Michener, James A. (82 page)

From such instruction Otto began to formulate his own interpretation of society, and the Ascots might have been surprised had he revealed it. Drawing upon what he had seen at Natchez-under-the-Hill and at Goliad, he discovered that for a man to make a mark in this world, he had better have a tough core of righteousness which he should allow nothing to scar, neither the lure of money nor the pursuit of pride. He had better identify his enemies quickly and beat them down before they had a chance to do the same to him. And it would be best if he kept quiet.

Early in their evening talks around one of Betsy Belle's homemade candles, he decided that he was not fashioned to be a scholar, because the first time Martin handed him a lawbook that explained the topic under discussion, he found that his interest quickly flagged. And whenever Betsy Belle spoke reverently of some romantic tale she had picked up from her study of history, he would dismiss it as imagination. He was a tough-minded little realist, soon to be fifteen, and he would leave the life of letters to others better qualified.

But he never dismissed the essence of what the Ascots were saying. He knew from looking into their excited faces that there was a lower order of life and a higher, and he was instinctively drawn to the latter. In every court case that Martin discussed, he found himself siding with right, and justice, and what Martin sometimes called 'the only sensible thing to do.'

These growing convictions served him in good stead when he worked with Yancey Quimper at the inn, for there he saw a

completely different type of person. To begin with, Yancey himself was about as far removed from the Ascots as one could be. For example, when the Ascot cabin needed caulking, Betsy Belle tied up her skirts, went into the Brazos, and dug the clay for it; at the inn when there was work to be done, Yancey always looked about for someone else to do it. He could in a single day find a dozen things for Otto to attend.

The motivations of the inn customers were also quite different from those of the Ascots. Everyone seemed to be conniving for some advantage or trying to acquire land or belongings owned by someone else. Arguments were settled not with carefully marshaled words but with fists or a flashing Bowie knife. Otto was by no means afraid of a fight; he knew from experience that he could control adversaries much bigger than he, but he saw that to engage endlessly in brawling was not productive.

Yet he enjoyed the liveliness of the inn, and despite Quimper's obvious defects in character, he liked being with him, for something was always happening, like the time two toughs from Kentucky stopped on the far side of the Brazos and clamored loudly to be ferried across. 'Go fetch them,' Yancey said, and Otto had gone down the steep bank to where the ferry waited, its two guide ropes attached by rings to the wire that stretched to a big tree on the opposite side. With deft hands he grabbed the forward rope, allowed the current to carry him downstream till the rope was taut, and then pulled sturdily so that the ferry moved forward along the fixed wire.

'What kind of contraption is this?' one of the frontiersmen bellowed as they climbed noisily aboard, and at midstream on the return trip, the man who had spoken grabbed the rope from Otto's hands, while his partner grabbed the stern rope, and pulling in the opposite direction, nearly upset the craft.

'Stop that!' Otto shouted, recovering the rope, but he could do nothing to move the ferry because now both men heaved on the back rope. He was stronger than they and knew better what he was doing, so they did not succeed in taking the ferry away from him in their boisterous game, but they did make orderly progress impossible.

Dropping his rope, Otto whipped from his belt the pistol that Zave Campbell had taught him to use so effectively. Pointing it at the two roisterers, he said quietly: 'Drop that rope.' When they refused, he calmly put a shot between the pair and said: 'Drop it or I'm coming after you.'

The threat was so preposterous, this boy challenging two grown men, that they began to laugh, and if Otto's pistol had had the

capacity of a second bullet, he would have blazed away at them. Instead, he leaped forward, knocked one sideways so that he fell into the river and flattened the other.

The pistol shot had aroused men in the inn, and they came streaming down to the bank. A good swimmer, seeing that the first Kentuckian might drown, plunged in to save him, while others waded out to bring the ferry to the bank. When the two travelers were at the bar drinking the watered stuff that Quimper sold as whiskey, one said: 'You got yourself a son who's a tiger,' and Yancey said: 'He ain't my son,' and they said: 'You better adopt him.'

