Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (6 page)

On a boulder two old countrymen were still-fishing with casting rods. They looked at me. An eddy caught the boat and drifted me close, and I got out my pipe to fill it.

“Come down in at air airplane?” asked one, a cadaver in overalls.

I said no.

“Tole you not,” the other said to him.

“Catch anything?” I said, because one has to.…

With monosyllabic unwillingness, the cadaver confessed that they hadn’t. I lit my pipe, and from the corners of narrow farmers’ eyes they flicked glances at my boat and possessions. The second one, short and wiry, reeled in an empty hook above a huge sinker and began to rebait it from a jar.

“Hod-damn stuff stinks,” he said.

“What makes it good,” the cadaver averred.

For a few moments I sat, smoking and resting, in the aura of their strained indifference, then shoved on down, having given them fuel for an hour’s taciturn, conjectural conversation. There was a fine long piece of river below, deep but with a pull, and running somehow—a miracle—sidewise to the wind, so that the water next to one bank was sheltered and smooth. I steered there and drifted quietly. On either shore the castellated sandstone mountains rose. The day held sadness still, but I had the feel of the river now, and the boat, and the country, and all of it was long-ago familiar.

There is no way to equate canoeing with the ways of the old ones in that country. We used to try, reading books of northern Indian lore, but it was an alien injection and I guess we knew it, imitation Chippewas in the Comanche country. The whole tradition there, Indian and white, was horseback; they didn’t need to travel the alternately dry and flooded streams. But their kind of penetration into the country is no longer a possibility; barbed wire and the universal privacy of property obstruct passage, and the highways are
mere gashes across the land, having little to do with what the land is.… I can’t give you three unanswerably good reasons why one should care a damn about what the land is, but if one does, one does, and rivers thread through it and are still public domain—a reasonably rare phenomenon in proud Texas, which retained title to its public lands when it came into the Union, and then gave them all away.

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things—sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in mountains.… Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited. Those for being unquiet seem to abound—vulgarity, as Huxley has written, being like adultery largely a matter of opportunity. But I saw a coon waddling along the riverside path that afternoon, and an old boar squirrel tightwalked unsuspecting down a branch just ahead of the boat, and having skipped lunch I shot him for supper.

Hale had been right about the ducks. I saw none. Wet years in the Southwest are good for wildlife, but you see less of it than in the dry times, when cover is scarce and all creatures have to use the scant remaining patches of water. The river now was incidental to tanks, creeks, and even ruts as a water supply, and its heavy flow would make it unpleasant feeding for waterfowl.

Somewhere on Schoolhouse Mountain, in the Fortune Bend (Old Man Fortune brought his slaves there in ’56 to work the land, but wisely left his family in Waco; I never read what happened to the slaves when things got rough in
that country), a man was calling cattle in the old, long, melancholy way. They called back, wending probably toward his feed-laden pickup truck.… In another drifting mile or so it was four thirty by my guess time, and I pulled out at the mouth of Ioni Creek, above a tumbling rapids, and made camp in a bed of thick, tough, oily, dark green weeds, below willows. It was the sort of place that in summer would have been insect-ridden, but the footing was sandy turf instead of mud, and I wanted to get settled before evening brought whatever weather it might bring.

Jesse Veale fought the old, useless fight just up Ioni, one day in 1873….

I skinned and quartered the old squirrel, thick-hided and with testicles as big as a dog’s. Since the war, somehow, I don’t much like to skin them. You cut them at the wrists and make a slash or two and peel away the tough pelt, and what you then have suddenly in your hands is a bug-eyed, naked, dead homunculus whose looks I do not care for. It isn’t the same with other animals.… I remember, from somewhere, a story of Kentucky politicians arguing over the composition of burgoo, and whether or not the squirrels that went into it ought first to be decapitated. One point of view holds that the cheek meat is the best of all.… In the story, the proponent of headlessness wound up shouting: “By God, I don’t care. When I look in a pot, be damn if I want it lookin’ back at me!”

