Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (18 page)

“Looked at her,” he said. “Liked her. Guess she liked me. Still both do.”

When he had just about consolidated his own small ranch there (cheap land or no, it’s a tough thing to get done), the big drouth had burned in and had shrunk his few head of cattle to sway-backed racks of bones before he’d sold them at canner-and-cutter prices, and he’d thought he’d have to sell the place, too. But mohair goats and a long stint at the Fort Worth Convair plant that draws much of its labor from that region had scrooched him by, he said.

The passenger brought a rock and dropped it at his feet, hoping for play. With a slanting grin the rancher looked at him and reached down to pull his ear.

“Son-of-a-gun dogs,” he said. “Run out here from Mineral Wells at night. Kilt me thirty-five goats oncet from sundown to sunup. Two of the worst was hounds, and I knowed who they belonged to, but he said they wouldn’t run no goats. Laid a load of number two shot into one of ’em one night, and the next time I seen that fellow, he said: ’Know that blue dog of mine? Bobcat clawed him up turble, other night.’ And I said: ’You don’t tell me? Rough outfits, bobcats

I said I doubted that the passenger was going to get big enough to do much slaughter among people’s livestock.

“Sha,” he said. “Tell me. I’ve seen Pekes out there a-run-nin’.”

Though he said he scarcely ever killed deer, he had a passion for squirrel shooting and for hunting what he called “short varmints.” He said the things screaming on the hill the night before had been ringtails, which were more numerous than he’d ever known them to be and which he blamed for a local shortage of squirrels: in the spring, he claimed, they went into the holes and ate the young ones on the nests. Of the projected Brazos dams—one is to be slapped up against those bluffs—he said: “I’ve learned to get along with her pretty good the way she is. Don’t know how I’ll like her when she’s a lake. Good bottomland, them fish’ll be grazin’ on.”

He was one of the quiet, tough, unprofane types that that country still breeds from time to time, close in type to the best of the old ones, or to what nostalgia says the best of them were like. He had blue eyes with seamed corners, brown skin, a strong nose, and thin lips that shaped themselves stiffly, thoughtfully, around his words.… He told me about a field full of Indian debris, and corn-pounding
holes along a high ledge, and a kind of cave where he’d once let a hermit live for five years, occasionally bringing him coffee and beans and flour from town. The hermit had always stayed hidden until he could see who had come, and at the river had kept a big chicken-wire box full of live catfish.

“Give me one oncet weighed thirty-two pounds,” the rancher said. “Up and left one spring, never said why.”

He took a look at the canoe, and said he’d always thought he’d like to do a little floating himself.

“Come on,” I said.

He looked at me. “Dang if I wouldn’t,” he said. “Dang if I wouldn’t.”

But then he grinned and shook his head, and after drinking half a cup more coffee wished me luck and continued his patrol along the bank. I washed pots and scraped off some whiskers and rolled my gear into bundles ready for loading, then climbed for a look at the hermit’s hole. It was under a block of conglomerate forty or fifty feet tall, in a grove of live oaks beneath the bluffs. Age-long surface drainage had chewed out a chamber between the earth and the boulder’s cuspate base, and the hermit, whoever he had been, had laid walls of sandstone blocks at either opening of the cavity, mortaring with mud, leaving a door at the big lower end and a chimney hole at the upper. The domed ceiling, blackened by smoke, was tall enough to stand under; it was a snug retreat, and if I’d known about it the night before I would have stayed there, though the floor was littered with the droppings of exploratory goats. In the live oaks outside titmice were whistling
peter-peter-peter
, and down the hill the river sparkled blue, and I found myself thinking that you wouldn’t have to be a really peculiar old misanthrope,
at that, to want to live in such a place for five years, or for a lifetime.…

A river has few “views.” It seeks the lowest line of its country, straight or crooked, and what you see when you travel along it are mostly river and sky and trees, water and clouds and sun and shore. Things a quarter-mile away exist for you only because you know they are there; your consciousness of them is visual only if you walk ashore to see them. For a man who likes rivers, most of the time that is all right; for a man who seeks sharp solitude, it’s special. But sometimes, too, the shores close in a bit as room walls will, and you crave more space.… Now, without having thought about doing so, I clambered beyond the hermit’s hole up ledges, hoisting the pup at spots, to the top of the bluff.

