The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (11 page)

“We don't know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to,” he would write in his book. “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows' feet on his corns and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him….

“But there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do….”

We all yearn for escape and aloneness sometimes, and floating down a river, living off the land and listening to the water and the birds, seems a beautiful thing to do with solitude. Especially when the river is John Graves' Brazos, which in his book isn't just a string of water, but a history as long as the river itself, full of such stone-hard characters as Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, Bose Ikard, Martha Sherman, Big Foot Wallace and all the blood-loving Comanches and flinty Anglo-Celts who strove against each other.

It was of these and their world—gone now, but not so long gone—that John was thinking while he paddled. “No end, no end to the stories…” he would write. His thoughts were the long and deep thoughts of one who is alone but not lonely. And a reason so many love his book is that we imagine that if we were drifting down the Brazos in a canoe, John's thoughts are the thoughts we would have.

Goodbye to a River
often is called a classic. When this is done in John's presence, he smiles, pleased that you think so, then says: “We won't know that for a hundred years.”

“In the simpler times I knew when growing up in Fort Worth, even we town youngsters had some almost unpeopled pieces of countryside, in the Trinity West Fork bottomlands and elsewhere, that were ours in exchange for a bit of legwork and a degree of
sang froid
toward the question of trespass,” John has written in
Self-Portrait, with Birds
, an autobiographical essay. “Later on there were Depression country jobs in summer for a dollar a day and keep—wheat harvest, fence-building and so on—and I can't remember a time when wild live things weren't a part of consciousness and when knowing something about them didn't matter.”

John's father ran a men's clothing store in Fort Worth, but had grown up in Cuero, in South Texas, wonderful quail country. John grew up hunting with his father and his uncles. The Trinity bottom, his urban wilderness, was just across the Rivercrest Golf Course from the Graves home on Fort Worth's west side.

After high school, he went to Houston and got a degree in English from Rice. When he graduated, in 1942, the country was six months into World War II. John joined the Marines, became an officer, and, in 1944, shipped out for the Pacific. “I didn't last very long,” he says. “I was just starting to think I was about halfway competent when I got bashed by a hand grenade.”

He was discharged with a captaincy and a Purple Heart in 1946, went to Columbia University for a master's degree, and, in 1948, became an English instructor at the University of Texas in Austin. In charge of five freshman sections of 30 students each, most of whom didn't care a flip about the language or its literature, John was disillusioned quickly by the academic life. “The main thing I remember is the ungraded themes,” he says, “stuck in coat pockets and piled on my mantelpiece. And every time I would look at them, I would feel guilty.”

Tortured also by the failure of a brief marriage, and “a powerful but stalled compulsion to write undying prose, and a yen to shake the dust of old Texas from my shoes and roam the world, … I fled for solace when I could to the pleasures of forest and stream,” he wrote in
Self-Portiait
. Two years later, he quit his job and embarked on what he calls “an unreasonably protracted, pigheaded, impecunious, lone-wolf writing apprenticeship lasting for several years and conducted, in the main, more or less on the move and far from my native region.

“… All I wanted was to shuck off a few old guilts and inadequacies, and to see and learn and live a bit while engaged in the belated effort to make my work come right.”

His wanderings took him to New York, New Mexico, Mexico, England and finally Spain, where he settled, more or less, for three years. “When I went to Europe in 1953,” he says, “I thought I would spend six months in England and France and Italy, picking up a little language, seeing everything I was supposed to. But, hell, I bogged down in Spain. I really think it was because it's like West Texas. I tend to treasure the kind of people that a hard, dry country produces.”

Living was inexpensive in Spain, and John was selling enough of his writing to get by. He even had a little motorcycle, and was making all the bullfights. “I was writing mostly fiction then,” he says, “most of it for the ‘slick' magazines of the day—women's magazines, that sort of thing. I would write a story for the slicks, and then I would write one for myself—some serious thing that I would mail off to one of the little literary magazines. The first short story I had ever written—back when I was at Columbia—had been published by
The New Yorker
, and I was wasting a lot of time trying to write like I
belonged
in
The New Yorker
, which I didn't. Most of the serious stuff was really bad.”

He also was contributing semi-regularly to
Holiday
, a popular magazine devoted mostly to travel and good places to be. And he wrote a novel, which he won't talk about. “There's a manuscript stashed down at the Humanities Research Center in Austin with instructions that it can't be opened until 25 years after I'm dead,” he says.

“But mostly, I was just living in congenial places. And it was a good life.”

In 1957, after about four years abroad, he returned to Fort Worth to visit his family. “I didn't come home because I wanted to,” he says. “I just felt that I
ought
to. I never thought I was going to stay.”

Once home, however, his life began to change. His father became ill with cancer. John's brief visit became an indefinite stay. He took a job teaching creative writing at Texas Christian University, which offered him a sunnier experience of academia than he had had at the University of Texas. “If you get to teach what you know and like and want to teach, it's fun,” he says. “I had bright kids, and they were all there because they wanted to be, which is a lot different from a freshman class.”

He met Jane Cole, a young designer for Neiman Marcus, and fell in love. And, in books and the outdoors, he began rediscovering the Texas wildlife and history that had fascinated him in his youth. Eventually he realized he had returned to stay.

“What it amounted to was a homecoming a re-exploration in adult years of roots and origins, an arrival at new terms with the part of the earth's surface that was and would remain, regardless of all its flaws, more my own than any other part could ever be,” he would write years later in
Self-Portiait, with Birds
. “The wandering years, it seemed, had served their purpose. I could now exist where I belonged, chasing echoes, without wondering if there might be better things to chase elsewhere. There weren't, not for me. I'd gone to a good many elsewheres and was glad I had, but I was back home now.

