Michener, James A. (158 page)

'We know of nothing that will halt it, or kill it. All we can do is pray that it will run its course, like a bad cold, or that some other insect will attack it and keep it in bounds My advice to you? Move to better land, farther west, where it doesn't dominate, because the boll weevil has a built-in compass. It needs moisture and moves always toward the east, seeking it.'

The situation was as bad as he said, and from 1892 to 1900, Cobb watched his once glorious plantation, 'the pride of the bayou' he called it, fall almost into ruin. Fields which had once shipped boatloads and then trainloads of bales to New Orleans could now scarcely put together fifty usable bales.

At the turn of the century, in deep dejection, he went to his wife: 'Sue Beth, we can't fool ourselves any longer. Our fields are doomed.'

'You think Lammermoor is finished?'

'Not if we could find something to kill the weevil. Or some new kind of fertilizer. Or if the government could breed a new strain which could protect itself . . .'

'But you don't expect such miracles?'

He did not answer. Instead, he took from his pocket a report from a cotton growers' advisory committee: These men say there's wonderful new land near a place called Waxahachie.'

'What a strange name for a town.'

'I haven't seen it, but from what they say, it could prove our salvation.' He took the train to Waxahachie, and returned bubbling with enthusiasm: 'I can get a thousand acres at thirty-one cents an acre.'

'But hasn't the weevil reached there, too?'

'It has, but the rainfall is so much less, the experts have worked out ways to control it . . . more or less.'

'So you've decided to move?'

'I have.'

'Will we be able to sell this plantation 7 '

'Who would be so crazy as to buy?'

'Does that mean we lose everything?'

'We lose very little. What we do is transfer it to Devereaux. He claims he can operate it at a small profit.'

Devereaux Cobb was a gentle throwback to the eighteenth century. Forty years old and self-trained in the classics, he was the late-born son of that red-headed Reuben Cobb of Georgia who had died at Yicksburg, but he had inherited none of his father's verve and courage. A big, flabby bachelor afraid of women, he had dedicated himself to tending the white-columned plantation home built by his parents; in lassitude he tried vainly to keep alive the cherished traditions of the Deep South, and although he had no cadre of slaves to tend the lawns as in the old days, he did have hired blacks who deferred to his whims by calling him Marse Dewy while he called them Suetonius and Trajan. He was a kindly soul, a remnant of all that was best in that world which the Texas Southrons had striven to preserve.

Since his widowed mother, Petty Prue, had become the second wife of one-armed Senator Cobb, he had a direct claim to at least half the Jefferson holdings, and now Laurel and his wife were offering him their half: 'You were meant to be the custodian of some grand plantation, Devereaux. We leave this place in good hands.'

'I try,' he said.

On the way home from the lawyer's office where the papers of transmittal were signed, Laurel said to his wife: 'Devereaux's not a citizen of this world. He feels he must hold on to Lammermoor as a gesture, a defense of Southern tradition.' They visualized Devereaux, forty and unmarried, occupying in solemn grandeur

the great houses which had once counted their inhabitants in the twenties and thirties. He would combine the libraries and sell off some of the pianos and try to get along with four black servants from the town. Some of the fields he would abandon to weevils and weeds, but others he would farm out on shares in hopes of earning enough to support himself. The afternoons would be long and hot, the summer nights filled with insects. Steamers would no longer call at the wharf, for the Red River now flowed freely to join the Mississippi; 'Jefferson's throat been cut,' as the natives said.

There was still a belief in Northern states that everything in Texas prospered, a carryover from the G.T.T. days, and invariably it did, for some years, but failure was as easy to achieve here as it was in Massachusetts or West Virginia. The woods of East Texas contained as many failed plantations as the plains and prairies of West Texas displayed the charred roots of what had once been farmhouses and ranch headquarters. Some said: The armorial crest of Texas should be an abandoned house whose root stumps barely show.'

'Devereaux will survive,' Laurel said as he and Sue Beth packed their last belongings, 'but I do wish he'd take himself a wife before we leave.'

