Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the old ones settled along that bit of the river, which I guess is why they called it Shut-in. A man named Davis homesteaded there in 1857, a year or so before the Comanches (restricted by then legally, if not in fact, to a reservation up the Clear Fork) reached a startled awareness of the newcomers’ solidity and began the really bloody fighting.
    They were diverse, the first Saxons who came here, the old ones, and it is hard to talk knowingly about them from a century’s distance. There was very little Hollywood about them, and not much Fenimore Cooper. Rough, certainly … Mainly Southern, but not altogether, and even the Southerners heterogeneous in origin and type—rednecks and slaveholding younger sons from the cotton states, Texas-Revolutionary veterans from the older cattle counties far down the Brazos and the Colorado, hillmen from Tennessee and Carolina. Judging from the dialect they passed down, and the religion, and the narrow, straight-line living broken occasionally by sprees and murder, the hill people may have predominated, but a lot of them came later, when other people had moved on after exhausting a farm or so.
    Sharp around the edges, not tender … They couldn’thave been, bringing wagonloads of women and kids and chattels where they brought them. Like the Comanches, they were unlovable to neighbors of other breeds, but like the Comanches too they did not care. They had a notion, handed tangled down from the dank European forests, that
they
were The People. There wasn’t room enough in the Comancheria for two tribes with that illusion.
    What part John Davis played in the consequent uproar is not recorded, but someone relayed a sad, sentimental story about his floorboards. He drove a wagon south to Waco to get them, and brought them back to lay them in his cabin for his bride; it was the first floor in the Palo Pinto country which was neither flat dirt nor puncheon. They say she was proud of it, and a few months later she died in childbirth and John Davis tore up the floorboards and made them into a coffin.…
    Maybe then he stayed in the valley, morose, and proceeded with mule and plow and straight uncontoured furrow, with cotton and corn year after leaching year, to wear it out. Someone did. It lies fallow now, its old small fields choked with briars and the low second-growth oak brush they call shinnery. I didn’t know where the old Davis cabin had stood, or whether any signs of it remained, but near the river I found what was left of some log corrals, and beyond that a bulldozer had been at work and a bright goat-wire fence stood taut, evidence probably of new city ownership. Up through the thirties and the war and even till the drouth of the fifties, individual families still subsisted on some of those little farms in the valleys and on the flatlands inside the river bends. It was a hard-scrabble life. Most of them have moved away now, leaving the farms to lie brushy and neglected, convalescing from a century of abuse. Businessmenbuy up blocks of them as ranching investments, dozing away the scrub and the cedar that has moved down from the hills, and replanting in grass. If the land is to be used at all, that practice probably does it less harm than the other did, though a kind of people, backwash of the old ones, are disappearing with the change.
    Towhees and cardinals hopped about in the brush, untouched by the wind that hissed in the treetops, ignoring me and the pup in the assurance that thick undergrowth gives them. Bewildered by so much untailored shrubbery, the passenger stuck by my heels. Mud … An old corncrib, collapsed at one corner, and the rat-chewed gray cobs spilling out between the logs like a travesty of a cornucopia … Frostbitten sumac the color of arterial blood speckled the high hillsides. Deer tracks pitted the old corral. Silence. Ruin …
    Trespassing, I climbed over the new fence. The old kind of owners didn’t worry much over that kind of property rights,