Texas

by James A. Michener

  When this disposition was laid out, he revealed the secret: ‘Then all you do is step off the distance from B to C on this bank, and you have the exact distance from B across the river to A.’ He encouraged his son to measure the distance, and Otto said: ‘Four hundred and twenty-nine feet. That’s a big river.’

  ‘And not too deep at this point.’

  The essence of this vast land was beginning to seep into their souls, as it did with almost all who stayed long enough to savor it, and that night Otto reported to his father: ‘When I was little I wanted to be a boatman on the Mississippi. Now I want to live in Texas.’

  ‘So do I,’ his father said, and that night they slept with deep contentment.

  They were wakened in the morning by loud barking from Betsy, who was nipping at the heels of a brash young man heading upriver with two bundles slung across his back. The first contained clothing, the second the awkward tools of a blacksmith, and it seemed likely that these parcels represented a lifetime’s accumulation.

  He said: ‘Isaac Yarrow, renegade from North Carolina, with a brief halt in Tennessee.’

  When Finlay asked ‘Where are you going?’ the young man spat and growled: ‘Got thrown out of San Felipe de Austin …’

  ‘Isn’t that the capital of these parts?’

  ‘It is, and a sorrier spot God never made. Thirty-nine houses, six criminals to a house. Each house hidin’ someone wanted for embezzlement, armed robbery, seduction or murder. The alcalde drifted into town smellin’ distinctly of tar and feathers, and the esteemed sheriff still has four different wives in four different states, none dismissed by divorce.’

  This evaluation was so contrary to the one Macnab had made in the Carthaginian that he had to protest: ‘The immigrants we sailed with weren’t like that, not at all.’

  ‘You saw the goods. I saw the bads.’

  ‘You’re telling the truth?’

  ‘Texas is a magnet for criminals.’

  ‘If it’s that bad, what did you have to do to get thrown out?’

  Yarrow leaned against a live oak and scratched his head: ‘They brought seven counts agin’ me. Mostly I was too outspoken and too blasphemous.’

  ‘Where you heading?’

  ‘Seems like anyone with spirit who comes to Texas moves on to some-wheres else. Missouri, Arkansas, Me, I’m headin’ for California. Man can live decent there.’

  ‘I thought men could live decent in Texas,’ Finlay said, and Yarrow growled: ‘If you want to kiss ass. I never cared for that.’

  They joined forces for the short journey to Quimper’s Ferry, and when they sighted the sturdy dog-run which served as inn, Yarrow grew rhapsodic: ‘Now, if all people in Texas was like Mattie Quimper, this place would be a hard-workin’ paradise.’ When Finlay asked who Mattie was, Yarrow said: ‘If she was twenty years younger, I’d marry her.’

  ‘But what’s she do?’

  ‘She runs the ferry. She runs the inn. And she befriends people like me who’ve been kicked out of other places.’

  As they approached the inn, Yarrow bellowed: ‘Hey, Mattie!’ and to the porch of the dog-run came a gray-haired woman in her forties, lean and worn from incessant labor. As she peered to see who was shouting, a young man of nineteen joined her, but remained slightly behind, as if seeking the protection of her petticoats.

  ‘Good God, it’s Isaac!’ the woman called, and with a spry leap from the porch on which two travelers were asleep in their blankets, she ran to the blacksmith and kissed him. ‘They tell me you’ve been in trouble down to San Felipe.’

  ‘Got run out of town. They said “You’ve got twenty-four hours to git,” and I shouted back “I’ll live to see grass growin’ in your goddamned streets.” ’

  ‘Sshhh,’ Mattie whispered. ‘We got clergy inside.’

  ‘Father Clooney?’ Yarrow cried with obvious enthusiasm. ‘Did he get out of jail?’

  ‘No, sad to say,’ Mattie reported. ‘They sent officers from Saltillo to arrest him. Charged him with bein’ too partial to the norteamericanos.’

  ‘How long’s he been in chains?’

  ‘They didn’t chain him. Not after the first month. But he’s been in jail a year. Miracle he ain’t dead.’

  ‘So who is the God-shouter in there?’

  ‘Reverend Harrison.’

  Yarrow spat: ‘That sanctimonious …’

  With a quick swipe of her hand, Mattie slapped the blacksmith on the cheek: ‘You shut up! Reverend Harrison has come down to see if I’ll marry him.’