Tve been brooding about that,' his wife said. She was a practical woman, much like her mother-in-law, Petty Prue, and it bothered her to think that a notable catch like Devereaux was inheriting this mansion without a wife to help him run it.

She had therefore scoured the town of Jefferson, striving to find a suitable woman to occupy the place, and she told her husband: Td accept any likely woman from age nineteen to fifty. But I find no one in all of Jefferson fitted to the task.'

'Devereaux's the one to do the judging,' her husband said. 'How do you know he wants a wife?'

'He'll do what I tell him,' she responded, and she was soon off to the major town of Marshall, over the line in the next county, and there she heard of an attractive young widow with a baby daughter. The candidate was from an Alabama family of excellent reputation, which cemented her position with Sue Beth: 'Devereaux would never consider a wife who wasn't from the South, but this one is, and she's a charmer.'

She was that, a twenty-nine-year-old of delicate breeding and considerable poise, with a two-year-old daughter named Belle who had been trained to be a prim little lady. The mother spoke in a low voice, held herself very erect when meeting strangers, and was, said a neighbor, 'the perfect picture of Southern womanhood at its best.'

Sue Beth, eager to safeguard Devereaux's future before leaving Jefferson, wanted to approach the problem frontally, but she knew that this would offend the niceties observed by Southern women, so she said tentatively: i do wish you could visit Lammermoor one day.'

As if totally ignorant of what was afoot, the widow said quietly: 'I've heard it's delightful.'

'It is, and alas, we're leaving it.'

'Oh, are you 7 '

'And when we go, Devereaux . . .' Sue Beth hesitated shyly. 'He'll take over, of course.'

'I've heard of him. People refer to him as the last of the Southern gentlemen.' She knew the names of all the unmarried gentlemen in two counties.

'My husband and I would be so honored if you . and your delightful daughter . . .' Both women hesitated, then Sue Beth took the widow's hands: 'You would honor us if you were to assent . . .'

'It is I who would be honored,' and when the widow and her daughter were seated beside the Cobbs on the new train to Jefferson, the purpose of the visit was clearly understood even though it had not yet been mentioned.

At the station, a painfully embarrassed Devereaux waited with a curtained wagon driven by Suetonius, and after awkward introductions were completed, Sue Beth whispered to her guest: 'You'll find him a crotchety bachelor but delightful,' and Laurel added important reassurance: 'He comes from the finest South Carolina and Georgia blood, and the plantation is all his and paid for.'

It was the kind of meeting that had often happened along the Texas frontier, where death was arbitrary and widowhood commonplace. A farm of eighty acres needed a woman to bake the bread, or a plantation of twenty-thousand acres needed a mistress to grace the mansion, so friends searched the countryside; fumbling introductions were completed; a minister who knew neither bride nor groom was summoned, and the life of Texas went on.

At Lammermoor, such a wedding was arranged.

From Lammermoor to Waxahachie was about one hundred and fifty miles, similar to the distance from New York to Baltimore, or Berlin to Hamburg, but in Texas this moved the Cobbs across three radically different types of terrain: pine belt, oak forest, and the rich and rolling blacklands of which Waxahachie was the capital. More significant to the welfare of cotton, the Cobbs had escaped the dank bayou country, where the rainfall neared fifty

inches a year, and had come to more manageable lands with about thirty-five inches.

The topsoil was eighteen to thirty inches deep, free of large rocks and often invitingly level; since earlier owners had removed the trees, Cobb could start using the land immediately. The boll weevil had of course reached here in its plundering surge out of Mexico, but by the time the Cobbs took over, the once-gloomy expert from A&M was actually smiling with reassuring news:

'We're a lot brighter now than when 1 talked with yon dnnny those dark days in Jefferson We've wrestled with the little devil and come out ahead. First thing yon have to do, Cobb, is plant a variety of cotton that bolls early Earlier the better, because then yon have a chance of picking it before the weevil starts. Second, plant a trap-crop of corn between the rows. The weevil really loves corn Let em eat that instead of your cotton bolls. Third, and maybe the most important, you have got to burn your stalks in August, September fifteenth latest, because then the stinkers have no place to breed Fourth, thank whatever god directs your movements that you've come to Waxahachie, because the rainfall is so much less. Weevils love wet, and out here you'll dust them off. Fifth, we aren't sure whether it will work or not, but we've had some promising results from arsenic. Poison the little bastards.'