I was out of breath when I got there, but it was a fine spot and worth the climb. I knew it from before. People drive out to it from Mineral Wells for picnics, on a dirt road running past Baptist crossroads churches and log ruins. As you stand there on weathered solid stone, the lowlands roll south and east from below you to the horizon; your eye can trace fifteen miles or so of the river’s course as it meanders over sand, slower and flattened, between tall bright cottonwoods and oaks and pecans, and where you can’t see it you can guess it, and can guess too the things around it, knowing them. Though it’s nothing much in comparison to the vistas you get in real mountains, after a week in the Brazos’s winding trough, it dizzied me a little; it made fun of what I had been doing. Heights have that kind of humor.

Likely that bluff had a good name once before some dullard called it Inspiration Point. The nation’s map is measled with names like that, pocks from the old nineteenth-century plague that made people build gazebos and well-tops of
rough masonry with oaken buckets on ropes but no well beneath (unless it was a “wishing well”), and sing “Annie Laurie,” and read Scott for his worst qualities, and long to own paintings by Bouguereau or Landseer or Alma-Tadema, and, disregarding the guts and soul in the old nomenclature of American places, rename them Inspiration Point and Lovers’ Retreat (there’s one of those up Eagle Creek) and Maiden’s Leap. It was worse in the interior than on the East Coast, where the old names had rooted themselves before that frame of mind came along. It was worst of all in the South, because the South yearned hardest to believe Scott, but the whole hinterland had the disease; in the Midwest it got flavored with Hiawatha.… Though it has its own cachet now—yes, I like gingerbreaded houses, and old pictures of women with buns and with big breasts under stiff shirtwaists—it was, for me, a flouting of real ghosts and genii, an unimaginative lamina of Greco-Scotch-English never-neverism on the surface of a land that seemed too new to would-be-cultured sensibilities. You don’t have to line up too solidly with the America shouters to resent it.

Now that the land looks a little older and we don’t have to stare directly at the tobacco juice on the haired chins of those who made its past, the grandchildren of the Gothicists are likely to be enchanted to find that the streamlet below their house used to be called Dead Nigger Draw, but they have a hard fight with the real-estate men, staunchly Gothic all, if they try to cancel out its present title of Bonnie Brae.… And the effort, somehow, seems little more praiseworthy or genuine than their grandparents’ was.

One digresses? Certainly.

That whole arc of country below the Point is ghost-laden. Violent, obscure history piles in on you as you look off over
the lowlands. They were richer than the mountain country; therefore more people wanted them and came there. People make trouble; trouble makes history, or anyhow tales, since not much of the history is reliable. After the trouble, little of weight happened in that piece of country—no oil booms, no industry to speak of until the Fort Worth factories began to suck the people away—so that for a long time remembrance of the frontier was strong on the slowly eroding farms and the ranches, and in the little bypassed towns. It sat on the land. It still does, a little, if the land means anything to you.

Two miles below the bluff you can see a railroad bridge where the Texas & Pacific main line crosses to hill-hidden Brazos town, which weed-shot to existence in the eighties when the railroad came. It is a dusty spraddle of small frame houses now, with a brick post office and an empty store or two; a few countrymen eye you with faint astonishment if you drive out there, as well they may. No one goes there by accident since their highway bridge washed out and made them a dead end, and if anyone goes there except by accident he makes ripples in that quietness. An old man lived there for a long time who used to hint of dark and pleasurable past connections with the Jameses and the Youngers and Quantrill. Since his death Fm unaware of even any refracted drama in Brazos, Texas, though there is fair fishing by the stark piers of the vanished road bridge.