  Yarrow caught Mattie in his arms and gave her a little waltz, feet off the ground. ‘Mattie, old girl! You don’t have to waste yourself on that Psalm-singer. I’ll stay here and run the ferry for you.’

  ‘Weren’t you run out of the whole Austin grant?’ she asked, and Yarrow replied: ‘I was. But I’d stay here and protect you from Reverend Harrison.’ He spoke the name with such disgust that the two Macnabs supposed the clergyman to be an ogre, but when he walked out the door onto the porch, gingerly avoiding the sleeping men, they were surprised by his commanding appearance.

  ‘Isaac!’ he said with unfeigned cordiality. ‘What evil are you up to now?’

  ‘You’ll be gratified to learn that your prophecy came true. They ran me out of San Felipe.’

  ‘High time,’ Harrison said, stepping down and throwing his right arm about Yarrow in a brotherly embrace. ‘We welcome you here, but we’re going to watch you … most carefully.’

  ‘I’m on my way to California. Just stopped off to warn Mattie Quimper not to marry you.’

  Harrison laughed: ‘Bad men flee to Texas. Always have. And the worst move on to California. Always will.’

  Mattie, who continued her work as if the marriage under discussion involved someone fifty miles away, invited Yarrow and the Macnabs into the inn for breakfast, and when eggs, bear strips and pecans were on the table she asked Harrison if he would say grace, and the tall, forbidding man asked the others to bow their heads while he raised his face toward heaven: ‘Almighty Father, watch over Thy renegade son Isaac as he heads for California. And welcome to Thy bosom the strangers who join us this day. Protect Mattie who does Thy work so endlessly, and speed the day when Thy true religion can be preached openly in these parts. Amen.’

  When heads were raised, he placed his hand on young Otto’s arm and said: ‘They haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Otto, and this is my father, Finlay Macnab of Baltimore.’

  ‘Someone has taught you manners, young man.’ Then he smiled at Finlay, asking: ‘What brings you to these parts?’ and Macnab said: ‘Freedom.’

  ‘You’ll be welcomed here. What church?’

  ‘Presbyterian. Many generations in Scotland and Ireland.’

  ‘One of God’s chosen religions,’ Harrison said. ‘Here we’re all Methodists.’

  ‘Not me,’ Yarrow interrupted, at which Harrison warned: ‘God has His eye on you, Isaac, and so do I.’

  ‘What’s this about a marriage?’ the blacksmith asked, and Harrison said, blushing: ‘I had not supposed that so delicate a matter would be discussed publicly,’ and Yarrow replied: ‘If a lovely lady like Mattie Quimper has to be protected from a lecherous old clergyman like you, Harrison, it should become public’

  ‘She needs a man to help her,’ Harrison said with real tenderness as he watched Mattie moving about the kitchen. Smoothing down her apron, she lifted a flat metal slab from the fire and brought to the table her latest batch of salt-and-honey pecans, which she placed before Otto.

  ‘Let ’em cool. Then eat up,’ she said. She offered Finlay some and invited Yarrow to sample them, but she took pains to see that when the slab came to rest, it was before Reverend Harrison.

  ‘Now tell me,’ she said, ‘what brings you to the Ferry, Mr. Macnab?’

  Finlay was too embarrassed to reveal his secret, especially since a Methodist minister looked on, but Mattie could guess: ‘You hoped that Father Clooney would be here, didn’t you? You want to
convert so you can obtain land?’

  At this blunt disclosure of his plans, Finlay began to stammer, but he was saved by his son, who said openly: ‘Zave Campbell, he’s already Catholic, with papers from two different priests proving it, and he got his land right away. And if he can find a Mexican lady to marry, he’ll get four times as much.’

  To the surprise of the two Macnabs and Yarrow, but not to Mattie, for she now knew Reverend Harrison well and favorably, the austere Methodist said: ‘Have no embarrassment, Macnab. It’s an immoral law and to obtain your land it’s quite forgivable to subvert it. Swear allegiance to the Pope but remain Presybterian in your heart.’

  ‘Is that your counsel?’ Macnab asked, and Harrison said: ‘I give it constantly. And do you know why? Because within five years at the most, Texas is going to break away from Mexico. And we can all worship as God wants us to, in His churches.’