By following this military advice, Cobb not only got his new cotton plantation started, but by the close of the first year, found himself with such a rich crop that it was reasonable for him to build his own gin, and this made him one of the major farming figures in the area. To his surprise, he found himself following exactly the advice proffered by the intrusive Northern newspaperman Elmer Carmody when he visited the Jefferson plantations in 1850, and which the original Cobbs had resented so strenuously: 'Sue Beth, I burst out laughing when I realized that I was growing the best cotton in the world without the help of slaves, without even one black man working for me. All whites. All working for wages, just as Carmody predicted. I owe him an apology,' and he saluted the place in the bookcase where Texas Good and Bad stood.

Carefully calculating his profit, he built a modest house for Sue Beth and the children, and with the money left over he associated himself with other cotton people, all of them pooling their funds to underwrite less well-to-do farmers who wanted to get into the business. To his delight he saw the sale price per pound rise from eight cents in 1901 to twelve in 1903. By 1905, when the price remained high, he was the leading agriculturist in the region and a king of the cotton industry, insofar as the boll weevil allowed anyone to gloat.

'I wish there was another crop we could grow,' Cobb complained one night when he realized how totally dependent he was on cotton, but he could devise none which would produce the safe yields and assured profits that cotton did. As early as 1764 the Cobbs of Edisto Island in South Carolina had wanted to diversify their crops, but the presence of slaves to manage the cotton fields and pick the lint from the seed kept them imprisoned in that economy; the Cobbs had made statistical studies which proved that they were penalized by this adherence to one crop and were prepared to branch out when Eli Whitney invented his miraculous gin, which revolutionized the industry, and they fell back, entrapped in lint.

In Texas it had been the same. All the Cobbs who settled there had wanted to diversify—'to break away from our bondage to New Orleans and England,' Senator Cobb had cried in several of his speeches—but none had done so, and now in their new home, on land which would have welcomed different forms of agriculture. Laurel Cobb and his wife persisted with their cotton.

'We're prisoners of that damned fiber,' Laurel cried one night. 'It binds us to it like the threads of a spider binding its victims.' Then he laughed: 'But it's a glorious bondage. No farmer in the world enjoys a better life than the man who owns a cotton plantation and his own gin.'

Such thinking was making Texas the world's most important cotton-producing area. Strangers thought of the Carolinas and Georgia as the capitals of the Cotton Kingdom, but inexorably the centers were moving west and coming to rest in Texas, and on some mornings in the autumn when Laurel and Sue Beth rode intc Waxahachie they were dazzled by the splendor of the scene which greeted them and of which they were a leading part.

'God, this is a fine sight!' Laurel cried one day when bright October sunlight filled the central square, and he was justified in his assessment.

Waxahachie had a town square of most pleasing dimensions, foi it was compact and lined on four sides with fine low buildings, some of real distinction, yet it was spacious enough to accommodate the red-and-gray masterpiece of that inspired courthouse builder James Riely Gordon. Here, with a budget more than twice what the less affluent men of Larkin County had been able to put together, Gordon had built a fairy-tale palace ten stories high, replete with battlements and turrets and spires and soaring clod towers and miniature castles high in the air. It was a bejewelec treasure, yet it was also a sturdy, massive court of judgments, one of the finest buildings in Texas.

But it was not the noble courthouse which captivated Laurel Cobb this morning; it was what crowded in upon the building, cramming the copious square that surrounded it, for here the cotton growers of the region had brought cartloads of the best cotton, more than two thousand bales, their brown burlap sacking barely hiding the rich white cotton crop

Here was the wealth of Texas, these mountains of cotton bales, these pyramids, these piles strewn before the courthouse where buyers would come to make their choices; trains would earn the bales to all parts of the nation and to Europe, and even to Asia or wherever else cloth was needed.

'Look at it!' Laurel shouted to his wife as he reined in their horses. 'This will go on forever.'