Read Summer of Pearls Online

Authors: Mike Blakely

Summer of Pearls

Dedicated to the memory of my
grandfather, Jim B. Blakely,
1906-2000
Goose Prairie Cove
Caddo Lake, Texas
1944
 
TO UNDERSTAND THE SUMMER OF PEARLS, YOU MUST HOLD THE TEARS OF
angels in your hand, and know what made those angels cry. You must realize that for every ten thousand moons, only one reveals itself through a rainbow.
I talk crazy when folks ask me about that summer, but if you'll listen long enough, it'll all make sense. It's like the murky floodwaters of this lake, or the morning shade of a cypress brake up some twisted bayou. It's dark and confusing until you stay with it long enough; then it comes clear.
It has taken me a lifetime to absorb everything that happened here in the summer of 1874. I was a youngster of fourteen then. I am a youngster of eighty-four now. You've probably heard there was a lot of killing that summer—the summer of pearls. But there was a lot of living, too. The boilers blew on the
Glory of Caddo Lake.
Gold and silver and pearls circulated like schooling fish. A Pinkerton man shot two outlaws aboard the
Slough Hopper,
and I kissed my first girl.
Some folks say I killed Judd Kelso that year. They say I stabbed him in the chest with a butcher knife. I let folks believe what they will. I am
the only one who knows the truth anymore. All the others are dead and gone.
At the time, nobody really cared who killed Kelso anyway. By the end of that summer, just about everybody in Port Caddo
wanted
him dead. Nobody cared to find the killer, except maybe to give him a medal, or a key to the city or something. Of course, a key to the city wouldn't have been worth much, seeing as how Port Caddo barely rated as a village, much less as a city, and would soon be nothing more than a ghost town.
Port Caddo was a riverboat town at the dawn of the age of iron horses. Marshall, the county seat, already had a rail line that went to Louisiana. The Texas & Pacific had plans to build on to that road and make Marshall a major eastern terminal. Railroads could move stuff faster and cheaper than riverboats could, and Port Caddo was not situated well for a railroad, perched as it was at the edge of Big Cypress Bayou, just above Caddo Lake. The railroads were going to be the death of her, and everybody in town knew it.
My pop pretended not to know. That was his job. As editor of the
Port Caddo Steam Whistle,
he was the town's most active booster. In his editorials he kept coming up with schemes designed to keep Port Caddo alive after the railroads took away the riverboat trade.
“We must hold a county bond election to fund a narrow-gauge line from Port Caddo to Marshall,” I heard him say one day in the barbershop. “It will link us with the main rail lines.”
But few county residents cared to pay to keep our town alive.
Pop also suggested Port Caddo promote itself as a resort town, with duck-hunting clubs, fishing camps, and steamboat excursions on Caddo Lake. “Just think of the folks coming here to line our pockets with money from as far away as Memphis and Little Rock,” he told the butcher once in church.
But not many folks had money to burn at resorts that soon after the fall of the Old South and the ruination of the plantation economy. Oh, Pop came up with a lot of wild ideas for the town, and people humored him for doing his job, but we all knew the town was doomed.
I was a boy then, and couldn't stand to think of Port Caddo dying. I still remember the sounds of the steamboat whistles and all those valves and engines hissing hot vapor. I could hear them from the Caddo Academy where I took my lessons. Our teacher, Mr. Diehl, would have fits trying to hold us boys in class when a boat was calling at our stretch of bayou.
Port Caddo was heaven on earth for boys. The steamers would whistle at us when we were out on the lake fishing or fixing up our duck blinds. In summer, all the boys in town turned amphibious and could swim like alligators. On the farms and timber lots, which started just outside of town, we could hunt squirrels, rabbits, hogs, and deer in any patch of woods without even having to ask the owners. All the land was private, but the woodlands were treated as free range then and people just let hogs and boys run wild in them. knew a thousand secret places in the uplands, and about a million more out in the cypress brakes of Caddo Lake.
Looking back on it after all these years, I forget about the mosquitoes, the water moccasins, the odor of dead fish, and the suffocating summer heat. I can only remember the aroma of pines on the hills, the flat-bottomed hull of my bateau bumping against the cypress knees, and the cool waters of Caddo Lake always at my feet.
Just because the place was heaven for us boys, it doesn't mean it was exactly hell for anybody else, either. Even womenfolk liked it. It was tolerably civilized. A stretch of the main street leading up from the wharf was paved with bricks. We had churches for Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians. Old Jim Snyder ran a store, well-stocked, and Widow Humphry kept a first-rate inn for a town as small as ours. We didn't have a doctor, but as my pop used to say, “We have the healthiest climate in the world. Why the devil would we need a doctor?” We numbered about four hundred souls and everybody knew everybody else's business. Ours was just a podunk backwater bayou town, but we could get anything in the world. The riverboats linked us to New Orleans.
I couldn't tell you how many steamers plied Caddo Lake back then.
I never took the time to count them. They came up the Mississippi from New Orleans, entered the mouth of the Red River and steamed past Alexandria to Shreveport.
There they had to find a channel around the Great Raft—the huge logjam that held back the waters of the bayous. The government snag boats worked for years trying to clear the Raft, but every time they carved a channel through the tangle of driftwood, a flood would come along and plug the channel again with trees washed down from upstream.
“Those snag boats are a sin and a waste of taxpayers' money!” my father would rail. “God put the Great Raft there, and when He wants it gone, He'll wash it away. The government has no business playing God!”
