I hear the steps of Modred in the west,
And with him many of thy people, and knights
Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown
Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.
AFTER the eighties the Brazos country needed rest. It pulled up its blanket of scrub oak and cedar and had itself a doze, a long one that is only now ending as the city money pulls away the blanket. The frontier had moved on and petered out, with most of its violence. The Brazos country ranched and farmed, or its people did—without knowing, most of them, any more about soft treatment of the land than their fathers and grandfathers had, so that they went on compounding the old error. They money-cropped when they could make the money crops grow; little Somervell County at one time had sixteen cotton gins (you ought to see the stands of needle grass in those old fields), and where nothing else would grow they ran cattle, too many of them always, so that the grass went from the slopes and then the dirt, and the white lime rock showed through and the brush spread, and we’ve gone into that before.… In the end the country’s sleep was one of exhaustion.
The cedar country went perhaps more solidly to sleep than the other stretches along the river. It was tireder, and had less left to stay awake about. Hidden by the aromatic scrub that covered their hills and had to be fought back out of their leached valleys, the cedar people grew separate, grew different as people will in a generation or so of living on separate, different country.
Not much different … Country in a generation or so can’t scallop the contours of a breed of people in the way it has in a thousand years in mountain places in Spain and Italy, where you can stop at a village which, though moneyless nearly always, is rich enough in things that matter—in oil and wine and wheat and fruit and the flesh of animals, the valley around it providing—and then can wind on up the valley toward gray crags where the soil thins or disappears, and can find within four or five miles a grim unmortared rock pile whose people glare at you from doorways and subsist during the year’s five or six leanest months on porridge stewed out of acorns or chestnuts from the wind-warped trees around them. In the one place there is music and tough humor and wholeness—in the other, sickness and silence and hate. For me, the kind of people that hard living carves are usually worth having around, but there is a point past which that doesn’t work at all.
On this continent, place dependence doesn’t get quite so intimate. Between a skinny grim New Hampshireman and a Cajun laughing on a bayou there is difference, and much of the difference has to do with place—with dirt and rain and heat and the things that grow. But a lot of it has to do with distance, too, and there isn’t enough distance between points in my piece of the Brazos to matter that much. If a tuned ear can pick out a progression in the dialect, it’s nevertheless still all West Texan, hill Southern, in its ring. If the Palo Pintans run a bit more to real ranching and the big Western openness of view that goes with it, and the Parker and north- Hood Countians to prosperous sandy-land farming and to farmers’ shrewd philosophy, and the cedar people to small marginal freeholdings and to slit-eyed exclusion of outlanders, those are certainly effects of country. But in no place along there does no ranching at all exist, or no sandy-land farming, or no small hard-scrabble freeholding, and a man would have to live more continuously among those people than I ever have, to speak with weight about real difference. There’s more of it than there was in the beginning when all men started the joyful rape of the land with equal fervor and from like backgrounds; there’s less than during the long stasis, the doze before the Second War.
What the cedar people are, mostly, is sort of more so. More Anglo-Am, more belligerent, more withdrawn, more hill Southern, more religious, or more hoggish in their sinning if they lack religion or backslide from it …
More tied to their country, too, in various ways … Since the country as they know it is so sorry, that’s a paradox, but it’s so.
Davis Birdsong was walking through the shinnery one day behind old Sam Sowell—I forget why; maybe he was going to chop some posts on the old man’s place on shares—when Sam stopped short, then slowly, felinely backed up. Davis looked over his shoulder. Coiled in a bare spot, rattling his rear off, was a diamondback as thick as a two-bit post. Davis eased his hand back along the oiled helve of his ax.
“Le’m alone!” Sam Sowell said.
“What?” Davis said.
“Le’m be!” Sam said. “Hin bi’ me. Hin bi’ oo. Le’m be.”