  Yarrow interrupted: ‘You’re convinced God is a Methodist?’ and Harrison shot back: ‘He certainly isn’t a papist.’ When Yarrow said: ‘New Testament says he is,’ Harrison growled: ‘That’s your interpretation.’

  Then he changed his tenor completely: ‘Isaac, return to San Felipe. Make peace with the officials. Because when war comes we’ll need men like you.’

  ‘I gave Texas its chance. And it rejected me. I’m for California.’

  The newcomers spent three enjoyable days at Quimper’s, talking about the future, teasing Reverend Harrison about his courtship, and stuffing themselves with Mattie’s good food. Harrison was certain that revolution of some kind was inevitable; Yarrow doubted that weaklings like Stephen Austin would ever muster courage for such an act; and Finlay Macnab was startled by the frankness of the speculation: ‘I thought everyone agreed that Texas was to remain Mexican. Austin said so in his letter to me,’ and he produced that document.

  When Yarrow finished reading it he said: ‘The epistle of a weakling,’ and when Harrison took the letter he said: ‘He’s masking his true beliefs.’

  As talk turned to other matters, Yarrow asked boldly: ‘Harrison, why do you insist that Mattie needs your help when she has this fine son who could run things better than you ever would?’ and Harrison replied: ‘She’ll be in real trouble if she relies on that one.’

  Yarrow and Macnab had been studying young Yancey, and the more they saw of him the more they agreed that the flabby lad needed some strong influence to force him into Texas ways. ‘He’s just not Texican,’ Yarrow said. ‘He’d get along fine in Virginia, or even better in Massachusetts, where they don’t have such high standards for manliness. But in this climate I fear for him.’

  What the two men disliked about Yancey was the latter’s unwillingness, or inability, to take charge of the inn and the ferry. ‘No woman should be doin’ the work Mattie does,’ Yarrow said, and one afternoon he grudgingly told Harrison: ‘It could be a proper move, Reverend, if you was to marry her. How old are you?’

  ‘I’m a year older than she is. Lost my wife to the cholera.’

  ‘In principle I still oppose the marriage,’ Yarrow said, ‘but in practice …’

  ‘How old are you?’ Harrison asked, not belligerently, and Isaac replied: ‘Very old in the ways of the world, and I can see through you. What you want is that ferry. You know it’s a gold mine.’

  ‘What I want,’ Harrison said, ‘is a free Texas. Stay and help us win it.’

  But Yarrow, one of the best men to emigrate to Texas during these turbulent years, had seen enough of it. The good men like Austin lacked courage and the bad ones, like the fugitive murderers and embezzlers at San Felipe, lacked judgment. He could see no hope for the colony but he did foresee a kind of permanent tension between Mexico and the United States. He concluded that the best chance for a man of inventiveness and daring lay in California, so on a bright morning in January he bade the residents at Quimper’s farewell, shouldered his two packs, and headed west. That afternoon, when all were still lamenting his absence, Yancey Quimper shouted from the porch where he was resting: ‘Mom! Here he is!’ and the Macnabs assumed it was Yarrow, changing his mind.

  Instead, it was a bent old man, Father Clooney, now sixty-seven but looking much older because of his stay in the Mexican prison. ‘Good God!’ Mattie cried as she ran to him. ‘What did they do to you?’ He was limping so badly that he had to be helped by two young priests, who explained: ‘The new governor pardoned him. He was supposed to find refuge in Zacatecas with the Franciscans, but he insisted on coming back to his old parish, and here he is.’

  ‘Will you stay with him?’ Mattie asked as she helped him onto the porch. ‘No, we’ve been assigned to Nacogdoches, and in the morning we move on.’

  The three clerics slept that night on the porch; Mattie offered Father Clooney a bed, but he said: ‘I’ll stay with me lads this last night,’ and in the morning he blessed them as they started for the remotest outpost of the Mexican empire: ‘You’ll like it up there, lads. Good people and souls to be saved.’ As they departed he stood with Mattie, watching as Finlay Macnab poled the ferry across the Brazos: ‘How wonderful it must be for them, Mattie. To be young, facing a new world, and knowing there’s chapels to be built and pagans to be saved.’