Which, in male company, could lead to the proctologist and the swallowed glass eye, and along many another colorful byway, but won’t … I would have been a headless-burgoo man—in fact am, since that standard stew one boils up out of squirrel and potatoes and grease and flour and
whatever else is at hand is essentially the same dish. It wasn’t much good that night, but on the other hand I was hungry and willing to use my teeth.

I ate about dusk and sat staring at a little stick fire that needed constant fueling. The pup had dry dogfood with squirrel gravy, and sought the tent. Aloneness is most striking at evening, however it may happen to be striking you at the moment. Day’s absorbent busy-ness is past, and the dishes are stacked dirty, and you are confronted with yourself and confronted too with whether or not you like being where you are, by yourself.

I didn’t like it overmuch just then, with blackness attacking a low gray sky. It takes time for the habit of people to wear off of you, especially at evening. I sat and listened to the rapids, and thought for no good reason about Jesse Veale, who rode to Ioni with two of his brothers and a friend from Palo Pinto town a few miles away, to fish and to hunt turkeys and to camp and, probably, to stick cockleburs under one another’s saddles and tie knots in one another’s bed rolls and laugh the kind of laughter you laugh with friends out that way, young.

In ’73 there was not much reason to expect Indians in that neighborhood—in fact, Jesse Veale was the last man killed in that county by them. The fighting had gone on hot and heavy all during the War and afterward, in the bitter Reconstruction years, when the Northern whites at the Oklahoma agencies had not only tolerated but sometimes abetted the raids down across the Red, with the full moon. But by ’73 it was last-ditch and sporadic, and its center had moved out north and west of the Brazos country.…

Inheritors of the old sharp-edgedness, though, Jesse Veale
and his companions likely went around hoping for trouble, any kind. If so, they got it. One afternoon, setting fishlines near the Garland Bend, they ran across some Indian ponies staked out in the cedar, and some saddles, and took them. (The assumption with Indian ponies was always that they had been stolen, or if not that others had been.) The next morning Jesse Veale and Joe Corbin crossed Ioni a half-mile above its mouth, on their way back to camp from checking some hooks at the river. At the crossing, in a race to see who’d come second and get splashed, they hit the water hard at about the same time and sprayed each other mightily and raced on through, yelling. On the other side Joe Corbin pulled up and knuckled water out of an eye and unholstered his old cap-and-ball Colt.

“You scutter,” he said. “You done wet my loads.”

“You ain’t gonna shoot nothin’ nohow,” Jesse Veale said.

Joe Corbin said: “Jesse.”

“What?”

“Jesse,” Joe Corbin said, “they’s two Indians a-lookin’ at us from on top of that bank. They’s more than two.…”

Afoot, likely because it had been their ponies the boys had taken upriver, the Comanches began to shoot, and an arrow hit Jesse Veale in the knee, and his horse went to bucking off to one side. Joe Corbin yelled: “What the hell we gonna do?”

Jesse yelled something back. To Joe Corbin it sounded like: “Run it out!” He did, snapping his useless pistol at an Indian who tried to grab his reins and ducked aside from the misfire, lashing his pony on up the bank’s rise.… When he last looked back (how many times did he see it again, the rest of his life, how many times did he wonder if
what Jesse Veale had said was: “Fight it out”?), Jesse was on the ground shooting and clubbing with his pistol, and they were all over him. And when Joe Corbin came back with help from a ranch not far away, they found Jesse Veale sitting dead but unscalped against a double-elm tree, his pistol gone, Comanche blood on the ground around him. Though the Indians were gabbling over their wounded in a ravine near at hand, and someone’s dog went there and bayed at them, the whites were only three and did not follow them, then.…

Some of the lines they had been checking must have been set where I was camped just then, a good fish hole still.