Davis said he needed more explanation than that before he was going to give up the idea of killing a rattlesnake, but the old man gave it to him. He said, as nearly as Davis could follow, that the snake from its looks had been around that country as long as either of them had, that it had given fair warning and hadn’t struck when it could have, and that by God it had as much right there as Davis Birdsong or he, Sam Sowell.
“Looked like a old snake hisself, a-hissin’ and a-spittin’,” Davis said, telling it. “You kind of had to dodge, talkin’ with Sam, if you didn’t want no sharr bath.”
Therefore they made an arduous half-circle around the rattler’s sunning-spot, and went on with their trek.
Davis, though infected with that fungus which presently diseases roots, is himself inextricably a cedar man. He has trucked transcontinentally and lived in a trailer in Michigan and worked a stretch at Convair in Fort Worth and slouched through the nation’s far dust traps in a mustard-colored army uniform, but he has always come back, having in a major sense never left, and for some years now has worked, quarrelsomely but hard, for a friend of mine who has built a grassy ranch on the cleared hills. He is good at land procurement, at finding another little neglected homestead to tack onto Bill’s holding, and at persuading the reluctant ones who own it—townsmen often now, needing money and not the brushy unproductive land, but distrustful—to sell at a fair price. He is of their breed and they know him honorable, as men in that country from long storytelling and long watching clearly know one another to be whatever it is they are.
In general, I think Davis likes the changes that are taking place. He hasn’t been fenced off from their fruits. The old way was cob-rough on him and his, back through his parents to his old grandmother, who was another thing and had seen The People in the time before the cedar.… He recalls years when his wife had to make her housedresses out of flour sacks, and the milk for his kids was short. That’s past now. He prospers reasonably from the change, and his razor-minded son will go to college.
He likes a bulldozer, crushing agent of change. Likes lowering its bright-worn battering blade and aiming it at the thick gnarled junipers and knocking them down and leaving behind him a strewn path full of edge-standing limestone boulders clutched by the roots that, uptorn, still hold on. Likes “chaining” best of all, another bulldozer howling parallel to his fifty or seventy-five yards away, and stretched between them a fat cable or anchor chain that inexorably, with a racket like the world’s own end, smashes out its mighty swath in eighty years of brush while little creatures flee. Likes clearing, cleaning, burning off the dried debris. Likes watching the doveweed and the sunflowers and the Johnson grass break through the bared ground the first year, and then the grain-rich native pasture stuff that, nursed, lays itself down on the hills’ slopes in a rug that soaks up rain and opens cool seep-springs all along the draws. Likes too the fat cattle those pastures will maintain. Once, in an access of enjoyment, he leveled an excellent log house on one of the homesteads they were clearing; it made Bill sore as a skunk for a time. Davis will even knock down live oaks if not watched.
And yet his gaze can turn back, too. Not long ago he and I went to look over a lost 140 acres on a dry creek, far back in the cedar. After the road to it played out at a wash, we left the pickup and walked, and along the way we came on a place with junk scattered around and a concrete well curb and the tumbled fire-blackened stones of a foundation and a fireplace under a pecan tree. Davis stopped, and grunted.
“Nothin’,” he answered, and leaning over stared down the dark eight-inch tube of the well, crisscrossed at its mouth with ragged spiderwebs. Davis said: “Went dry.”
“You can’t tell just looking like that,” I said. “It might be a deep one.”
“Used to run over like a sprang,” he said. “Hit was artesian.”
“You knew it.”
“I reckon,” Davis said. “I growed up where you see them rocks.…”
We walked on parallel to the dry creek, ascending, but the ghost place had reached him and he felt like talking.
“We didn’t have nothin’,” he said. “I mean, nothin. Two mules and a wagon to rattle into town with ever’ two weeks haulin’ a load of posts. A ridin’ horse, wind-broke. Some old pieces of arn you could farm with, a little. Choppin’ cedar. Putt coal oil on ever’body when they got hurt or sick. Coal oil on a cut. Coal oil on a rag on your neck if you tuck down with flu … But you know somethin’?”
