauna—burros, and magpies, and tawny water
thrifty rodents that live among the rocks—somehow symbolize for me those lands that will never again be what they were.

One waxes pessimistic? Not so much … There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with you a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers. Though I sign up with organizations that oppose the process, I sign without great hope.… Islands of wildlife and native flora may be saved, as they should be, but the big, sloppy, rich, teeming spraddle will go. It always has.

Nevertheless, the Brazos was there, and I was on it. Two tall sand-hill cranes, forerunners of the big flights, flapped up from a bar at the old Welty crossing as I bore down on it. I had business there, a minor expedition that, like many others, I’d never gotten around to making before.

Good hard-bottomed fords were prized in the days before bridges. With normal water, horses and cattle and high-wheeled wagons could traverse the river at them without fear of holes or quicksand. They were all known and were named, usually for the man who settled nearest them. Henry Welty settled there quite early, west of Big Keechi, and by 1863, when a good many of the country’s males were away with the Confederacy and the Comanches were lashing the frontier like a whip, he and his wife had five children scrambling and yelling about their cabin, and a good herd of stock.

One evening Henry Welty saddled up and went to bring in his milk calves, to keep them off their mothers’ teats. He gathered them up, and was driving them toward the corrals when, in the bend of a draw, about ten of The People fired at him from brush. Wounded, he loped away, but they followed, yelling, and when he fell from his horse they finished the job and scalped him and stripped him and took
the horse. All that night, hour after dragging hour, they wailed and hooted about the house where Mrs. Welty and her children huddled fireless and lightless.…

It wasn’t an unusual story, nor did I think to ferret out any new aspects of it. I just wanted to see if I could find the place. The gullied trough where the wagons had come down to the crossing since more than a century before was still sharp; I climbed up through it into a wide pasture dotted with mesquites and post oaks from which the wind was whipping yellow leaves, and followed the ruts of the old road to a second rise maybe a half-mile inland. There, where they should have been (the old ones seldom built next to the river), I found a roughly rectangular jumble of squared sandstone blocks, what was left of a foundation and chimney. Even a rotten log or two would have been too much to expect; most of the cabins went long ago for fence posts or cordwood, or burned down.

The real settlers, the old ones, were gone by the time I’d grown up enough to ask many questions. But some of their children were living, and those who remembered back into Indian times remembered, more often than not, nights like that one Mrs. Welty spent in the house that had rested on those sandstone blocks. No light, no fire, no sleep, no explanation, maybe, except a sweat-cold hand over your mouth if you started to whine from the discomfort and the felt fear; the woman herself wondering (yet not wondering either, because knowing) if the flesh that had cloven her flesh to produce these children lay now out there somewhere cold and hacked … And the feel of the murderous wild men in the moonlit dark all around the house, and not knowing if a screech owl’s quaver was a screech owl or a wolf’s yell was a wolf. Always moonlight, that was when
they came.… It must have been hard to forget, the feel of those nights. Those were the years when some settlers moved together and forted up; more got back away from the frontier entirely.

I stared at the blocks for a time and kicked a couple of them and looked about a little for pieces of iron or china. Then, finding none and having proved nothing, I went back to the canoe well satisfied. Either you care or you don’t.…

Big Keechi … I rounded down at its wide rock-strewn eddying mouth, and two army helicopters rounded down at me. Poised against the wind just over me, their pilots waved and shouted; they were young, and came probably from Camp Wolters twelve or fifteen miles to the south. I waved back. They gestured toward the creek, but I couldn’t make out their meaning and shook my head. Together, as if maneuvered by one set of controls, they veered back over the land and flew down the creek and, from waters I couldn’t see, flushed fifty or more bluebills toward me. Meat or no meat, beaters in helicopters weren’t a part of my personal leisure-class ritual, and I had no notion of killing any ducks that way. But if you were once young and harebrained in a uniform yourself, you keep some tolerance for the breed. I picked up the shotgun to humor them. The bluebills flared away before they came in range, so that there was no need to play out the show. One of the pilots hovered over me again for a moment and held his nose between his thumb and forefinger; then, as I laughed, he flew off over the jumbled cliffs of the shore.

During a second I envied him, dominant as a hawk over the country and the river, minutes away from places it would take me a week to reach by water. But the envy was a spasm and without point; I was on the river in the way
I’d chosen to be there. And I’d had enough of the young, uniformed, harebrained business to last me three lifetimes.

Big Keechi (if you’re of those who don’t care, I guess you probably won’t have come this far with me) is about as historic as places get in the upper-middle Brazos country. It is a biggish and dependable creek for that part of the world, and it runs far up into Jack County in a wide valley that caught the eye of cattle-minded men when the whole country was free for the choosing. Like the other north-south tributaries, it was a road in and out of the Brazos valley for The People, and consequently it heard the bowstrings’ thrum and the rifles’ pop, time and time and time again.

Old Man Charlie Goodnight lived up there when he was young, at Black Springs. It was where he settled when he first struck out on his own with a little herd and a big set of guts and considerably more direction and determination than most of his neighbors. Mr. Charlie’s life spanned about three eras, and he was vigorously central in all three. Born in Illinois, he came to Milam County, Texas, as a child at just about the time when Texas entered the Union, and grew up in the hunting-farming-stock-raising aura of that time and place. Young, he earned cattle of his own by tending a herd on shares, set himself up on the Keechi range, and by the time the war and the bad years came along knew about as much as anyone in the region about Indians, Cross-Timbers cattle raising, and how to stay alive. He served out the war as a scout and ranger on the plains, fighting Comanches instead of Yankees (Texas had its asterisk on the Stars and Bars, but on these fringes there were many men who had no stake in slaveholding nor any particular excitement about the whole fracas), and he could, they say,
practically tell you how many miles you were from usable water by fingering the foliage on a chittamwood tree.… Indians and neighbors stole him blind while he was away, but he built up another herd and joined with another Keechi cattleman, Oliver Loving, to open the harsh trail to New Mexico and Colorado. Old, he had the JA in the Paloduro Canyon where the Cap Rock breaks away to rolling prairies, and was, more than any other man on the South Plains, a symbol of the cattle baron. He was a tough and bright and honorable man in tough not usually honorable times, and had respect and a kind of love for the Indians even when he fought them. They called him Buenas Noches.