Texas

by James A. Michener

  Since our June meeting was to be held in the nearby German community of Fredericksburg, Quimper invited us to spend the preceding evening at what he called ‘my home ranch,’ on Lake Travis, west of Austin. When we entered his living room we saw that he had finally triumphed over his mesquite. He had directed Cándido to cut down two hundred of their biggest mesquites—most of them not over ten feet tall or eight inches across—and from the cores of these trunks his men had cut a wealth of squares, three inches on the side, half an inch thick. Using them as parquetry, he had fitted them into a heavy cement base and then burnished the surface with heavy buffers usually reserved for marble.

  When the floor was leveled and smoothed, and after a thin silicone paste had been applied and polished to a gleaming finish, the result was a most handsome floor. The jagged patterns of the mesquite thus laid bare formed an intricate work of art: predominantly purple but with red, green, yellow and brown flecks or scars. ‘It’s a floor of jewels!’ said one delighted visitor. And it was, the neat squares of wood showing a thousand different patterns, a hundred variations in color.

  Lorenzo had triumphed, but it had not been easy: ‘Come out here to the workshed. Look at that pile of burned-out saw blades. Cutting that floor was hell.’ He looked at the stack of blades, nearly three feet high, and said: ‘Of course, doin’ the library was even worse. The blocks were smaller.’

  Our session the next day was memorable, for it consisted of three unique stages. When we convened for breakfast in Fredericksburg, one of the finest small towns of Texas, with an immensely wide main street, good German restaurants, European music and citizens eager to make visitors welcome, we were met by representatives of six of the state’s minorities: Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Scots and Wends, and we could have talked with twenty other such groups had we had the time, for Texas is truly a state built from minorities.

  When the speaking ended, the groups brought in dance teams in native costume and regional orchestras playing unfamiliar instruments, and as we applauded, older people served ethnic dishes of wondrous complexity. This was a Texas which not many outsiders imagined, and among the scores who entertained us, there was not an oilman or a cowboy.

  After lunch we drove fourteen miles east to adjacent rural parks, one national, one state, honoring Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the heart of the parks, overlooking the Pedernales, stood an unpretentious one-room house which had been converted into a recreation center. Here we held our afternoon session, at which three scholars from New York and Boston addressed us on the significance of Johnson’s occupancy of the White House. As we met there in a meeting to which the public had been invited, we could see the hill country that L.B.J. had loved, we could feel his tall, gangling presence, a sensation that was enhanced when Lady Bird herself came unannounced to invite us to refreshments at her ranch across the river. Texas history seemed very real that day.

  When we ended our meeting at six-thirty, we were handed another surprise by Il Magnifico: ‘The missus and me are throwin’ a little do back at our ranch in favor of our daughter, Sue Dene, her sixteenth birthday, and we want y’all to come. Spend the night.’ So we piled into the limousines which Rusk and Miss Cobb provided for the occasion and drove the forty-odd miles back to the Quimper ranch. As we saw that splendid rolling country of scattered oak, mesquite and huisache, Efraín said to Miss Cobb: ‘I imagine a newcomer from the wooded hills of New Hampshire or from the real mountains of Montana would find this rather ordinary. But when you’ve worked all day in steaming Houston and fly up here in your own plane on Friday night, this must seem like heaven.’

  ‘It is,’ she said.

  As we approached Lake Travis, which came into being in 1934 when the Colorado River was dammed, I commented on the incredible good luck that seemed to crown any Quimper real estate venture: ‘Do you have a crystal ball?’ and he replied apologetically in country style: ‘I swear to you on a stack of Bibles, my pappy was just ridin’ along here one sunny day in 1930 and said to hisself: “Some day they’ll build a dam here and make theirselves a lake.” So he bought seven thousand acres at sixty-three dollars each, and now it’s worth six thousand an acre, five times that much if it fronts the lake.’

  ‘How was he clever enough to foresee that?’ I asked, and Lorenzo said: ‘He had no privileged warnin’. Just believed that whenever you grab onto Texas land, somethin’ good is likely to happen.’

  At the entrance to his ranch a massive stone gateway had been erected in a style borrowed from ancient Assyria, monstrous blocks of granite piled helter-skelter but with dramatic effect; as we passed through these stones uniformed police hired for the evening directed us to an assembly area—ten or fifteen acres kept cleared by a flock of sheep—where several hundred people awaited instructions.

