Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (24 page)

Nobody answered. I tried again, and someone shouted from behind me. I turned to see a man a couple of hundred yards away at a crossroads by the pasture’s corner, driving a calf toward me. I walked to meet him, the pup swaggering feistily ahead and then gradually falling back before the strangeness of the calf, a six- or eight-month-old bull, black and scrub in shape, that stopped and shook its head and pawed the earth a time or two as the gap between us narrowed.

The man, tiny and wizened and old in bib overalls, whanged him with a stick and said to me as though in greeting: “No-good piss ant!”

I guessed he meant the calf, and asked if he were Mr. Willett.

Thick gold-rimmed glasses beaded down his little blue eyes; he wore a blue chambray work shirt under the overalls, and over both an old brown suit coat, and had on a big dirty Stetson pulled to a drooping point in front, with no creases or dents in its ballooning crown.

He said: “I’m half of it.”

I said that my Weatherford friend had told me to look him up and talk to him about that part of the river. He grunted, hit the calf again, and drove him on toward an open fence gap. Emboldened, the pup began to shrill at the calf’s heels, and I called him back.

“Half Angus, half Jersey,” the old man said. “Took my cow to one of my boy’s bulls. Don’t know why.”

“You never cut him,” I said.

“Ain’t caught the moon right,” he said. “Besides, I like him bull.…” He spat brown juice. “Said I knowed the river, did he?”

“Said so,” I affirmed, that laconicism being easy to drop into.…

He said, wiring the gap shut behind the calf, that even living on her for fifty-six years he didn’t know a damn thing about her and, further, that he didn’t feel like saying what he did know in no sore-throat wind like that; why didn’t we go to the house? We headed for it. As we mounted the porch steps, a jet cracked sound above the low scuttling cloud cover; the house shook and its windows rattled. The old man swiveled his little eyes upward for a moment in token attention, said: “Them son of a bitches!” and held the door open.

“Bring him in,” he said, seeing me glance backward at the passenger. “Don’t reckon he’ll tangle none with a tomcat.”

The tomcat himself would have tangled with anybody or anything, except that he didn’t want to move. Heat-stupefied, he lay before a fierce butane stove and raised his head and made a noise like far-distant summer thunder, and the pup backed timidly into a corner. After two weeks on the river the room’s temperature was dizzying; the old man dropped into a rocking chair beside the stove and waved me to another. Tugging at zippers and neck buttons, I sat down. In a corner of the room was a single bed, and beyond its foot on a rugless floor stood a silent television set. To conserve that oven heat, the doors to other rooms were closed.…

“Looks like you’d have more brains,” Old Man Willett said. “Horsin’ around a river this damn time of year.”

I grunted defensively.

“What you think you’re gonna find?”

I told him, or tried to.

He grinned and said I wouldn’t know what the crap to do with it if I found it.… A coffee can sat between his feet; rolling forward on the rockers, he spat darkly and perpendicularly down into it, threw the unheroic Stetson into a corner, and said he wasn’t nothing but a damned old farmer. However, if my Weatherford friend was willing to pay me money to run up and down a river in wintertime …

“Pay me?” I said.

“Pay you, hell yes,” he said, eye-drilling me. “Think I don’t know how cracked he is on old junk?”

I laughed. He took it for confirmation, and started a kind of lecture on the local background. Many of the old ones had still been around when he’d come into that country, and he had talked to them. He had known old Sam Savage, and had heard him tell of the time when he and his brother Jim had been violently orphaned over on Sanchez Creek and carried away by The People into the wild country for so long that by the time someone at Fort Sill swapped a pony for them, their English was forgotten. He knew where Margaret Barton had died, and had positive opinions about Andrew Berry and the two little redheaded boys.

But the butane fumes had me drowsy and out of the humor for lectures, and for that matter it was mainly second- or third-hand variant versions of matters I’d mostly heard about already. We butted heads over whether or not the Indians had killed Roe Littlefield (“Reckon I heared right,” he said. “Got a arrow in his crouch. Hoop-arn tip. FIoop arn hit might near always infected bad …”), and I steered him onto himself as a subject.

