Texas

by James A. Michener

  On Tuesday, Franza and her brother entertained at John Mathuly’s seafood restaurant, and the guests, most with German names, shared an enjoyable evening ‘of fine oysters, rich crabs and other succulent viands which could not be surpassed this side of Baltimore,’ the menu boasted, ‘and equaled in only a handful of the superior establishments in that German city.’ After the meal there was singing, and at ten, ice cream, made possible by the new ice machine, was served; it was accompanied by four kinds of cookies baked that afternoon by Franziska. This was followed by more singing and a speech by Theo—‘The Unlimited Progress Possible When Rails Marry Steam’—which alluded to the impending railroad linkage of Indianola, San Antonio and Brownsville.

  When they left the restaurant, with some of the men still singing, Franziska became aware of a sharp change in the weather, for while they were dining an excessively humid wind had blown in from the Gulf, and although this disturbed her, it pleased her brother: ‘Rain! We’ve needed it since July.’

  But this wind did not bring rain. Instead, when Franziska rose next morning she found Indianola enveloped in billows of dust, and when she accompanied her brother on a visit to Captain Isaac Reed, the United States Signal Service man who now monitored storms in the area, he showed them a telegram he had received from Washington: WEST INDIAN HURRICANE PASSED SOUTH KEY WEST INTO GULF CAUSING HIGH WINDS SOUTHERN FLORIDA STOP WILL PROBABLY CAUSE GALES ON COAST OF EASTERN GULF STATES TONIGHT

  When Franziska asked: ‘Isn’t that serious?’ he assured her: ‘Government follows these things carefully, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, such storms collapse and produce no more than a slight rise in our tide.’ But later that morning, when the winds became more intense, Theo and Franza returned to the weather office, and Theo, as the elder statesman, asked: ‘Shouldn’t you hoist the danger signal?’ and Reed said: ‘Washington would warn us if such a signal was advisable. Rest easy. This storm will die.’

  Later Captain Reed did receive a frantic telegram: from Washington, warning of the immediate descent of a full hurricane, but now it was too late. Within minutes the hurricane came roaring in, and before Reed could respond, telegraph lines were whipping in the wind.

  Reed was a valiant man, and when it looked as if his Signal Service was going to be blown away, he stayed inside to screw down the anemometer so that the maximum velocity of the wind could be recorded. It hit 102 miles an hour before it and the building were simply blown apart. Reed and a medical man, Dr. Rosencranz, were struck by falling timbers as they tried to scramble away, and the incoming waves submerged them. They were seen no more.

  When the building fell, a kerosene lamp was thrown to the floor, and its flames were whipped about so violently by the roaring winds, which now gusted to 152 miles an hour, that within an incredible eleven minutes the entire main street was in flames, and residents in panic tried to escape the fire. The Hurricane of 1875, which they said could never be repeated, was now reborn with a fury more terrible than before. Theo Allerkamp, whose ships’ chandlery was struck by the first awesome blast of fire, managed to escape the instant conflagration produced when his turpentine and tar exploded into flame, and for one hellish moment he watched as the street he had rebuilt was attacked by flame on its rooftops and flood at its foundations. Buildings spewed sparks hundreds of feet into the storm, then sighed and collapsed as the irresistible flood tore away their walls.

  ‘Mein Gott!’ he cried. ‘What are You doing to us?’

  Mindful of how a hurricane worked, he shouted to those other bewildered men who saw their life’s energies destroyed: ‘Prepare for the back-surge!’ To repeat the precautions which had saved his family before, he struggled through the rising waters to his home, where his sister stood pressed against the wall, protecting herself from the tremendous winds and watching the fiery destruction of her brother’s handiwork. ‘Oh, Theo!’ she cried as he staggered up the three wooden steps which had not yet been washed away by the waters that attacked them. ‘How could such punishment come to so good a man?’

  He had no time for lamentation, even though flame and flood nearly engulfed him: ‘When the calm comes, then’s the danger.’ And he led her to the highest spot in his house, built to withstand floods such as that of 1875, and fetched ropes with which to bind her to its walls when the waters began to recede.