“And without much dark pondering having occurred, the work that I wanted to do fell into place and began to speak in my own voice, for better or worse, of these matters and others.”

That finding of his voice might be dated from one afternoon when he sat down at his typewriter and wrote: “They called him Pajarito. …” It was the beginning of a story about an encounter between Tom Bird, an old frontier cattleman, and a band of Comanches led by an old warrior named Starlight, who came to Mr. Bird's ranch and asked him to give them a buffalo from a small herd that he kept.

“The story just sort of wrote itself,” John says. “I stayed up all night and finished it. It's so wonderful when that happens, and so seldom.”

The Last Running
was published by
The Atlantic Monthly
, was reprinted in one of the
Best American Short Stories
collections, and has been issued twice in book form. It's widely acknowledged as a masterpiece, and may be the best short story yet about the end of the frontier and the meaning of its loss.
The Last Running
is as hard and tough as the old rancher and his ancient Comanche adversary, completely dry of sentimentality. But its power and the haunting echo of its last sentence—“We had a world, once.”—have made many Texans and at least one Indian cry.

A few years ago, a friend of John's bought a copy as a Christmas gift for a grandson of the great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. John inscribed it to the man, “whose valiant people made my people know they had been in a hell of a fight.”

“The old man cried,” John says. “You make a Comanche cry, you've done something.”

The Comanches were much in John's thoughts during his Brazos journey, for it was along the Brazos that some of the bloodiest collisions between the merciless “lords of the South Plains” and the equally pitiless Anglo-Celtic invaders had taken place.

The Comanches, John would write in
Goodbye to a River
, “ate up the seed corn and the brood stock that were furnished them, converted their tools to arrowheads and battle axes, and on horseback drifted in and out of their reservation pretty much at will. The great Comanche Trail, ancestral route of thievery and rapine, lay near…. Buffalo…still teemed on the plains to the west. Two centuries of sweet wild tradition urged the Comanche to follow them, to ride and hunt and fight. Hand mirrors and hoes and occasional begged whiskey and strings of colored beads and the stink of a mule's behind were not a fair trade for that.”

Their white enemies, on the other hand, “were the cutting edge of a people whetted sharp to go places, to wear things out and move on, to take over and to use and to discard. It is doubtful that any of the people in history whetted in that way…have wanted to dwell much in their minds on the humanity of the people in their path, on abstract justice. If they had, they wouldn't have been able to go where they went.”

By the time he finished writing his book, John had found not only his voice but the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career. They would be the land itself, and “the kind of people that a hard, dry country produces.”

When he was home about a year, John married Jane, and they lived on a rented country place outside Fort Worth. But John was struck by what he describes as “the incipient disease of the land,” the desire to own his own piece of ground. “I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion,” he would write, “that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had a stake in them, a daily knowledge of them.”

A particular spot down in Somervell County had stuck in his thoughts. “A friend of mine started building up a ranch in pieces down here in 1947,” he says. “I'd come down with him, camping, and sometimes I'd come down by myself and wander around. In some of that wandering around, I happened onto this place. It was just old, beat-up, used-up land. But it was remote and private, and that was the main thing.”

He bought one overgrazed homestead and later added another, giving him almost 400 acres of eroded, cedar-infested limestone hills—some of the land that the Anglo-Celts had conquered and quickly worn out—with a beautiful creek, close enough to Glen Rose to be convenient, but far enough from the town and the highways. He began building a small stone house on a limestone ledge beside some live oak trees.

“I just intended it as sort of a hunting and weekend cabin,” he says. “Jane wasn't interested in the place. She seemed rather indifferent. But about the time I got the cabin built and some of the land cleared of cedar, she decided she wanted to move down here.”

As he became more involved in the labor of the land, John found that the focus of his own purpose was changing. The learning of what he calls “yeoman skills”—the clearing of cedar, the building of fences, plowing, the tending of cattle, the enlargement of his house, the construction of outbuildings—began to fascinate him and give him more pleasure than he had imagined possible.

When he and Jane became parents—two daughters, Helen and Sally, were born within the first four years of their marriage—Jane had quit her job at Neiman Marcus. And John's class at TCU met only once a week. So “Hard Scrabble,” as he called the place, became the center of their lives, and John evolved into what he jokingly calls a “squireen,” a small-time country gentleman.

He quit teaching in 1965. He worked for a while as a writer-consultant with the U.S. Department of the Interior, but for more than 25 years now he has made his living as a free-lance writer and farmer. He has raised some crops and some cattle, but the most valuable harvest that Hard Scrabble has yielded is the writing John has done about the place and his life on it.

In 1974—14 years after
Goodbye to a River
—he published his second book, which he named after his farm.
Hard Scrabble
, he wrote, “is not the account of a triumphant return to the land, a rustic success story, but mainly a rumination over what a certain restricted and unmagnificent patch of the earth's surface has meant to me, and occasionally over what it may mean in wider terms.”

There surely is no other piece of land in Texas that has been described in such detail as John's place. He describes its terrain, in the middle of what he calls the “Tonkawa Nation,” the dinosaurs who left their tracks along the Paluxy River not far beyond his fences, the prehistoric peoples and their Indian descendants who ate mussels from White Bluff Creek, the cattlemen and farmers whose wrongheaded practices stripped the soil of its power and tore the soil itself from its limestone bedrock, the cedar choppers who made their living from cutting the pestiferous trees and selling them for fence posts, the natural plant and animal life of the place, the local hunters of foxes and coons, the poachers of deer and wild turkeys and, of course, the pleasures and frustrations of his own efforts to restore the land and make it productive again.