To get around the Raft, some steamer pilots came up Cross Bayou, through Cross Lake. Others took the Twelve Mile Bayou route. It depended on where they could find the deepest water. The channels shifted constantly.
Once around the Great Raft and across Albany Flats, the riverboats entered that ancient enigma called Caddo Lake. I have lived by her waters my whole life, and she still hasn't let me in on all of her secrets. She hides things in her muddy waters. Her murky bed swallows all kinds of property. Boats sink and leave no trace. People disappear in her mossy cypress brakes and never come back. Snakes and alligators populate her bayous and sloughs, but they represent little danger. The real killer is the lake herself. You must respect her and suspicion her every little ripple and undercurrent. The moment you trust her, she'll rise up and suck you under like a twig.
Caddo Lake sprawls across the Texas—Louisiana border, like a crazy ink blot, and backs up into a thousand sluggish bayous and still-water coves. She has a lot of open water in her middle, but thickets fringe her shores, islands, and shallow swamps. Huge cypress trees, taller than Roman columns of stone, stand in the water and grip the lake bed. Their roots come up as if for air, bulbous nodules called cypress knees. The branches overhead intertwine and grow bundles of Spanish moss like beards and mustaches. They shut out the sun, channel the wind, and
lead the innocent explorers astray with a dark and mesmerizing beauty.
If you want to come home from the cypress brakes, you have to use the wind, the water currents, and the sun. You have to know which sides of the trees the moss grows on in each thicket. You have to know which way the birds fly to feed, and where the snapping turtles go to sun. If you know all that, you might still get lost. If you don't know any of it, the lake owns your corpse as soon as you stray from open water.
But the old steamboats stuck to the open channels, and the pilots knew them well. The water ran shallow in some places, and during the driest months of late summer, the steamers couldn't get into Caddo Lake at all. The trade usually lasted eight months out of the year. From July until some time in October, we didn't see many steamers at Port Caddo. But when the fall rains came and the lake rose again, our little town emerged out of the dog days like a blooming rain lily.
“Spruce up!” my pop would write in his editorial. “The steamers are coming! Pull the weeds and paint the privy!”
Our steamers were small, shallow-draft workhorses for the most part. We didn't have the huge floating palaces like those that plied the Mississippi. Most of ours were stern-wheelers built to handle freight. Side-wheelers were built for wide waters. Our bayous and channels were narrow. Our stern-wheelers carried out a lot of cotton and corn, burned plenty of pinewood, and brought back boxes and barrels of all sorts of things from New Orleans. They also took passengers, of course. We were just two weeks from New Orleans by steamer.
Port Caddo had a favorite riverboat, and her name was the
Glory of Caddo Lake.
Captain Arnold Gentry—as big a local hero as ever walked the streets of Port Caddo—was her owner, builder, captain, and pilot. I can still call his long, spare frame and his gangling gait to mind. He grew pointed mustaches and had a narrow strip of beard on his chin.
Captain Gentry had designed the
Glory
specifically for the Caddo Lake trade. She was the fastest, cleanest, fanciest boat that ever moored in Big Cypress Bayou. She measured a hundred feet and was in the hundred-and-fifty-ton class.
Whenever she steamed into Port Caddo, the
Glory
reminded me of
a four-tiered wedding cake, frosted with white paint and trimmed with so much gingerbread work that her carpenters must have worn out a hundred jigsaw blades putting her together. She drew only eighteen inches light, and could get out of the lake, fully loaded, in less than four feet of water. Her five-note steam whistle used to shiver me from the backbone out, and pump adrenaline through my legs like steam through a boiler pipe as I ran to the docks to meet her.
Captain Gentry maintained the
Glory
as a smaller version of the finest Mississippi packets ever to run between New Orleans and St. Louis. The tops of her tall black chimneys were notched and splayed to resemble huge crowns. The smokestacks had hinges. They could fold down to rest along the hurricane deck so the boat could get up under the cypress boughs in the tight places. Captain Gentry could call at almost any plantation or wood camp on the lake.
For a figurehead, the
Glory
used a beer keg, tapped with a silver spigot extending over the bow. “She draws so light,” I once heard Captain Gentry boast in his classic Southern riverboat drawl, “that I can get over the driest sandbar by opening that beer spout and floating on the suds!”
I remember like it was yesterday the last call the
Glory of Caddo Lake
made to our little bayou town. It was the day her boilers blew. The day Captain Gentry died. The same day the stranger, Billy Treat, became our new town hero. That was in June of 1874, and all anybody could talk about were the railroads and the sure fate of Port Caddo. Then Billy Treat came and gave us one last stab at splendor before the town died.
That was the fabulous summer of pearls—a time of great wonder, joy, and hope; of deep tragedy and ruin. When it was all over, Captain Gentry and Judd Kelso weren't the only ones dead. I will tell you about it. The parts I lived I will tell from my own experience. The other parts, the pieces I have put together over the decades, I will tell to you as a story. I have studied over it and thought about it—and even dreamed of that summer—for a lifetime. Even the parts I didn't witness with my own eyes, I can tell with true conviction, for I know what happened.
I guess the mystery over who killed Kelso that night in 1874 will live on forever with some folks, regardless of the truths I am about to unfold. As I said, I'm the only one who knows the truth for sure. I'm . the only soul left around here who even remembers the summer of pearls, seventy years ago. I know what happened. I remember it well.

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