  He was not at the inn three days—painful days of recuperation from his travail—before couples started arriving to have their informal marriages solemnized, and now Reverend Harrison felt it obligatory to withdraw. ‘No need,’ Father Clooney said, ‘I’m sure they’d appreciate your blessing too,’ but Harrison was worried more for the old man than for himself: ‘You speak kindly to a Methodist, and the Mexicans’ll throw you back in jail.’

  ‘I think they’ll let me run my course,’ Clooney said as he wearily prepared for the weddings.

  He was a tired old man now, worn out by the race of life. He had seen enough of frontier living—especially the hideous wars with Indians when each side tried to demonstrate its superior claim to savagery, and the petty rebellions, with fifteen Mexicans dead and sixteen Americans—to know that man was a frail creature who lived on this earth but briefly, and rarely well. A good horse, a reliable woman, sons to protect the old age, and enough to eat, that was the best man could hope for, and if perchance he heard far echoes of God and Jesus, never seen but surely there, so much the better. ‘Life,’ he told Mattie one evening, ‘is a whole lot better if you have reassurances.’

  He liked a good steak, cooked over embers, and he was especially fond of white bread smeared with butter, but flour was so rare in Texas that he had sometimes gone for a whole year without tasting bread: ‘A hunk of meat, two Mexican flapjacks made of corn, and now and then a beer, that’s my penance for having left those fine cooks in Ireland.’ Having lived in four different lands—Ireland, England and Louisiana, briefly, and Mexico—it was his measured judgment that Texas cooking was the worst in the world: ‘But I eat enough of it to keep me belly fat, and I do believe that when I die the table set in heaven will be a mite bit better.’

  He rose at dawn on the wedding day to take breakfast with Mattie, who asked him: ‘Should I marry Reverend Harrison?’ and he advised her: ‘If ever a woman sees a reasonably good man, take him.’ She then asked if he considered Harrison a good man, and he said: ‘He’s a man of God, but also a man of revolution. Does one destroy the other? I don’t know.’ She asked if he thought the revolution which Harrison preached would materialize, and he said: ‘A year of jail knocks desire for revolution out of a man.’

  Then suddenly he dropped his weary head on the table, and for a moment she thought he was weeping, but when he lifted his face he was smiling: ‘I’m so ashamed, Mattie. I’m covered with disgrace.’

  ‘Why? Jail is forgivable when you go there for the reasons you did.’

  ‘Oh, jail has nothin’ to do with it. But recently I’ve caught myself thinkin’ “I hope it all hangs together for the rest of my life, then to hell with it.” What a shameful surrender.’ He studied her across the rough wooden breakfast table, then confessed: ‘Harrison is
the voice of the future. I’m the past.’ Now tears did come to his eyes, and he did not try to hide them: ‘In Ireland, I wrecked me parish. Here, I converted never an Indian. In Mexico, I wound up in jail. And the years have fled so swiftly.’

  Mattie rose and went about her duties, leaving him there, and after a while he went onto the porch, where he supervised the placement of the rude altar from which he would preach to the seven couples. When this was completed he returned to the doorway, looked in at Mattie, and said, his face beaming with love for the old days: ‘Matt, old girl! I do wish your husband and The Kronk were here this day. I miss them.’

  Marriage, to Father Clooney, remained the most sacred of rites, but when the ceremony was over he did enjoy a bit of celebration and was especially appreciative if it involved some warming spirits. That evening the dancing, the fiddle-playing and the shouting were lively, but next morning Clooney was up early, showing no signs of excessive wear.

  ‘Now, who are the ones who seek conversion in order to grab a wee bit of land?’ he asked as the day began, and when four families, including Macnab and his son, were lined up on the porch, he proceeded mechanically to make them technical Catholics. But if he took such political conversion lightly, Finlay could not, for when he stood next in line and realized that he must soon take a solemn oath abjuring John Knox’s religion for which his Highland ancestors had died rather than surrender it to the Pope, his knees began to shake, his throat went dry, and a crazed look came into his eye. He recalled those great battles in Northern Ireland between the Presbyterians and the papists, the centuries of struggle of which he had been a part, and he found himself powerless to move forward.

  Father Clooney had seen these symptoms before, always in people who had come to Texas via Northern Ireland, and in his compassion he made it easy for Finlay and Otto to step aside. That day the Macnabs were not converted, the shock was simply too great, but that night Clooney talked with both father and son, for he insisted that Otto be present: