Michener, James A. (157 page)

As THE NINETEENTH CENTURY DREW TO A CLOSE, THE TOWN OF

Larkin, the seat of Larkin County, found itself embroiled in an intellectual argument which preoccupied a good many other communities: When did the new century begin?

Tradition, accepted modes of expression and popular opinion all agreed that at midnight on 31 December 1899 an old century would die, with a new one beginning a minute later. To any practical mind, even the name of the new year, 1900, indicated that a new system of counting had begun, and to argue otherwise

was ridiculous: 'Any man with horse sense can see it's a new century, elsen why would they of given it a new name?'

Yet Earnshaw Rusk, like many thinking men and women across the state, knew that the twentieth century could not possibly begin until 31 December 1900; logic, history and mathematics all proved they were correct, but these zealots had a difficult time persuading their fellow citizens to delay celebrating until the proper date. 'Damn fools like Earnshaw cain't tell their ear from their elbow,' said one zealot. 'Any idiot knows the new century begins like we say, and I'm gonna be ringin' that church bell come New Year's Eve and Jim Bob Loomis is gonna be lightin' the fire.'

Rusk found such plans an insult to intelligence. 'Tell me,' he asked Jim Bob, 'now I want you to just tell me, how many years in a century?' He had stopped using the Quaker thee in public.

'A hunnert,' Jim Bob said.

'At the time of Christ, when this all began, was there ever a year zero?'

'Not that I hcerd of.'

'So the first century must have begun with the year 1.'

i think it did.'

'So when we reached the year 99, how many years had the first century had?'

'Sounds like ninety-nine.'

'It was ninety-nine, so the year 100 had nothing special about it. The second century couldn't have begun until the beginning of 101.'

Jim Bob pointed a warning finger at the lanky Quaker: 'You're talkin' atheism, and Reverend Hislop warned us against ideas like yourn.'

For some obscure theological reason that was never spelled out, Reverend Hislop of the Methodist church had taken a strong stand in favor of 1900 as the beginning of the new century, and he had equated opposition to that view as being against the will of God: 'Every man in his right mind knows that the new century begins when it does, and misguided persons who try to argue otherwise are deluded.'

When Rusk asked him: 'All right, how many years were there in the first century?' the clergyman snapped: 'One hundred, like anyone knows.'

'And how could that be?' Rusk pressed. 'How could thy century begin at year 1 and end at year 99 and still have a hundred years?' and the reverend replied: 'Because God willed it that way.' And that became the general opinion of the community; if God had wanted His first century, when Christianity began, to have only

ninety-nine years, it was only a small miracle for Him to make it so.

As December 1899 ended, the wood for the bonfire at the south end of the former parade ground grew higher and higher, with most families contributing odd pieces to the pile. Jim Bob supervised the throwing on of additional pieces until a ladder was required to reach the top, and then schoolboys took over the task. Ladies from the two major churches, Baptist and Methodist, prepared a nonalcoholic punch, and a band rehearsed a set of marches.

This irritated Earnshaw, who asked his wife: 'Emma, how can people fly into the face of fact?' and she replied: 'Easy. I sort of like 1900 myself. Obviously the beginning of something new.'

Such reasoning disgusted her husband, who withdrew to the companionship of seven other men—no women engaged in such nonsense—who remained convinced that their century, at least, would start at midnight on 31 December 1900 and not before. They remained aloof from the celebrations, so they did not hear Reverend Hislop intone the prayer which welcomed the new century for everyone else:

'Almighty God, we put to rest an old century, one which brought the Republic of Texas victory in war and membership in the Federal Union, it brought us anguish during the War Between the States and sore tribulation when the Indians attacked us and niggers tried to run things But we have won free. We have settled the wilderness and conquered distance. We have a glorious town where unobstructed winds used to howl, and the prospects ahead are infinite and glorious.

'We cannot foresee what this twentieth century will bring us, but we have good cause to hope that war will be no more, and it is not idle to think that before the century is far gone we shall have a planing mill providing lumber for the many small houses we shall build. Our town is situated so that it must grow, the Boston of the West, with fine churches and perhaps even a college of distinction. I see great accomplishment for this town. Hand in hand with the new century, we shall march to greatness.'

Either the town or the century was laggard, because the year 1900 was one of drought, dying cattle and frustrated hopes about the planing mill. Banker Weatherby, always eager to advance the commercial prospects of his town and willing to risk his own capital, had put together a consortium of interests that had accumulated a purse of thirteen thousand dollars with which to entice a planing mill to start operations on trees hauled in by the railroad, but in July the venture failed, with the Larkin men losing their shirts. Even Weatherby, a perpetual optimist, was heard to

say as he closed the books on this latest failure: 'If God had wanted a planing mill in this town, He'd have given us trees instead of rattlesnakes.'

Rusk lost eight hundred dollars on the deal, which caused him to tell Emma: 'I warned people that 1900 was bound to be a year of ill omen,' at which she snorted: 'You talk as crazy as Reverend Hislop.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, he says God was in favor of 1900. You argue that nature is against 1900. I don't see much difference.'

Emma Rusk, forty-three now, believed in God and supported the Methodist church in a desultory sort of way, but she avoided theological discussion: 'I think a church is a good thing to have in a town. It civilizes people, especially young people, and it deserves our support. But the mysteries it tries to sell. . . some of the things that Reverend Hislop preaches ... I can do without them.'

She deplored her husband's gambling on the mill: 'We could have given that money to Floyd to help with our two granddaughters. Don't ever mention a planing mill to me again.'

She now thought more kindly of her son than she had in the past, for at twenty-five he was becoming more like a man. He was still grossly overweight, some two hundred and fifty pounds, and his wife, Molly, was much the same at two-twenty. But they had produced two lively girls: Bertha, aged four, and Linda, eleven months. The children looked as if they were going to have their grandfather's ranging height and their grandmother's lively attitude toward the world about them. They showed no signs of being especially intelligent, but Bertha did seem to have her mother's gift for organizing her little world in the way she wanted.

Emma judged that her son had a fighting chance to make something of himself despite his surly temper and his abhorrence of his father, for Floyd could work; the trouble was, as Emma saw it: 'He never sticks at anything. If I had to leave the handling of our cattle to him, heaven knows what would happen.' Fortunately, she could rely on Paul Yeager, two years older than Floyd and two centuries wiser. The Yeagers now occupied a considerable acreage north of the tank, but as the father pointed out to Emma one morning: 'Earnshaw gave us our first two hundred acres, but he's never entered the deed at the courthouse. Would you remind him that my boy and I are putting a lot of work into those acres? We'd feel safer . . .'

'Of course you would! I'll tell him to get jumpinV

In mid-December she told her husband: 'Earnshaw, it isn't right

to leave those Yeagers dangling without title to their land Go to the courthouse and fix that up, please.'

Thee is right!' There was no argument about the propriety of formalizing the gift, and Earnshaw said that he would attend to it as soon as he and his logicians had ushered in the new century properly

The seven men who had sided with Rusk in his defense of reason were now having a high old time preparing to greet the new century; no church would help them celebrate, for it was already acknowledged that God had ordained 1900 to be the year of change, and troublemakers like Rusk and his gang were seen as disrupters of the peace. Their argument that the first century could not possibly have had ninety-nine years had long since been disposed of, and they were largely ignored as they went about the serious business of greeting their new century.

Denied the use of any public building and supported by only one of their eight wives, these stubborn citizens met at eleven on the night of 31 December 1900, with Rusk uttering this prediction:

'Mark my words, and we must get this into the Defender as our prediction, in the year 1999 the citizens of this town will relive our debate Those with no sense of history or responsibility to fact will fire cannon and light bonfires as the last day of that year draws to a close. And I suppose there will be talk of God's preference, too, same as now. But the knowing ones will gather on the last night of the year 2000 to greet the twenty-first century as it really begins on the first day of January 2001.