It was one he had thought about, and with some bitter humor. He’d wandered into that country in 1901 as a young man from Georgia, via work in the pine timberlands of Arkansas and East Texas, part of a continuing drift from South to Southwest that was then, with all its fits and starts, eighty or ninety years old. A year or so later he’d married the daughter of a man who had married the daughter of another man who had built, in the Comanche time, the hewn-log cabin behind the cottage. With his wife, Old Man Willett had lived in the cabin for nearly half a century, planting peanuts and cotton and corn and sometimes, when the drouths and the floods permitted, harvesting them. He had always had a beef steer or two around for meat, but distrusted ranching, and ranchers too.

“Take my boy,” he said. “Made him some money in Dallas. Bought him a little stock ranch south of Ward Mountain, old sorry land that wouldn’t sprout a cuckleburr. Ought to see him dressed up like Gunsmoke, Sundays.…”

They’d raised a family, and four years before had built the white cottage to finish life in—though he said he’d preferred the cabin. An oak fire, now, it put out a nicer kind of a heat than ara gas stove. Sweating, I agreed.… Then his wife had fallen into a long sickness which coincided with the latter part of the big drouth and ate up $12,300 in hospital and doctor bills (he knew the sum with exactitude because they’d had $7,300 in the bank when she came down, and later he’d borrowed $5,000 on his place), and had died. He’d burned her bedclothes, and lived alone now, his children scattered to the cities. His manner in telling it all was wry and factual. Life’s shape as he saw it held those things; he had a dry narrow dignity that did not ask for sympathy.

Later, not in comment on himself, he said: “A man needs
it hard. I don’t give a crap. He’d ought to have it hard a-growin’ up, and hard a-learnin’ his work, and hard a-gittin’ a wife and feedin’ his kids and gittin’ rich, if he’s gonna git rich. All of it.”

“Appreciates it better, maybe.”

“Does
it better,” he said, and spat.

He said he had to go and milk. We went out into the wind, the pup and the gray-and-white tomcat with us. It was blowing wet and steadily hard and colder than before. At the little barn Old Man Willett elbowed past the nuzzling cows and pulled down hay into the feeders and let them in. Sitting on an upturned nail keg, he gently and perfectly pulled the first cow’s unwashed teats and squirted milk into a cracked china bowl, which when full he set down for the pup to slop at. Then he aimed a couple of squirts at the face of the old tomcat and milked the rest into a dirty pail, which he carried just outside the barn door and emptied into a long chicken trough. The chickens gathered, vocal, and the torn and a friend joined them.

“Figure besides them cats and pullets, I’m feedin’ three coons and a skunk,” he said. “Separate some cream maybe oncet a week for me.”

I said it looked like a good bit of trouble, keeping two cows for a bowl of cream a week.

He looked at me. “Hit ain’t the cream,” he said. “Crap, I wouldn’t have no notion what to do. Always milked.”

While he was milking the second cow, I walked over to examine the log house. It was a good one, the great flat-hewn post-oak trunks that showed on the sheltered porch joined into a single surface by chinking and smoothed mortar, no rot in them even at the corners, which were held together with miter-dovetail corners, the hardest of all to make and
the best, since water that might fester the joint or freeze and burst it drains always out and down. Each of the separate halves of the house had a sandstone chimney on its outward side, and behind them were two good-sized lean-to rooms of gray planks. In front and back, roofed and floored galleries ran the structure’s width, making an H with the shady open-ended dog run. I’ve seen others with the dog run enclosed and made a room, and with additional rooms tacked somehow onto the lean-tos or the rear gallery. Most of them began as a single square cabin with a door and a fireplace and maybe a loft for shirt-tail kids to sleep in, and grew with families. The log house was an infinitely expansible dwelling.

Stacked bales of hay showed through its windows, and in the dog run bags of feed were stowed. A good many cabins remain in that part of the Brazos country, though few compared to that time when they were the only houses. The great south-hooking finger of the Western Cross Timbers traverses the region. Largely scrub brush now, in the beginning it was thick with straight-boled post oaks that the men from timbered regions to the east and north knew uses for.… They left the marks of their origins in the way they built, mainly in their notches. Deep Southerners from the big-pine states cut simple, vulnerable half-notches and quarter-notches of the kind they’d used with the long, straight, expendable timber of home. Those flat notches rot out fast, and the examples that are left are mostly on houses that were boarded over a few years after building. Hill Southerners—Tennesseans and Kentuckians and Carolinians—had the tradition of the peaked saddle-notch, a tight joint suited to quick-tapering mountain hardwoods and good with post oaks, too, since a number of such cabins are still around. Pennsylvania Germans, apparently, shoved the use of the dovetail and the
miter dovetail on into the Midwest, and when you find a house with those corners in Texas, you know that an ancient Ohioan or Illinoisan had his hand in it, or someone who learned from him.

