Texas

by James A. Michener

  She now thought more kindly of her son than she had in the past, for at twenty-five he was becoming more like a man. He was still grossly overweight, some two hundred and fifty pounds, and his wife, Molly, was much the same at two-twenty. But they had produced two lively girls: Bertha, aged four, and Linda, eleven months. The children looked as if they were going to have their grandfather’s ranging height and their grandmother’s lively attitude toward the world about them. They showed no signs of being especially intelligent, but Bertha did seem to have her mother’s gift for organizing her little world in the way she wanted.

  Emma judged that her son had a fighting chance to make something of himself despite his surly temper and his abhorrence of his father, for Floyd could work; the trouble was, as Emma saw it: ‘He never sticks at anything. If I had to leave the handling of our cattle to him, heaven knows what would happen.’ Fortunately, she could rely on Paul Yeager, two years older than Floyd and two centuries wiser. The Yeagers now occupied a considerable acreage north of the tank, but as the father pointed out to Emma one morning: ‘Earnshaw gave us our first two hundred acres, but he’s never entered the deed at the courthouse. Would you remind him that my boy and I are putting a lot of work into those acres? We’d feel safer …’

  ‘Of course you would! I’ll tell him to get jumpin’.’

  In mid-December she told her husband: ‘Earnshaw, it isn’t right to leave those Yeagers dangling without title to their land. Go to the courthouse and fix that up, please.’

  ‘Thee is right!’ There was no argument about the propriety of formalizing the gift, and Earnshaw said that he would attend to it as soon as he and his logicians had ushered in the new century properly.

  The seven men who had sided with Rusk in his defense of reason were now having a high old time preparing to greet the new century; no church would help them celebrate, for it was already acknowledged that God had ordained 1900 to be the year of change, and troublemakers like Rusk and his gang were seen as disrupters of the peace. Their argument that the first century could not possibly have had ninety-nine years had long since been disposed of, and they were largely ignored as they went about the serious business of greeting their new century.

  Denied the use of any public building and supported by only one of their eight wives, these stubborn citizens met at eleven on the night of 31 December 1900, with Rusk uttering this prediction:

  ‘Mark my words, and we must get this into the Defender as our prediction, in the year 1999 the citizens of this town will relive our debate. Those with no sense of history or responsibility to fact will fire cannon and light bonfires as the last day of that year draws to a close. And I suppose there will be talk of God’s preference, too, same as now. But the knowing ones will gather on the last night of the year 2000 to greet the twenty-first century as it really begins on the first day of January 2001.

  ‘I don’t drink, but I do propose a toast to those valiant souls a hundred years from now. It is something, in this world of shifting standards, to respect the great traditions, and tonight I can think of none finer than the one which says: “No century can have ninety-nine years.” Gentlemen, with my water and your wine, let us toast common sense.’

  It was rumored later, after the tragic events of the evening, that Earnshaw Rusk, the Quaker who personified sobriety, had drunk himself silly with wine at his false New Century, but others like Jim Bob Loomis, who had built the bonfire at the real celebration, argued that God had intervened because of Rusk’s blasphemy over the false beginning. At any rate, when Rusk left the celebration and started to cross the old parade ground in the shadow of his beloved courthouse, two young cowboys from the Rusk ranch rode hell for leather into the courthouse square, in about the same way their fathers had invaded Dodge City.

  Earnshaw saw the first young fellow and managed to sidestep his rearing horse, but he did not see the second, whose horse panicked, knocked Earnshaw to the ground, and trampled him about the head.

  The fifty-nine-year-old Quaker was in such strong condition that his heart and lungs kept functioning even though consciousness was lost, never to be regained. For three anguished days he lingered, a man of great rectitude whose body refused to surrender. Emma stayed by his bed, hoping that he would recognize her, and even Floyd came in to pay his grudging respects; he had never liked his father and deemed it appropriate that Earnshaw should die in this ridiculous manner, defending one more preposterous cause.

  On the fourth day a massive cerebral hemorrhage induced a general paralysis, but still he held on; it was as if his mortal clock had been wound decades ago and set upon a known course from which it would not deviate. Indeed, as the doctor said: ‘It looks like he refuses to die. He’s dead, but his heart won’t admit it.’

  On the sixth day his damaged brain deteriorated so badly that Death actually came into the room and said softly: ‘Come on, old fellow. I’ve won.’ But even this challenge was ignored. Clenching his hands, Earnshaw held on to the sides of the bed, and his legs tried to grasp the bed, too, so that when the end finally came, they had to pry him loose.

  On the day of the funeral four Comanche rode into town from the reservation at Camp Hope, and at the graveside they were permitted to chant. Floyd Rusk and his wife were infuriated by this paganism and this hideous reminder of what had happened to Floyd’s mother decades ago, and they were further outraged when Emma Rusk, with no ears and a wooden nose, joined the Indians in their chant, using the language with which her ill-starred husband had hoped to tame these avengers of the Texas plains.

  The tragedy at Lammermoor, for it could be called nothing less, had begun one morning in 1892 when a field hand ran to the big house, shouting: ‘Mastah Cobb, somethin’ awful in the cotton bolls.’

  Laurel Cobb, the able son of Senator Cobb and Petty Prue and now in charge of the plantation, hurried out to see what minor disaster had struck this time, but he soon found it to be major. ‘Half the cotton plants have been invaded by a beetle,’ he told his wife, Sue Beth, when he returned.

  ‘Much damage?’

  ‘Total. The heart of the lint has been eaten out.’

  ‘You mean our cotton’s gone?’

  ‘Exactly what I mean,’ and he took her out to the extensive fields to see the awful damage, this sudden assault upon their way of life.

  That was the year when the boll weevil first appeared in the fields of East Texas, and in each succeeding year the scourge became more terrible. Entire plantations were wiped out, and there was no countermeasure to halt this devastation. The weevil laid its eggs in the ripening boll, and as the larvae matured they ate away the choicest part of the lint. When the weevil finished, the plant was worthless.

  When times had been good, Cobb was like everyone else in Texas: ‘I want no interference from government,’ but now when trouble struck he expected immediate help, and he was the first in his district to demand that something be done. A young expert from A&M, a most gloomy man, was sent to share with the local planters what was known:

  ‘Cotton is indigenous to various locations throughout the world. India and Egypt, for example. But our strain comes from Mexico, and a very fine strain it is, one of the best.

  ‘When it jumped north it left behind its major enemies. But now they’re beginning to catch up. The boll weevil came across the border into Texas first. Seems to move about two hundred and ten miles a year. Soon it’ll be in Mississippi, Alabama. It’s sure to move into Georgia and the Carolinas.

  ‘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. Fiel
ds 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?’

  ‘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 Vicksburg, 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 Devvy 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.’

  ‘I’ve 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: ‘I’d 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?’

  ‘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 we
evil 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 I talked with you during those dark days in Jefferson. We’ve wrestled with the little devil and come out ahead. First thing you have to do, Cobb, is plant a variety of cotton that bolls early. Earlier the better, because then you 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.