A mile down from there is the Highway 281 bridge by the mouth of Palo Pinto Creek for which the county was named; no one knows what painted stick it was that gave the creek
its
name, but that kind of haziness perhaps beats Gothicism. Like Keechi and Elm and the other creeks, it drains history into the Brazos along with silt and leaves and
drift and water. It has a hundred hidden valleys; The People loved it. In the fall of 1837 the ineffable Bigfoot Wallace came there with a wilderness surveying party—he was twenty years old, huge, and a year out of Virginia whence he had traveled to take Mexican toll for the deaths of a brother and a cousin at Goliad. Up the Palo Pinto (mostly they called it a river then) he strayed from his companions and got lost, fought some Indians, sprained his ankle, lived in a cave.… In good-humored old age, when he liked to talk, he told John Duval that other Comanches had taken him prisoner one day, and back at their camp had tied him to a pole with firewood around him in preparation for a redskin-style auto-da-fé. Things looked black, but—inevitably—“just at this moment the old squaw I had seen in the lodge rushed through the crowd of painted warriors, and began to throw the wood from around me.…” With like inevitability, he was adopted into the tribe, and stayed with them for three educational months before slipping away and going back to the settlements.

The fact is, there was probably truth in it. He was nearly everywhere that counted, Bigfoot Wallace, with enough vitality and humor to have seen four or five ordinary men through life. Though he was no half-horse, half-alligator sort of a liar, he sometimes told things a little big, but why not?

Port Smythe,
M. D
., on the other hand, modeled himself on the tradition of the clear-eyed scientific amateur when he visited the Palo Pinto in 1852, still before many whites had been there. As a kind of last bachelor fling, he rode horseback up the Brazos from the settled country to the south, hiring Indian guides to show him the way. He expected no trouble and found none, Latinized every scrap of weed that his horse’s hoof bruised, and exclaimed over nature’s
grandeurs in unscientific tones that echoed Cooper and Scott: old, low, flat Comanche Peak down in Hood County was “the crowning Glory of the Landscape, … the Hoary Monarch of this wide domain,” and his Indians could only be “the Sons and Daughters of the forest.” Having attained the Palo Pinto, he noted:

 … sundry specimens of Natural History, among which were the Raven,
(Corvus-corax)
Red Bird,
(Loxia-cardinalis)
the Humming Bird,
(Trochilus
—***) &c, besides innumerable Rattle Snakes,
(Crotalus-horridus)
Tarantula,
(Lycosia-taran-tula)
and Scorpion,
(Scorpio)
.

and, without climbing the bluffs to see where he’d been, rode back home again to write a pleasant, earnest journal of the trip, inconsequential from this range, though its newspaper publication may have lured some lackland South Texans up the river.

Up the Palo Pinto also, during the Civil War, settlers clustered against the Comanches, and while few details of that time have come down, a rhyme has that implies the details behind it:

(Tip Seay rode out from that fort on a half-broken black horse one day, against good advice, and never rode back again. Maybe somebody repeated the good advice to his scalped corpse when they found it.)

From the creek mouth the river drops down and loops back north, making the great Christmas-stocking shape of the Dobbs Valley Bend, named for old Chesley Dobbs, who ranched there till his luck ran out and the Indians got his long hair (against good counsel, too, he’d ridden out home
ward from Palo Pinto town), even though the tracks showed that his pony had given them a run. There seem always to have been those mournful post-mortem trail cuttings, since hoofprints and bruised bushes and tatters of cloth had voices for men both red and white in those days; I know a few for whom they still do, but not many. Chesley Dobbs was the one whose scalp they’d found at the Old Painted Campground, on Keechi.… Where the Brazos breaks south still again, forming the Littlefield Bend and piercing the invisible skin of Parker County, my merchant friend’s bailiwick, stands a lonely, rusty-faced hill called Red Bluff, where the Comanches (I can’t help it; the stories are there; I’m not telling even a fourth of them) hid once before making a reasonably bloody raid on Webb Gilbert’s remuda and wounding Roe Littlefield in a place that nobody, for some reason, will mention.

Beyond that, Rock Creek comes in past the brick kilns at Bennett, draining the country where Fuller Millsap ranched and fought Indians and shouted but backed down from a shotgun duel with Charles Goodnight, and George McCleskey died at Blue Springs pumping bullets out of his Henry between the cabin logs even after his legs were paralyzed, and Old Lady Rippy reached in between her sagging breasts and hauled out a plug and bit a chew when The People tried to make her run so they could shoot her more amusingly, and cursed them in their own language, so that nonplused they went away, but got her later along with the crusty old man she was married to—howling like wolves down at his traps.… And Owl Head Johnson lived alone and got lynched for stealing hogs.…