Next morning Yancey tried to do just that: 'Otto, I'm makin' you an offer. You run the ferry, help around the place. I'll give you room and keep, and soon as there's any money, you'll get a share. Meantime, you got yourself a leg up in life.'

i'll think about that,' Otto said, and he might have accepted, for he knew he needed a home somewhere, and that continued residence with the Ascots was both impractical and unfair. He might have become a river-crossing roustabout had not Martin Ascot been called to the new town of Houston on an important court case. Taking Betsy Belle with him, and inviting Otto to ride along, Martin set out for what was now the capital city of the republic. The three-day ride southeast, across the low, rolling hills between the Brazos and the Trinity, was a reminder of what the new nation might become if it ever stabilized and found enough money to operate, for the fields were rich, the trees grew in attractive clusters, and flowers bloomed everywhere. It was a rougher land, Otto thought, than the terrain he had seen in Ohio, but it was powerful, and he was proud to be a part of it.

The first night out they slept under the stars, but on the second they found a farmhouse where the wife welcomed them and the husband was eager to talk politics: 'As soon as that drunk Houston serves out his term, what we got to do is elect a real fighter like Mirabeau Lamar to the presidency.'

'Who's he want to fight?' Martin asked, and the man said: 'I've heard him twice. He wants to kick the Indians out of Texas. He wants to fight Santy Anny and whip him proper. And he wants us to take Santy Fay.'

'That would be a lot of fighting,' Ascot said, and the farmer replied: 'Us Texians can do a lot.'

The town of Houston was a revelation: first houses built in late 1836, a bustling town of 1,200 by the spring of 1837, capital of the nation in May 1837. When the Ascot party rode in, they found movement everywhere—new stores being built at a frantic rate

and eight principal streets, each eight inches deep in mud. Betsy Belle, trying to alight from her horse, felt her left foot sinking into a quagmire, and remounted.

There were no hotels yet, but local citizens, inordinately proud of their metropolis, directed the visitors to a remarkable substitute, and when they were comfortably fitted into the private home of Augustus Allen they heard an extraordinary yarn from Allen himself: 'Yep, my brother and I came down from Syracuse, New York, a few dollars in our pockets, dreams in our hearts. We bought, one way or another,' and here he shrugged his shoulders to indicate the chicaneries he and his brother had engaged in. Losing his train of thought, he asked Martin: 'Do you know how much a hundred Mexican leagues of land is?' Before Ascot could reply, he said: 'That's nearly half a million acres, and that's what we acquired.'

'You have to shoot anybody?' Betsv Belle asked, and he chuckled.

'Well, we set aside the best of our land, here beside Buffalo Bayou, with entrance forty miles out there to the Gulf, and we decided to make this the capital of Texas. Yep, we give the government all the land they needed, free. We give churches all they asked for, schools if you wanted to start one. We give away so much damned land you wouldn't believe it, and why do you suppose we done that?'

They learned from Allen's wife that her husband had been a child prodigy in mathematics and a college professor at seventeen, 'the wizard of upper New York, they called him.' And he made no apologies for what he and his brother had done in founding Houston: 'We did it to make money. We give away lots to attract attention, then sell what's left at a good profit. There's no hotel for distinguished visitors like you, so I open my house to all who come, free.' To close the gap between his prodigious learning and the local customers' lack of it, he had adopted Texas speech and sounded sometimes like an illiterate, but on their third night in Houston, the Ascots were invited to attend a session of the Philosophical Society of Texas, held of course in the parlor of Allen's house, for he was the treasurer and motivating force.

As an afterthought, Allen had said when extending the invitation: 'Bring the boy, if you wish,' and Otto found himself among the founders and philosophers of his nation. Congress was meeting in Houston that week, so many of the legislators participated in the discussion, and Otto quickly realized that these men were much like his father: serious, sometimes robust in their humor and obviously committed to finding a constructive life. After a satisfying meal cooked by Mrs. Allen, she and Betsy modestly retired, as

if incapable of understanding the august subjects about to be discussed, while the men listened attentively to two essays: The Federalist Papers, Key to the American Democracy, and Fielding's Tom Jones : A Threat to Public Morals?