“What?”
“We didn’t live bad,” he said. “They was a garden patch under that artesian well and it’d grow might near anythang. I mean. And we kept a cow most of the time, and hogs. Good house. Plenty of wood to burn in winter. And old Maw she kept thangs right.”
Maw was not his mother but the female grandparent who, alone against the lassitude of soil exhaustion and demoralization, had held stiffly upright those members of the clan within her touch until she had died a few years back, at ninety-seven. I’d only seen her a couple of times, but she had black eyes that burned you.… She was “good stock,” in the old phrase, Tennessee-born and brought at the age of three to Texas where The People screech-owled in the moonlit brush and you hunkered down clutching your mother’s skirt in the lightless, fireless cabin while outside the men lay watching with rifles. Once, young, she passed a band of Comanches beside a trail near her father’s house. They’d killed a paint mare belonging to a neighbor and were roasting its hind leg over a fire. They looked at her. She looked at them and walked on.
And if, later, the man she’d picked had chosen the wrong place to stay, and if dependence on that wrong, exhausted place had eaten at the fiber of her sons and daughters and grandchildren, those things weren’t her fault, and she’d kept the erosion from going as far as it had with other families. None of her children had turned out to be whisky makers or brawlers or shifty-eyes. Only a couple of the grandchildren had. She’d seen what there was to fight and she’d fought it. She’d kept thangs right.
Are we then praising the Noble Pioneer Mother? No. Just praising Noble Anybody who could shore up a clan’s pride against cedar and bitter indigence … And there were more than you’d think who could, with the help of Old Testamentalism. That was always there. It’s why one can’t laugh too hard at Bug Eye Tinsley, wallowing on the ground.…
Meeting me, Maw had said: “Where your folks from?”
South Texas mostly, I told her, and before that Carolina and Mississippi.
“Flat country,” she said with the reserve of her people to whom for two centuries or more flatlanders had been aliens.…
Davis said that that home place, which he hadn’t visited in twenty-five, nearly thirty years, had then had three pecan trees instead of one, and the well had flowed all the time, and so had the creek, with good fish swimming up it from the Paluxy as far as a little waterfall just under the house.
“Maybe hit’ll run again, though,” he said. “We git some grass around here.”
We crossed a rusty fence, sprung from its staples, into the place we were looking for, and started up a hillside streak of crumbly white caliche and rock between cedars; even the mud-daubers’ nests in parts of that country are limey white.… The trail narrowed and disappeared, overgrown. Davis paused, searching with his memory.
“Used to run here,” he said, pointing to a blank thicket wall of cedar.
It still did, on the other side. The family who’d lived on that place, he said as we went on, had been named Applegate and had had eight kids. They hadn’t owned the place or rented it, but whoever did own it had given up the idea of making it pay and didn’t care who did what with it. For hauling and plowing and the other unhuman work of the place the Applegates had used donkeys. Little old Meskin burros … Maw hadn’t entirely approved of the Applegates, though the donkeys had nothing to do with that. The Applegate girls would teach you things back in the cedar, was the trouble.
Davis said: “I guess you’d call ’em … poor folks.”
In his pause and substitution was sad awareness that everybody around that country for a long time had been so close to being what you’d call the Applegates that it would hurt a little actually to call them it.… Like an old twenty-two Hale used to have that would speckle fire across your forearm when you shot it …
He stopped. He said: “Right about here is where we berrit Bud Applegate’s thumb.”
“Whose?”
“They had a little old post-haulin’ wagon,” he said. “Pulled it with them donkeys. Didn’t have no regular wheels; Model-T rims, they used. Bud he was a little old kid and he was playin’ around the wagon one day when the old man was a-cuttin’ posts. Old Man Applegate he clucked to them donkeys and they started up and old Bud he had his thumb under one of them rims. Sliced it off like you’d slice a sausage.”
