Michener, James A. (43 page)

'But you have to choose sides.'

'Why?' And she displayed no interest in which side he had chosen.

The question of Mexican citizenship became more pressing when a guest reached the ferry to stay at the cave-house while trying to round up extra mules to drove overland to New Orleans. In halting English he gave his name as Benito Garza, said he was eighteen years old and a native of the little town of Bravo down on the Rio Grande: 'I cross river'—he called it reevair —'and catch the mule. You know what it is, the mule? Father a jackass, mother a horse. The mule all gunpowder and fury. But I, I tame the mule—'

'We know all about mules in Tennessee,' Jubal interrupted. 'But you're not going to take those seventeen mules all the way to New Orleans? Alone?'

'Oh, no! At the Trinity, I meet Mister Ford. He got fifty mules, sixty, from San Antonio. We take them together.'

The Quimpers liked Garza, for the young man was so enthusiastic that his ebullience became infectious: 'Mr. Ford, fine man. He give me money, I get him mules in Mexico. Maybe I buy four, five more right here?'

The Quimpers knew of no farmers in the vicinity who might

have bred mules, but they promised young Garza to watch his while he scouted the river, and on the next day the irrepressible young man reappeared with four good animals: 'I always find them somewhere.'

During the young muleteer's last night at the inn, Mattie could not control her curiosity: Tour mother? What's she think about such a trip? To New Orleans?'

'She's dead. But I go on trail first time, twelve years old.'

'Twelve?'

'She tell me: "You got to learn when you young."

'Where's your home?'

'Rio Grande. Lots of land. Lots of children, too. Brothers get land. I get mules.'

Despite her inclination to be impartial in most things, she could not help comparing this adventurous Mexican with her timorous son: 'Weren't you afraid? Twelve years old?'

'No,' he said brightly. 'Men all alike, Mexican, Texican. You quick, you got a little money, is all right.'

'What was your mother like?' Mattie asked as she passed her salted pecans.

'Most beautiful girl in San Antonio. Everybody said so. Frenchman wanted to marry her. American, too. But she walk to Rio Grande to marry my father. Nine children. Wonderful love story.'

'And what will you do?'

'Make much money, New Orleans. Then help my sisters find husbands.'

When the young fellow headed up the trail with his twenty-one mules, Jubal said: 'He's the best visitor we've had since Father Clooney left.' Then he added: 'I think I'll learn Spanish, serious.' When he caught the rhythm of that beautiful language, probably the easiest on earth for a stranger to learn, he told his wife: 'When I had to argue with that Ripperda at Nacogdoches, I wanted nothin' to do with Mexicans. But now that I see this land, and a fine young man like Garza, I'm beginnin' to think that Mexico is where we'll spend our years.' She replied: 'Texas, Tennessee, they all seem the same. Catholic, Protestant, likewise.'

'But you said you respected Reverend Harrison?'

'I respect Father Clooney, but that don't make me a Catholic'

At times Jubal could not understand his thin, secretive wife. Her indifference to some things mystified him. She could work interminably without complaint. She ran the ferry, and certainly it was she who kept the inn functioning. But she always came back to her two obsessions: 'Jubal, I won't live in this cave-house much longer'

and 'Jubal, we got to get hold of that land on the other end of the ferry.'

To the first demand her husband temporized: 'As soon as we get ahead, I'll build you a real house,' and to the second he reasoned: 'You heard Austin say you can't control land on both sides of the river,' and she asked bluntly: 'Does Austin need to know?' and sometimes when the ferry was waiting on the far side of the river, Jubal would see his wife marching about the land, driving stakes to mark what she wanted.

She was doing this one day when the Karankawa struck, and only by rushing down to the river and jumping onto the raft as it slid away from the shore did she escape being killed. The Indians raged along the bank, then disappeared into the wood on that side, rampaging far toward isolated cabins, where they killed the inhabitants.

The response was powerful. A contingent of thirty well-armed men marched down to the new headquarters settlement of San Felipe, where they joined with settlers from the coast in a ten-day campaign against the Kronks. When the Brazos River men straggled back to the ferry, they told Mattie wondrous tales about their battles: 'We overtook them in their camp. Ten of us up here. Ten over here. Ten makin' the attack. Cross-fired them till they had to accept a truce.'

'Was Yancey in the fight?' Mattie asked.

'No, he watched the horses.'

'Not right for a boy to be killin' folks.'

'He better kill Indians or they're gonna kill him.'

There was a strange outcome to this inconclusive battle. One morning when Mattie had guided the ferry to the far bank, depositing two travelers headed for Nacogdoches, she heard a rustling in the woods and saw to her horror that a very tall Karankawa was hiding there, armed with an old-fashioned gun. Unable to reach the ferry as before, she reached for some stick with which to defend herself, but the big Indian put down his weapon and came forward with hands outstretched. Because Mattie had always been willing to accept as her brother any honest man she encountered, she felt no hesitancy in dropping her stick and holding forth her hands, and thus began a strange friendship with a brave the Quimpers called The Kronk.

He lived in a self-made hut beside the inn, and when he had learned a few words of English he explained, with the help of vigorous signs, that the men of his family had led the sortie against the Brazos cabins and had been practically eliminated in the retaliation: 'Sun goes down. Karankawa no more.' He spoke with great

sorrow of the deplorable time in which he lived: 'White man too strong. He break us.' He made a snapping sound with his fingers, like twigs being shattered. He was capable of real grief, as when he spoke of his women slain in the last battle: 'Babies, they best. Always hope, babies grow.' He liked Yancey, who was terrified of him, and longed to teach the boy those things fathers teach their sons, but young Quimper drew away, and one night Mattie was appalled when her son said: 'If a new battle starts, the men will kill Kronk for sure.'

When Mattie upbraided him for the insensitivity she perceived, Yancey replied: 'He's an Indian, ain't he?' and the conversation ended.

The Kronk was so helpful around the cave-house that Jubal said one morning: 'Mattie, I think that with Kronk's help we might could build you a set of real outside walls for this dugout,' but she snapped: 'I don't want no improvements. I want a real house with four walls around,' and he laughed: 'We ain't that ambitious.'

With great effort Jubal, The Kronk and Yancey chopped out some stout lengths to substitute for the vertical poles that had framed their cabin, and slowly, finishing one side after another, they inserted the heavy logs, converting their flimsy-walled cave-house into a sturdy one. Travelers familiar with the former stopping place congratulated them on the improvement, but invariably the Quimpers confessed: 'We couldn't of done it without The Kronk.'

Strangers who had often been required to fight the Indians were sometimes startled to find a real Karankawa living at the ferry, but those who settled in the area grew accustomed to the bronzed giant with the flashing white teeth. They often found him sitting with Mattie, talking in his strange way with words which only she seemed to understand. She was not afraid to ask him anything, and one afternoon she said bluntly: 'Why did you Kronks eat people?' and he explained with grunts and gestures and the few words he knew that it was not done from hunger but as a ritual, confirming victory in battle or as a source of valor, as when warriors ate the heart, liver and tongue of a gallant adversary.

'But you did eat them?' she asked and he replied: 'Good. Like turkey.'

He became a kind of unpaid servant at the inn, but in return for his help he did receive food and such clothing as he wanted and the Quimpers were able to provide. His chief contribution was as a hunter, and under Jubal's tutelage he learned to be as parsimonious with his powder and lead as Quimper himself. With a fine hunter like The Kronk available, Jubal no longer took Yancey

with him, for the boy was useless in the field; The Kronk was a skilled shot, and with his gun, which his tribe had purchased from French traders in the early years of the century, he could knock down a buffalo or trail a deer almost as well as Jubal himself. As a pair they were formidable, and travelers grew accustomed to having copious helpings of meat when they visited Quimper's inn.

Once when he returned with three slain deer, Mattie asked: 'Why do you shoot so many deer? So few turkey?' And he explained: 'Deer easy, turkey damn hard.' When she asked the difference, he said: 'Kronk sneak up, deer see. They think "Is Kronk or tree stump?" and they stand there, I shoot. But when Kronk sneak up on turkey, leader cry "By God, Kronk comin'!" and off they go. Kronk never see 'em again.'