  This time that would not work, for when the tempestuous wind, now gusting occasionally to more than 165 miles, whipped about, it brought with it a summer’s sky of flaming meteors. The clouds were filled with embers, thousands of them, and they arched in beauty over the dark space, reaching for the houses not yet aflame.

  ‘We shall burn!’ Theo cried, not in desperation or in fear, and he ripped away the ropes that bound his sister to the wall and thrust them into her hands. ‘To the trees!’

  But before they could escape, a hundred blazing embers fell on the Allerkamp house and a like number on those nearby. In one vast, sighing gasp, heard above the howling of the wind, these houses exploded into leaping flame, and those who had not anticipated this likelihood perished.

  Waiting for a lull, Theo and his sister headed for the few trees in Indianola, scrawny things barely meriting the name, and she reached them but he did not. A wave wilder than any before came far inland, caught him by the heels, tumbled him about as if he were a wooden toy, then tossed him with terrible force back against one of the newly burning houses. Nothing could have saved him, and he died in the center of the town he had built beside the sea, and then rebuilt.

  Franziska, grief-stricken at seeing him perish, did not panic. With studious care she waited for a pause in the wind, then looked back to check where he had disappeared, lest he mysteriously appear still alive. Seeing nothing, she lashed herself as high into a tree as she could, and when the storm abated into that terrible calm which presaged the arrival of the greater danger, she climbed like a squirrel into the highest branches, but as she did so she saw a young mother with two small children, all so frenzied that none could do anything sensible. So she climbed down, all the way, and found the rope which Theo would have used, and then with her hands and knees scarred from the bark, she goaded the three others into the higher branches of the tree, where she tied them fast.

  They were there at dawn on Friday morning, when the cruel part of the hurricane struck, and from their high perch they watched the town continue burning, with more homes blazing from time to time, while the great waters of the flood began to recede.

  They came first as a slight movement back toward Matagorda Bay, then as a quickening—about the speed of a rill tumbling over a small rock—then as a surge of tremendous power, and finally as a vast sucking up of all things, a swirling, tempestuous, tumultuous rush and rage of water pulling away from the terrible damage it had caused. Now those houses which had missed the flames and withstood the first part of the flood collapsed as if from sheer weariness; they had fought honorably and had lost.

  When the raging floods were gone, and the roaring winds had subsided, and the flames had flickered out, Franziska Macnab untied her ropes and helped the others to untie theirs: ‘We can climb down now. The storm is past.’

  The two children would not find their father. Franza would not find her brother’s body. Some mesmerized survivors would not even be able to identify where their houses had once stood, for when Friday noon arrived, and the sun was back in its full August brilliance, it looked down upon a town that was totally destroyed. Indianola no longer existed, only the charred streets and the vegetable gardens with no houses to claim them showing where commerce and affection and political brawling and Texas optimism had once reigned. The incessant gamble which R. J. Poteet had said was characteristic of Texas had been attempted once more, and Indianola had lost.

  By two in the afternoon people were gasping for water as the sun grew hotter and hotter, but there was none to drink, not any in the entire town, and there were no buildings in which the tormented people could take cover. By four in the afternoon children w
ere screaming, and the collecting of dead bodies had to stop as distraught survivors made makeshift plans for the dreadful night that approached.

  Franza, conserving even flecks of spittle to keep her mouth alive, comforted the children, putting her finger in her own mouth, then rubbing it about the child’s, and in this mournful, moaning way the night passed.

  At dawn people from another town, less horribly hurt, appeared with water, and Franziska wept: ‘The water destroyed us, and the water saves us.’ Those first drops, half a cup to each person, she would never forget.

  Emma Rusk, safe in her little town four hundred miles northwest of Indianola, heard of the disaster by telegraph one day after it happened, but she paid scant attention, for she was preoccupied with her son, who each year became more difficult. In addition to his other exhibitions intended to demonstrate that he was in no way associated with the parents he despised, he had taken to eating gargantuan amounts of food. At the age of twelve he weighed more than a hundred and sixty pounds, and when his mother tried to control his gorging, he snarled: ‘I don’t want to be some thin, scared thing like my father.’