And after Bud’s stub had been fixed up fine with coal oil and a piece of somebody’s shirt tail, all the kids—the eight Applegates and Davis and his brothers and sisters—had laid the severed digit in a little cardboard box and carried it into the cedar and held a funeral for it, with speeches.
Davis said: “I bet I could putt near go to it and dig it up, right now.”
He lingered. He said: “I bought Louise a warshin’ machine last week.”
“Save a lot of work,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, but kept looking around on the crumbling white soil beneath the cedars.
“God damn it!” he said finally.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothin’. Just God damn it …”
HE HAS AN UNCLE named Herb who can witch water and has something wrong with his taste buds, so that he puts ketchup on peach cobbler and once drank a glass of coal oil for water, not knowing it until somebody told him.
“Then he said he’d noticed his stomach was a-burnin’ a mite,” Davis said. ’Twenty miles to town. That old wagon. We all sat up to three o’clock waitin’ to see if it was a-gonna kill him and it didn’t and we went to bed.”
He has a friend whom he admires named Clarence, who went to Waco young and made some money finally in contracting, and bought a little place in the cedar hills where he comes for weekends, a city owner. Clarence drives a second-hand Cadillac and drinks Mögen David wine, and on Saturday nights he and Davis and Louise and occasionally a lady friend of his from Waco, a Miss Antelope of Apache derivation, drive thirty, fifty, sometimes eighty miles to country dances with fights and heel-stompings and all kinds of added amateur attractions. Once, coming home, they hit what Davis called a “bear cage” in the road—it took me a week to get “barricade” out of that one. It took Clarence longer to get his Cadillac fixed up.
Davis will work in cotton clothes under January’s sleet for twelve hours in a row if he wants to get something finished, or in the frying glare of August, hurling prickly seventy-five-pound bales of hay onto the back end of a truck in a windless bottomland field. Air conditioning and the silver-blue lure of television have little pull for him, and he’ll eat chicken-fried steak and beans every day for lunch if that is what is put before him, or alternatively mustard greens. He is thus an ascetic, though I’d dislike having to weave the logic of his kinship to Saint Henry.… Like many people in that country, he mistrusts the right names for things, the special vocabularies that go with specialized activities, so that pullets, cocks, hens, and capons are all just chickens, and in the strips of cow country even leathery experts may call chaps “leggins,” and lariats “ropes,” and corrals “pens,” and a cantle “the hind end of the saddle.” I don’t know why.
Davis quietly knows himself to be as good as any man, and can show it if he has to, if at times in strange ways. One September during the early years of my friend Bill’s ownership of land out there, not long after the war, Bill and I went out to spend a few days hunting doves. He hadn’t yet built a house to tempt his wife into bringing the children for weekends, so we were staying by ourselves in an old tin-roofed shack, a couple of miles across brushy pastures from where Davis lived in a new concrete-block cottage.
Early one morning Davis rattled into view in his pickup. Getting out, he stood looking at us where we sat on the edge of the sagging porch. He wore a straw hat curled cowman fashion and a suit of pinkish khaki.
“Mornin’,” he said, tepidly, since he and Bill had differed the day before over what pasture to put some goats in.
Bill said: “Nice day.”
“Sha,” Davis said. “I wouldn’t take nothin’ to live in that old siiake trap. Wha’d you eat for breakfast?”
“Doves.”
“Chicken eats better.”
Bill said: “I’d like chicken better too if I couldn’t hit doves anyhow.”
“Be damn!” Davis said. “Oncet I kilt thirteen with one shell. Not no two whole boxes.”
He doesn’t discern the logic of wingshooting—because, of course, it has none. He said: “What I come for, somebody wants you long distance up at the store.”
Rising, Bill said: “If you want to, we can play a nice long game of mumbly-peg before we go see about it.”
“Sha,” Davis said. “They done waited this long.”