Otto could not fathom either the concepts involved in these discussions or the vigor with which they were pursued, but he was proud when Martin Ascot entered the debate with such forceful comment that in the midst of the proceedings Mirabeau Lamar, president of the society and vice-president of the nation, proposed: 'Gentlemen, our young lawyer from Xavier County has spoken much sense here tonight. I recommend that he be made our corresponding member from Xavier.' The proposal was approved by acclamation, after which Lamar reported: 'At the conclusion of our last meeting several members, including Anson Jones, Thomas Rusk and James Collinsworth, suggested that the topic then debated with such illumination be continued into this meeting, should time permit. Well, time does permit, and 1 would like our esteemed secretary, David Burnet, to state the question.'

Burnet, an older man who had served briefly as president of the fledgling nation during its formative period, rose, coughed, and read the title of the debate which had so exercised the members: 'Women: Why Have We Had No Female Painters or Musicians?' and when the pros and cons of this question were discussed, often with great heat, even Otto could understand the proceedings. It was conceded by both sides—anti-women, eighty-eight percent; pro-women, twelve percent—that females were flighty, inconsistent, unable to pursue a goal over any extended period and apt at any moment to fly off the handle, and that these weaknesses disqualified them for any sustained intellectual or creative work such as the composition of a Mozart symphony or the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, two examples of art with which most of the members seemed to be familiar.

But granted these deficiencies, was the female physique such that it automatically precluded greatness in the arts? The majority decided that it was. Just what these limitations were, Otto could not decipher, for when they orated on this fascinating subject, the members inclined to talk in a code that he could not penetrate. However, several speakers referred with great emotion to 'the sublime work of art which women are capable of, the birth of those children on whom the future of any society must and does rest.' Such statements were always greeted with cheers, but toward the end of the evening Martin Ascot rose and said: 'I have heard much comment about the inability of women to sustain any effort through an extended period. Anyone like me who has lived on the

far frontier and seen what a wife can accomplish is astounded by her energy.'

From his seat in front, ex-President Burnet grumbled: 'Ascot, you're so young.' And the meeting ended.

Its effect on Otto was magical. Even he could see that these earnest men, stuck away on a frontier so different from either Baltimore or Cincinnati, were striving to maintain their interest in the entire world, and especially in those wellsprings of human behavior from which goodness came. He liked these men and their pompous oratory. He was proud of how a younger man like Martin fitted in. And he saw with remarkable clarity that he was intended to be a man like them, and not a man like Yancey Quimper. When he returned to Xavier County he would tell Yancey that he did not want the job at the Ferry. But what he did want, and where he would make his home, he did not know.

If Otto was confused as to where he would find his home, Texas faced an equal quandary. Shortly after the establishment of its government, a plebiscite had been taken, and the citizens produced an irrefutable plurality in favor of joining the United States immediately, and upon any reasonable terms offered, but to their chagrin, the nation to the north rejected the offer. 'We ought to march to Washington!' customers at Quimper's Ferry bellowed, and Yancey predicted: 'We'll see the day when Washington comes beggin' for us. And what will we do then?'

'Spit in her eye!' the belligerents cried, but in his kitchen Martin Ascot provided a more cautious analysis: 'This dreadful panic makes everyone afraid of making bold moves.'

'I think what people are really afraid of is another war with Mexico,' Betsy Belle said, but her husband struck the deeper chord: 'It's slavery. Those damned Northerners will never let us come in as another slave state.' And he was right, because year after year the Northern senators excoriated Texas as a nest of backwardness and slavery, and annexation seemed impossible.

Now the contest for the allegiance of Texas became an international affair, with three nations involved, and with debate in the Ascot kitchen divided three ways. Betsy Belle, who had learned French from a Louisiana slave who had reared her, hoped that France would assume the control she had tried to exercise back in the 1680s when Texas was theoretically French, and from time to time this seemed possible and even likely: 'I should love to see this vast area civilized. We have great affinity with the French.'