  She had wanted to slap him when he said such things, but he said them so frequently now and with such venom that she did not know what to do. Dismayed as she was by his behavior toward her—which worsened as he entered puberty and faced its dislocations, for now he identified his mother with the most specific sexual misbehavior during her time with the Indians —she was even more distraught the next year by his relations with eleven-year-old Molly Yeager, the sprouting daughter of their foreman.

  ‘Earnshaw,’ she said delicately to her uncomprehending husband, ‘I do fear that Floyd is playing dangerous games with little Molly.’

  ‘What kind of games?’

  She had to sit her husband down and explain that if Molly was the little minx she appeared to be, Floyd could fall into deep trouble if he continued to disappear with her from time to time, and when she made no headway with Earnshaw, she went directly to Mrs. Yeager, a thin, stringy woman with a goiter and a passion for singing hymns loudly and off-key: ‘Mrs. Yeager, I’m worried about Molly and our Floyd.’

  ‘For why?’

  ‘Because they’re alone a good deal. Things can happen, bad things.’

  ‘What happens, happens,’ Mrs. Yeager said.

  ‘I mean, your daughter could find herself with a baby.’

  ‘What?’ Mrs. Yeager leaped out of her chair and stormed about her kitchen. ‘You mean that hussy …?’

  Before Emma could halt her, Mrs. Yeager was on the front porch screaming for Molly, and when the girl appeared, a plump, unkempt child with a very winsome face, her mother began hitting her about the head and shouting: ‘Don’t you go into no haymows behind my back.’ There was not a haymow within a hundred miles of Fort Garner, but since this was the phrase her own mother had drummed into her, it was all she could think of at the moment.

  Molly, startled by the ineffectual blows, glowered at Emma as the probable cause of her discomfort and tried to run away, but now Mrs. Yeager grabbed her by one arm while the child spun around in a circle like a wobbling top, with both mother and daughter screaming at each other.

  It was a lesson in child discipline which Emma could neither understand nor approve, and when she left the Yeager household the two were still at it. Back in her own home, she decided that if her husband would not talk with their son, she must, and when he came straggling in with the snarled inquiry ‘When do we eat?’ she sat him down and told him that she did not want to see him sneaking off with Molly Yeager any more.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked truculently.

  ‘Because it’s not proper.’

  Her son stared at her, then pointed his pudgy right forefinger: ‘Were you proper with the Indians?’ And with this, he jumped up and fled from the room, half choking on his own words.

  It was this wrenching scene which caused Emma to speak with R. J. Poteet when next he came by on his way to Dodge City: ‘R. J., my son is a mess, a sorry mess. Would you please take him to Dodge City with you? Maybe teach him to be a man?’

  ‘I don’t like what I’ve seen of your son, Emma.’ At sixty-four, Poteet had lost none of his frankness.

  ‘How have you been able to judge him?’

  ‘I get to know all the boys, all the families we meet on the trail.’ He pointed to three of his young cowboys and said: ‘A boy unfolds the way a flower unfolds in spring. It’s time, and inwardly he knows it. Time to get himself a horse. Time to handle a revolver, time to court some pretty girl. And in Texas, time to test his manhood on the Chisholm Trail, or on this one to Dodge.’

  ‘What has that to do with Floyd?’

  ‘For the last three years, Emma, I’ve sort of extended your son an invitation to ride north with me. These other kids, I had only to drop the hint, and they had their horses ready, pestering me. Three years from now they’ll all be men.’

  ‘And Floyd did not respond?’

  ‘Your son’s a difficult boy, Emma. I don’t like him.’

  She was tempted to say ‘I don’t, either,’ but instead she pleaded: ‘Please take him. It may be his last chance.’

  ‘For you, Emma, I’d do anything.’ But when she was about to praise him for his generosity, he halted her: ‘I’m gettin’ to be an old man. Can feel it in my bones. Last winter I decided I’d go north no more. Had no choice, because Kansas has passed a law forbidding the entrance of Texas Longhorns.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, why?’