They rattled away. I washed the breakfast dishes in the trough by the windmill, cleaned my shotgun, and sat around listening to a tribe of chickadees quarrel in the ailanthus trees, and in a while they came back. Bill said the Jaycees in the city where we’d both grown up had been saddled with the entertainment of some foreign dignitary, and one of them, an official in a bank to which Bill owed money, or had owed it, had decided that it would kill time to show him a ranch.
“This one?” I said. It was not much to see at that time, a thousand acres or so and only partly cleared of cedar.
“Flat Top,” Bill said. “But they don’t know the Flat Top people and they don’t know their way around this country, so I guess we’re elected.”
“You are.”
“We are,” Bill said.
“France,” Davis said, his tone less unconcerned than usual. “Hit’s a big Frenchman.”
He doesn’t lack curiosity, and an hour and a half later when a seven-passenger Cadillac eased to a stop at Bill’s gate on the highway, Davis was with us. The bank official was driving, a plump fellow I’d known as a boy. Call him Seagrove.… He introduced us to a little mustached Frenchman named Ratineau, seated beside him. A newspaper photographer in the back seat looked boredly away.
Ignored, Davis stuck a hardened hand through the window at the Frenchman. “Birdsong,” he said. “D. M. Birdsong. How do.”
M. Ratineau blinked and was again charmed.
“I was borned and raised around here,” Davis said.
“Yes,” the Frenchman said.
“He doesn’t understand much English,” Seagrove said irritably. “We better get moving.”
We climbed into the back by the photographer and Davis took one of the jump seats. I saw Seagrove’s eye flash coldly around at him, and saw too that Davis hadn’t missed it.
Driving, Seagrove said with wide gestures, gravely: “Ranch country. Much cow, sheep, goat.”
M. Ratineau nodded politely and gazed out.
Davis snorted. “What kind of movie-Indian talkin’ is that?” he said.
“Please?” the Frenchman said, turning.
Seagrove said: “I told you, he doesn’t understand.”
“What is he, anyhow?” Bill asked.
“Well,” Seagrove said. “Secretary of something or the other. Treasury, I think.”
“Commerce,” the photographer said.
“I think Treasury,” Seagrove repeated.
I tried out a stumbling, polite remark in French to the Secretary, and he spouted back happily. I had to ask him to slow down. He said he had a hard time understanding Texas English, and began telling me, too fast, about some unjust experience in a hotel.…
“Pretty talk,” Davis said, listening. “But damn if it don’t look stupid, comin’ here without knowin’ no English.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say right in front of the man,” Bill said.
“He can’t understand,” Davis said. “Fatso there done said so.”
The photographer snorted. Seagrove’s thick neck was pink. The Secretary asked if I was familiar with the combination of the little peas with the carrots, at luncheons.
Was I not.
Where it seemed I should, I murmured.
But at the big ranch, a show place used to celebrities, a foreman took over and drove Seagrove and the Secretary and the photographer around the pastures while Davis and I and Bill waited at the auction barns. When they got back, the little Frenchman had his picture taken aboard a palomino stallion with someone else’s big Stetson down around his ears, and taken again holding a rope attached to the halter of a prize bull.
Then we left. It was hot in the car and no one spoke for a time, until the Secretary said to me: “One prefers vineyards. Listen. That bull. Thirty-five thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“What folly!” he said.
Davis tapped his shoulder. The Secretary looked around. Davis said: “Like I told you, I was raised right here in these cedar hills. Now looky here what I can do.”
Reaching down, he grabbed his right boot heel and then, with a quick thrust upward, placed his leg around his neck. “By God!” he said. “Looky here.”
The wonder in the Frenchman’s face became a smile, and then abruptly he let out a squeal of such genuine laughter that it made Seagrove in the driver’s seat leap.
“You look too, Fatso,” Davis said levelly from beneath his own knee.
Seagrove glanced around briefly, the heavy flesh about his mouth twitching with fury. But the photographer was laughing, and so was I, and M. Ratineau was wiping away tears while he sobbed to himself: “Ah, the droll! Ah, the marvelous peasant!”