Sometimes you take country for itself, for what shows merely, and sometimes it forces its ghosts too upon you, the smell of people who have lived and died there. They do not have to be individual ghosts like Jesse Veale’s; often they’re only the feel that a time past has for you, the odor of an era.… And they don’t have to smell good.

My canteen was empty of its sweet city water. I filled it at the river, propped it in the coals with dry sticks around it, and sat watching its contents boil to purity if not to palatability. They say Old Man John Chisum’s cowboys, accustomed to water from the same mineral-laden redbed that taints the Brazos far to the west, used to carry shakers of salt when they trailed into strange country, that their drink might taste the same as usual.…

Sizzling rain began, unheralded by any gust of air. I dragged the boxes and sacks into a hasty pile and put the tarp over them, and tumbled into the tent. The pup was having one of his shivering, gasping seizures. Heavy, the rain drowned the fire’s small flicker, and since the lantern in
its box was with the flashlight under the tarp outside, I shed my boots and pants in the dark, trying not to rub the canvas with my shoulders, and slid into the bag.

Young, one
was
Jesse Veale, or Charles Goodnight, or sometimes an Indian, a brave one.… One saw them heroic in size and posture, and transmuted them into myth, and tried in reverie and play to live the myth; it is the process that in this day has shaped the whole Western legend into a raucous lie flooding out from bluely glowing television screens.

There was heroism, but there were people, too. Older, having seen a few heroics at first hand and having probed one’s own possibilities, one knows more about Joe Corbin, feels what he likely felt, leans down with him along his running horse’s hot neck and glances back with him past his biceps at a clot of screaming, hating, hacking savages, knows the panic, and the pointlessness of turning the pony back and dying there, too.…

Young, one moves in upon the country and thinks himself a tile in its tesselated ecology, and believes that he always would have been such a tile, and hoots with the owl, and scorns even tents.

Older, one knows himself an excrescence upon the landscape and no kinsman to any wild thing; one hears the bass drumbeat and the gabble of the rapids below and the roar of the rain and feels abrupt depression and wonders why he barged out alone into the wetness and the winter. And thinks that perhaps, in the old time, he would have been one of the cautious who stayed in the jammed East.

I lay awake for a long time with a kind of three-o’clock-in-the-morning apprehension on me. The pup shivered
against my side. The river boomed and burbled against its rocks. At last, half-awake, or I thought so, I heard the booms and burbles change into drums and voices, and it was Comanches and Kiowas somewhere off across the creek. Multitudes of them, in angry fiesta, and there was in me a wonder whether or not they’d find me …

For a time I had a consciousness too that the sound was not really voices and drums but the Brazos. With full sleep, though, that consciousness went away, and the delusion went into a dream in which the celebrants were angrier and louder and knew I was there and were searching in a loud line, while I scrabbled away on hands and knees in the wet scrub.…

“Kah
-seh!”
one screeched from nearby, and another answered in syllables as clear.

In life, I have only known that feeling in war, at night, on bitter little islands in the Pacific. That tangled into the dream until the hating Comanches were not distinguishable from hating Japanese in the underbrush beneath palms.…

When the dream had ended its feel still rasped my sleep, so that later when a cramped shoulder woke me and I rolled over, the rain still roaring, the rapids still booming, I felt relief and chuckled. I was on a whimsical trip down a river, and the trip didn’t amount to much. The little tent was warm. The flavor of wartime was still on my mind, but now what I remembered was the tents of an encampment we had far up on the side of Haleakala, on Maui, where in the days the yellow sunshine splashed off the red slopes around us and the Pacific far below and the crags of the volcano above, and where at night it used to rain so hard that there was nothing in the world but roaring rain and a tent and oneself, young and tight-bellied, on a dry warm cot.… The evening’s foreboding was gone, and I decided rather
cheerfully that if the weather didn’t change, I’d pull out at the Dark Valley bridge and telephone home for a ride.

It was that simple. I went back to sleep.