  ‘They claim we carry ticks. Texas fever. Fatal to their cattle. They’ve warned me, no more after this year. I didn’t want to watch it all come to an end, too mournful, but a lot of families around San Antone had collected steers they had to sell or go broke. So I agreed to one last trail.’ He fell silent, looking across the bleak land he had helped tame: ‘Never put together a finer team. Look at those boys, the two good men at point. I wanted this to be the best drive I ever made, and now you force that no-good boy of yours upon me.’ He sank down on his haunches and threw pebbles at his horse’s left hoof, and apparently this was a signal of some kind, for the animal moved close and nudged him.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ he said, rising and shaking her hand. ‘And I’ll bring him back to you, for better or worse.’

  It was a curious trip. Traveling slowly at fifteen miles a day, it took the herd four days to reach the Red River, and in this trial period Floyd Rusk learned a lot about herding cattle: ‘Son, the new man always rides drag, back here in the dust. That’s why cowhands wear bandannas, and since you got none, I’m going to give you mine. Gift from an old cowhand to a new one.’ Poteet had smiled when he said this, but Floyd had not smiled back, nor had he said thank you, but that night when the hands gathered at the chuck wagon, he asked: ‘How long do I ride in the dust?’ and Poteet said: ‘All the way to Dodge. Your second trip, you get a better deal.’

  Floyd could not mask his anger, and so livid did he become that his rage showed beneath the dust that caked his face, so Poteet said: ‘Same rules for everybody. If you don’t like ’em, son, you can always drop out. But make up your mind before we cross the Red River, because gettin’ back home from the other side will not be easy.’

  Floyd had gritted his teeth and accepted the challenge, and although he was almost grotesquely fat, he did know how to handle a horse, so he did not disgrace himself. In fact, at the fording of the Red he handled himself rather well, remaining on the Texas side and pushing the steers into the water with some skill.

  ‘You know how to ride,’ Poteet said with genuine approval, but this did not soften Floyd’s attitude, and during the entire crossing of the former Indian Territory he proved to be the surly, unpleasant fellow that Poteet had expected. He was by no means useless, for he knew what cattle were, but he was a decided damper on other young men, and by the time the herd reached the Kansas border, they had pretty well dismissed him.

  Poteet did not. In his long years on the range he had watched boys eve
n less promising than Floyd Rusk discover themselves, sometimes through being knocked clear to hell by some fed-up cowboy, sometimes in the thrill of showing that they could ride as well as any of the old hands, often with the mere passage of a year and the rousting about with reasonably clean, straightforward men. Poteet hoped this would happen with Floyd, and he directed his two point men to look after the boy, but when young Rusk repulsed all their good efforts, they told Poteet: ‘To hell with him. Herd him into Dodge like the rest of the cattle and ship him home.’

  Poteet did not try to argue, for he knew that with three thousand cattle behind them, more than half Longhorns, they had no time to bother with a surly, overweight brat, but he himself could not dismiss his responsibility so easily. If Emma’s son could be saved, he would try, and one day when he saw the boy gorging himself at the chuck wagon as they crossed into Kansas, he took him aside and said quietly: ‘Son, I really wouldn’t eat so much. When you want to find yourself a wife, you know, pretty women don’t cotton to young men who are too—’

  ‘I don’t want to look like my stupid father.’

  Poteet drew back his right fist and was going to lay the boy flat when he realized how wrong this would be. Allowing his fist to drop, he said very quietly: ‘Son, if you ever again speak of your father or your mother like that in my presence, so help me God, I will give you a thrashing you’ll never forget.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  Poteet stepped forward and said, with no anger: ‘Son, you don’t know it, and maybe there’s no way of telling you, but you are in the midst of a great battle. For your soul. For your immortal soul. I think you’re going to lose. I think you’re going to be a miserable human being for the rest of your life. But for the remainder of this trip, do your best to act like a man.’