And later, as the three of us stood by Bill’s gate watching the Cadillac vanish ahead of an irate wedge of white dust from the road shoulder, Davis said: “That Secretary of France, he was all right. Wait till I tell ’em in Glen Rose.”
“How would you know what he was like?” Bill said, pausing with the gate half opened.
“I could tell,” Davis said. “But that Fatso …”
“What?”
“I got his goat,” Davis said. “I guess I showed that jessie.”
We passed through and Bill latched the gate behind us, grinning a little off center.
“Dog gone you,” he said. “I guess you did.”
THAT RANCH IS A GOOD ONE NOW, 4,000 acres or so, ragged in shape because of the way it was built up, homestead by homestead, dollar by dollar that Bill could make or borrow. It’s a “good investment”; he could sell it now for two or three times what he has in it. He’ll cite that justification for its ownership to people who think in those terms, but he doesn’t need it for himself. He spends all the time out there that he can, and wanders around the pastures alone for two and three days at a stretch, chewing the stems of the good grasses, studying out places for stock tanks or terraces.… He knows pretty well what the birds and animals are that wander there too. A city boy, he is the cedar people’s successor, as the cedar people succeeded Cooney Mitchell and Cooney Mitchell succeeded Bigfoot Wallace and the Comanches, and because Bill has some notion of what Cooney and Bigfoot and the Comanches were, the good and bad of them, he isn’t a break in the country’s continuity as the big absentee “operations” nearly always are. I think it’s not sentimental to say that Bill belongs there, and if he has anything to say about it his children will belong there even more than he does.
The cedar people don’t always leave happily. They drag their heels, and have to be waited for and bought out at the right times. The reluctance is not really rational and economic, though more often than not they say it is (“Land’s a-goin’ up. Sommidge wouldn’t want it if it weren’t …”), but is built on a dread of breaking the stringy line between themselves and the old ones.
Davis’s Uncle Herb dragged his heels for years in regard to one quarter-section that had no link at all with his own personal old ones. It had come to him through his dead wife and was five miles distant from the place he lives on with four hounds and a few chickens, hauling his water in buckets from the well and achieving nocturnal illumination, despite a cheap R. E. A. line that passes a quarter-mile away, with kerosene lamps.
Bill and Davis wanted the quarter-section because it adjoined them. He wouldn’t talk about selling. One time—I was there—they persuaded him to ride over to it with them and look around, but it was a mistake. When we had him there he stood bowlegged under the chinaberries before the place’s ruined main house (remember the shack where Davis and Jim Lemmon and Bert and Ike planned a dummying, long before?) and told how his wife Stella’s grandfather had exchanged fire with enemies from that same spot. On a nearby hill—“Yonder, see hit? Looks like a titty”—he said someone else of that collateral clan had once, on a certain night of a certain year because that was the way it had to be, glimpsed the flickering shaft of light that shows where gold lies buried.
He said: “I done tried a dozen times to witch it, with a gold cuff button. Couldn’t do no good.”
Davis said: “Herb, you know they was just a-tellin’ that.”
“Naw,” Herb said. “Hit was there. You need a coin, is what you need.”
He grew indignant, thinking. He said: “You take me God damn home, Dave Birdsong!”
And went … Sourly, in the pickup after we’d dropped him off, Davis said that he knew the old man was kin to him, and that he was a good old man, but that sometimes he crapped too close to the house.…
He did sell finally, though with stipulations written into the instruments. He said he wanted to be able to wander there if he wanted.
Bill said: “You can go anywhere on my place, any time. You always could.”
He said: “I want it on the paper.”