Impermanent types, the wearers out and movers on, slapped up cabins like corncribs with round unhewn logs and haphazard plain saddle-notch corners, none of which have survived.…

A dull treatise? I daresay, though the field has its interest, and a properly obsessed student can get off into odd corners of it: the alternative use of rived boards or froe-split shakes for roofs, and how floor puncheons were hewn, and the effect that minutely local geology had on fireplaces.… And how we used to dig Comanche bullets out of the logs of the old Rippy place before it burned (somebody got mad at somebody else and set a pasture afire, and lots of things went that time), though oldsters said the bullets we got dated only from last season’s disgruntled deer hunters, and maybe they were right.

The easy skill with edged hand tools, with ax and adze and froe and knife, which went into the construction of those houses for a scant dozen or so years of the last century, before the big post oaks played out and the planks came in, is nearly inconceivable now. If you doubt it, take a look at a good set of corners. I never knew anyone who could do that kind of work on uneven logs of varying size without saws or elaborate measuring gear. Like all good handwork, it was a matter of feel, and that kind of feel is short among us these days. Once in a foreign country I sat at the window of a little hotel by a trout river and watched a man in the courtyard below chop out a pair of stilt-soled chestnutwood shoes in fifteen minutes with an ax, all but the hollows inside, every blow
counting and his hand sliding up and down the helve in control of the angle and force of his strokes. Some such art as that must have gone into a set of miter-dovetail cabin corners.

But I guess it may not matter greatly. For the most part the countrymen who live among the few surviving cabins seem to think not, and burn and batter them according to the dictates of pragmatism, and sometimes of whim. The logs make good fence posts still. My Weatherford friend, a scholar of log houses and a resister of their destruction, ordered some cordwood from a farmer one fall and got a truck-load of sawed-up timbers hand-hewn 100 years before.

“Solid, ain’t it?” the old man said, coming up behind me.

“It’s a beauty,” I said.

“Trouble was, she got to thinkin’ it was too old-timey,” he said reflectively. “Daughter-in-law stuck that in her head.” He thought. “Hell,” he said. “Her old maw she recollected when they had to squnch down all night long in there without no lights or fire, and the men layin’ outside a-waitin’ for Indians. They kilt one oncet down behint the barn.” He snorted, and spat. “Too old-timey!” he said.

It appeared to be the tail of a losing argument that he was unwilling to have let end even at her death. He pointed out a place where a few rotten shakes still showed beneath the galvanized roofing and a layer of shingles, and said that under the plank floor of the right-hand log room the old puncheons were still firm. Swapping cabin lore, we wandered back to the house’s butane fervor; I managed to prop back a swinging door that led into the kitchen, and it helped a little.… We spoke of the river, and he asked me if I’d run into any quicksand. I said no, not the real kind I remembered.

“They ain’t no more,” he said nostalgically. “Hell, I lost a
team of mules in twenty-five. Somethin’ happened since.”

I mentioned the thought of a friend of mine, who’d theorized that Possum Kingdom Lake was settling out all the finer particles that quicksand needed, leaving only the coarse firm stuff in the river below it. He considered that, and said maybe so, unwilling that an outlander should tell him anything about the river.… Of my sand island where the geese roosted, he said: “Hit ain’t no island up there.”

I said he’d better tell me what river it was I’d been floating down, then.

“Ha!” Old Man Willett said. “You must of found it on that-air map.”

My books and maps, when I’d shown them to him, had curled his crusty lip. Holy Scripture, he said, was all the books that anybody needed. Now, reminded, he went to the windowsill by his bed and brought back a crack-spined Bible to the fire. He thumped it.

He said: “If they’s any salvation, she’s in this book.”