Often in the long months of that first year before Mattie's corn had ripened or the crops matured, meat was all they had had. Months would pass without flour for the making of bread; salt was scarce; vegetables did not yet exist; and men would say: 'Last night I dreamed of fresh bread, covered with butter and sprinkled with salt. God, how I hate venison.' But when they had Jubal's honey to flavor the great chunks of roasted meat, the frontiersmen stopped complaining. 'It's uncanny how jubal can smell out a honey tree three miles away,' they said, but others said: 'He's just as good at trackin' bear. When Mattie smokes it properly, you cain't tell it from Pennsylvania bacon.' But what Jubal really enjoyed was stalking the wild turkey, for as he told the others: 'Salt or no salt, bread or no bread, that bird is delicious.'

Once a wandering Irishman named Mulrooney brought the Quimpers a bundle containing real flour, about three pounds, which he had acquired at great cost from an incoming vessel at the mouth of the Brazos: 'Could you make me some bread? I'm starvin' for bread.'

Mattie said that she could, if he'd let her keep some slices: 'Because I'm starvin' for bread, too.' But when he saw that she was preparing to mix a dough using most of his flour, he protested: 'No, ma'am! No!' and he told her that in backwoods Tejas they used half flour, half acorn, and he proceeded to take Yancey with him to gather the latter.

'No, not that kind,' Mulrooney said. 'Them's red oaks. Very high in tannic acid. Burn your gut.' What he sought were the fat, beautiful acorns of the live oak, a variety whose nuts were reassuringly deficient in tannin. The numerous but tiny acorns of the post oak he ignored completely: 'Waste of time. Not enough meat.'

When he and Yancey had a bag full of the rich-looking nuts, he peeled them and asked for a bucket of scalding water, in which

he boiled them for three hours: 'We're drivin' out the acid Now, when that's done, we boil them again for three hours in very salty water. Sweetens 'em up.'

The two boilings took most of a day, but that night he spread the blanched acorns before the fire so that they might be crushed and pulverized at dawn. When this was done he had a fine white flour almost indistinguishable from the bought variety, and from this mix Mattie made her bread.

'By God, that's good!' Mulrooney exclaimed when his first piece was smeared with honey. 'You know, Miss Mattie, you and me could make a fortune with this here bread,' and the Quimpers agreed that it was palatable. It was more than that, it's damned good,' Jubal said, and he told Mattie: 'Remember how he did it. Stay away from them red oaks.'

On a summer day in 1824, as Mattie poled her ferry across the Brazos, she saw well to the west a phenomenon which did not startle her but which did attract her attention. As she explained later: i thought nothin' of it, at first. Dark clouds along the horizon, but after a while 1 realized they were darker than any I'd seen before. And they didn't move like an ordinary storm. Just hung there, like a distant curtain.'

While the darkness intensified without any visible motion, she deposited her passenger on the far shore: 'Mister, somethin' strange. I'd watch for cover.'

'What do you think it is?' the man asked, and she said: i don't rightly know, but some place back there is catchin' rain. And if they're gettin' it now, we'll get it soon.'

When she returned to her own side of the river she called for Jubal, but he was off tracking honey bees, so she spent a few minutes outside, studying the storm: 'Yancey! Come here and see this cloud.'

When the boy stood with her, she repeated: 'Somebody upriver's catchin' a lot of rain,' and soon thereafter Jubal came running home with news that the river was rising.

For most of that long summer day the tremendous black clouds remained motionless along the northwestern horizon, depositing enormous quantities of rain, so that as dusk approached, the Brazos showed a sullen rise of nearly a foot. Jubal said: 'If it starts to rain here, Mattie, that river could really run wild.'

When the first drops did come splattering down, just at nightfall, Mattie told her men: i think I'll stay with the ferry ... in case,' and by the time she poled it across the river to the more protected anchoring place on the opposite shore, the rain was falling not in drops but in torrents, and she realized that it was

bound to lift the river level so drastically that she would have to remain there through the night and away from the turbulent center of the rampaging river. She was drenched. Hair, eyes, clothes, hands, all were soaked in the lashing rain. From time to time as she poled away from the uncontrolled flood she became aware that great trees, uprooted from the northwest, were moving down the current, and these she must avoid.

Will the cabin survive? she asked herself toward dawn when it became apparent that this was to be a historic flood, far in excess of any whose remnants Jubal had pointed out to her on that first day. Pray God it doesn't reach our hill.