He wanted ownership of another old shack back in the place’s cedar, worse ruined than the main one, with a rotten perforated shingle roof and one of the windows made out of an old Model-T windshield, the hood’s arc faithfully reproduced along its lower edge. Not ownership of the land under it, just of the shack … The provision was typed in, and three months after that he went over with a double-bitted cedar ax and a wrecking bar and tore the old shack board by board apart. It took him a week. If you happened by he wouldn’t keep up the work, but would sit down and watch you tight-lipped till you left. He carried none of the wreckage away, and when he’d finished what remained was a square of foundation stones and a chimney’s shaft and a jumble of boards, rotten furniture, broken churns, and maybe a thousand Mason jars. And the Model-T windshield …
Davis said it must be more treasure foolishness. lie said his Aunt Stella’s uncle, who’d once lived in the shack, had been supposed to have money hidden somewhere.
“But it might not of been that ay-tall,” he said. “Old Herb he takes a notion.”
“Wonder if he found whatever it was?” I said.
“Shoo!” Davis said. “Won’t nobody ever know. If he’d of found a million dollars, he’d of just hid it again somewheres else. Without even buyin’ no electric lights.”
The heap of lumber and glass and crockery sat there for a good while until Davis, burning downed cedar one winter, squirted distillate on it and set it afire. Now there are only the fireplace and the foundation and ashes and molten glass and blue-scorched rusting rods and straps of iron, and Davis says the first time he has the dozer down that way he’ll shove it all into a draw.
So many tales, and every time you go to that country you hear a dozen more—good ones, if that’s your kind of thing. Too many to put down here, too many for a book not just about the cedar people …
No room, then, for Herb’s boy Clint, truck driver and rodeo rider, who though perfumed with dark charm is, like Jim Lemmon, about half mean when he gets mad, and who once, after a trouble with his first wife, sought her out at her parents’ house where she’d gone, and kept the whole family up under bright lights all night (they deserved it, but there is no room) while he twiddled a thirty-eight by its trigger guard and nipped at a bottle and swore he was going to shoot them all dead by dawn, but with the first light outside started laughing hard at the looks on their faces and walked out and took up again his 30,000-mile truck route. No room …
No room either for tales of “burning out,” of pastures blackened by revenge and houses gone the same way, or for what Davis Birdsong said to the air-force lieutenant colonel over long distance after a jet bang put a stair step crack across one wall of his house … Or for the cedar-country man who went to college and won a Rhodes and studied at Oxford and was a bright gleam of the Dallas bar, prosperous, only to drop it all one day on impulse and go back alone to the cedar hills and live in khakis, barefoot in the warm months, impartially inhabiting caves and abandoned houses, they say … Sometimes you’d see him hitchhiking with a brief case, hatless and bushy-headed and still in khakis, to litigation in some little county court, because the cedar people always wanted him when he’d take their cases.
Or for the big cockfight out in the brush in Bosque County one Sunday when two city ducktails tried to hold up the crowd for its betting money, and everybody ran for his car but not to get away, and even after the ducktails had roared off, shot to pieces, to a city hospital, the happy fusillade kept up in and around the cars where old enemies were shooting at one another, the cockfight forgotten … Chicken fights, they call them, partly from a distaste for right names and partly because of the old Anglo-Am tabu on the sexual homonym.
Or for the man who rides a bony horse into Glen Rose on summer Saturdays, barefooted but with big roweled spurs on his heels …
Or for tales of whisky, so central … No room for whisky, fuel for the northern peoples’ empires? There must be. When empire had burned its way on through and far beyond the Brazos country, the Brazos people kept on using the fuel, imperially. The gentle, genteel people and the clear sighted ones like Maw among the older stock have been fighting it ever since, with varying success.
It’s hard to blame them, even if you’re a drinker. Mostly these days beer is the beverage of joy in those parts, hauled in from the wet territory to the east and sold at double price. It causes a few fist fights and wife beatings, but not much else. Whisky is for the blow-off, for the real overspew of that breed’s boiling violent illogic that builds up pressure underneath the slit-eyed quiet, and has to go somewhere. It comes out wild; it comes out Cooney Mitchell and Bigfoot Wallace and the cowboys in the Kimball Bend, and makes the midnight horrid and the afternoon, too. So that even drinkers sometimes vote dry, hoping that the voters in the next county will be damned fools enough to vote wet and give them and their friends a nearby swilling place out of earshot of their own kids.