'1 don't drink, but I do propose a toast to those valiant souls a hundred years from now. It is something, in this world of shifting standards, to respect the great traditions, and tonight I can think of none finer than the one which says: "No century can have ninety-nine years " Gentlemen, with my water and your wine, let us toast common sense.'

It was rumored later, after the tragic events of the evening, that Earnshaw Rusk, the Quaker who personified sobriety, had drunk himself silly with wine at his false New Century, but others like Jim Bob Loomis, who had built the bonfire at the real celebration, argued that God had intervened because of Rusk's blasphemy over the false beginning. At any rate, when Rusk left the celebration and started to cross the old parade ground in the shadow of his beloved courthouse, two young cowboys from the Rusk ranch rode hell for leather into the courthouse square, in about the same way their fathers had invaded Dodge City.

Earnshaw saw the first young fellow and managed to sidestep his rearing horse, but he did not see the second, whose horse panicked, knocked Earnshaw to the ground, and trampled him about the head.

The fifty-nine-year-old Quaker was in such strong condition that his heart and lungs kept functioning even though consciousness was lost, never to be regained. For three anguished days he lingered, a man of great rectitude whose body refused to surrender. Emma stayed by his bed, hoping that he would recognize her, and even Floyd came in to pay his grudging respects; he had never liked his father and deemed it appropriate that Earnshaw should die in this ridiculous manner, defending one more preposterous cause.

On the fourth day a massive cerebral hemorrhage induced a general paralysis, but still he held on, it was as if his mortal clock had been wound decades ago and set upon a known course from which it would not deviate. Indeed, as the doctor said: it looks like he refuses to die. He's dead, but his heart won't admit it.'

On the sixth day his damaged brain deteriorated so badly that Death actually came into the room and said softly: 'Come on, old fellow. I've won.' But even this challenge was ignored. Clenching his hands, Earnshaw held on to the sides of the bed, and his legs tried to grasp the bed, too, so that when the end finally came, they had to pry him loose.

On the day of the funeral four Comanche rode into town from the reservation at Camp Hope, and at the graveside they were permitted to chant. Floyd Rusk and his wife were infuriated by this paganism and this hideous reminder of what had happened to Floyd's mother decades ago, and they were further outraged when Emma Rusk, with no ears and a wooden nose, joined the Indians in their chant, using the language with which her ill-starred husband had hoped to tame these avengers of the Texas plains.

The tragedy at Lammermoor, for it could be called nothing less, had begun one morning in 1892 when a field hand ran to the big house, shouting: 'Mastah Cobb, somethin' awful in the cotton bolls.'

Laurel Cobb, the able son of Senator Cobb and Petty Prue and now in charge of the plantation, hurried out to see what minor disaster had struck this time, but he soon found it to be major. 'Half the cotton plants have been invaded by a beetle,' he told his wife, Sue Beth, when he returned.

"Much damage?'

'Total. The heart of the lint has been eaten out.'

'You mean our cotton's gone?'

'Exactly what I mean,' and he took her out to the extensive fields to see the awful damage, this sudden assault upon their way of life.

That was the year when the boll weevil first appeared in the fields of East Texas, and in each succeeding year the scourge became more terrible. Entire plantations were wiped out, and there was no countermeasure to halt this devastation. The weevil laid its eggs in the ripening boll, and as the larvae matured they ate away the choicest part of the lint. When the weevil finished, the plant was worthless.

When times had been good, Cobb was like everyone else in Texas: 'I want no interference from government,' but now when trouble struck he expected immediate help, and he was the first in his district to demand that something be done. A young expert from A&M, a most gloomy man, was sent to share with the local planters what was known:

'Cotton is indigenous to various locations throughout the world. India and Egypt, for example. But our strain comes from Mexico, and a very fine strain it is, one of the best.

'When it jumped north it left behind its ina|or enemies. But now they're beginning to catch up. The boll weevil came across the border into Texas first. Seems to move about two hundred and ten miles a year. Soon it'll be in Mississippi, Alabama. It's sure to move into Ceorgia and the Carolinas.