The bootleg kind of liquor doesn’t locate itself by law, though. In the cedar hills they make it white, running the steam from soured corn meal and sugar out through copper tubing and selling its condensation right away at two dollars a raw oily half-gallon, though cedar clearing and lawmen in airplanes have hurt the profession’s privacy. During the brief glory that was Prohibition, Glen Rose became a resort, hub for a wide ring of thirsty country. There were sanitariums run by chiropractors, at least one of whom wrought witnessed, attested miracles. There were mineral springs, and boosters who spoke of almost every attraction except the real one. There were parks, standing weedy now with bandstands of red petrified wood which testify that here the tip of wanton prosperity’s wing once brushed the ground.
In 1932 that boom naturally broke. Now most of the homemade soul balm is drunk up locally, with a little going to outsiders who for one reason or another like it. West Texas, too, dry and wide, offers a field for enterprise. One part-time maker told me that starting from scratch, keeping no still around between times to be found and blamed on him, he could stew up a truckload batch of white whisky for $800 which, after an evening haul to Lubbock, he could sell for $6,000. He said it was fairly safe if you didn’t do it at regular intervals; if you were regular they’d lay for you.
One short tale? There’s an old moonshiner around—call him Else. He is a man of dignity and of harsh ethics, few of which fit the interstices of the law or the philosophy of patio living. A long time back he got caught at his chosen trade, though to toll him out of the brush they had to break the law themselves and hold his family hostage. He was tried and given a year or so in jail but, somehow, was allowed a little time out on bond before he had to turn himself in. On the night before his freedom expired, his friends gathered to give him a party. Everybody felt bad. There was whisky, some of it even wood-aged for a month or so.… They gloomed.
“Hod damn it,” one said. “This ain’t it. We don’t want old Else to recollect us this-a-way, all that time. Like a funeral.”
Another said: “What you gonna do, sang songs?”
He said: “Le’s have a jury trial.”
“Who you want to try?”
“Else, that’s who,” he said. “I’m the judge.…”
They held it, drinking hard. At the end they had Else, swaying with whisky, stand up before the bench and the judge said: “They done found you guilty of bein’ damn fool enough to git caught. What you got to say?”
“Sommidgin’ thang,” Else answered. “G’lty.”
“All right,” the judge said. “I hereby by God sentence you to git beat up. Now.”
And they all piled on him, swinging and kicking. After a while they lost track of who it was they were after and just fought, a flailing mound of them, until nobody had any fight left in him. Old Else, who lost four teeth and had a thumb broken, still says it was the nicest party he ever went to.
ALL TO THE FACTORIES NOW, all to towns … Selling whatever they happen to own, they leave the places which their breed wore out and which in reciprocation wore their breed out, too. They go to Fort Worth and Dallas and Los Angeles and Detroit and almost everywhere, and few come back, for there is no reason to. In corporation plants they learn well or badly those technical specialties that hour-pay requites, mingling there and in the beer halls and in the suburbs into a new and future breed with other kinds of people. With migrant hill Southerners, kinsmen in religion and honky-tonkery and fierce schizoid polarity, and probably often in blood too … With that drifting, truly rootless worker mass that two or three generations of big production and war have brewed among us, on all levels from corporation president to shop sweeper …
A lament? Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey? Not necessarily. A good many ills have been hastening around the Brazos country for a good long while. And besides, what is, is.
But what is, too, is of concern to a farewell-sayer like me, and what is, there, is the slow, sometimes reluctant, some times glad end of a people. Davis Birdsong’s people, the more-so people … The breed is changing.
Not my people, not in lifelong neighborness or the real scaffolding of thought … South Texas gets into it, and so does the city, and the wandering.
But if one cares about people at all, he has claim to more than just one kind of them. Young, I breathed in these, like pollen, from the air.…