  After our cars were unloaded, a whistle blew, policemen waved, and a make-believe train of nine cars dragged by a tractor-locomotive pulled up to carry us to wherever the girl’s birthday party was to be held. The train took us along a country lane, through a stand of oak trees and onto another empty field. Traversing this at slow speed, it brought us into an area which caused us to gasp.

  To prove to his daughter that he loved her, Quimper had hired a complete circus: there stood the Ferris wheel, the two merry-go-rounds, the Bump-a-Car enclosure, the Krazy Kwilt Palace of Delights with its distorting mirrors, the barkers luring people into the free sideshows, and the line of cages with lions, tigers and bears. Six clowns did impossible things and the high-wire act was enthralling.

  At the height of the show the lead clown came roaring across the field in a Mercedes 450SL, vanity license plates Q-SUE, which he presented to the Quimper girl as her birthday present. Miss Cobb whispered: ‘Doesn’t every lassie get a Mercedes?’ But my attention was diverted to a scene that was taking place between Quimper and his wife. I heard him tell her: ‘Honey, we’re in trouble! We’re runnin’ out of food.’

  ‘Impossible,’ she said. ‘I baked the cookies myself. Thousands of them. And we have more than enough barbecue.’

  ‘That’s not the problem. About a hundred of our neighbors have seen the lights and they’ve come over to join in the fun.’

  It was a warm-hearted party, and by Texas-rich standards, not preposterous or even ostentatious. The Quimpers had the ranch, they had the money, and they enjoyed entertaining their neighbors. Above all, they wanted to be sure their daughter and her friends met the right kind of young people against the day when they must choose their marriage partners, for, as Mrs. Quimper said, ‘if they don’t meet people from the right schools and the right families, they might marry just anybody.’

  We were sitting in Quimper’s living room and congratulating ourselves on one of the best days our Task Force had spent when the whole façade collapsed, for Mrs. Quimper brought into the room one of the men who had addressed us that afternoon, a Professor Steer from Harvard, forty-eight years old, suave and sure of himself in his gray-touched hair, bow tie and London tailoring. ‘What a coincidence,’ he said as he reached for a drink, and settled down. ‘My son, who’s doing graduate work at SMU, is one of the young men out there dancing with the young ladies, especially a Miss Grady, and he dragged me along. I never dreamed you were the people I’d been addressing this afternoon.’

  ‘We’re mighty glad to have you,’ Quimper said, bringing him a plate of barbecue.

  The conversation started well, with Steer asking our two older men: ‘In Texas, are you considered oilmen or ranchers?’ to which Quimper replied: ‘In this state a man can have thirty oil wells and a little ol’ nothin’ ranch with a thousand acres and six steers, but he calls hisself a rancher.’

  Rusk, trying to be amiable, said: ‘I have many friends who never wear a cowboy Stetson in Texas but always when they go to New York or Boston.’

  Miss Cobb said: ‘You’ll find, Professor Steer, that Texas ranchers like to brag about their prize bull, the pilot of their airplane and their unmarried daughter, in that order.’

  T
ricked by the apparent warmth of this greeting, Steer said: ‘I’m so glad to find you here. I sort of held back on certain fundamentals this afternoon. Too many of the public listening.’

  ‘Like what?’ Quimper asked, and the professor startled me by the frankness with which he responded.

  ‘I should have pointed out that Lyndon Johnson suffered bad luck in ascending to the presidency in the way he did.’

  ‘How so?’ Quimper probed.

  ‘Well, John Kennedy, for whom I worked, was a charismatic type, handsome, well groomed, educated, able in leadership, and gifted with a beautiful, sophisticated wife.’

  As this was said I happened to be looking at Rusk, a Republican leader who had contributed to Johnson’s campaigns but voted against him. He was studying his knuckles, not looking up, so I could not ascertain how he might be receiving this attack upon a fellow Texan.

  Steer continued: ‘A regrettable aspect of Johnson’s ascendancy was that he came, in our interpretation …’ Here I noticed that Steer had subtly changed from referring, as he had in his speech, to the Eastern Establishment as them, and was now including himself in the ruling group.

  ‘We saw Vice-President Johnson as a prototypical citizen of Dallas, the city which had killed the real President.’

  Miss Cobb interrupted: ‘Dallas didn’t kill anybody. A crazy drifter from New Orleans and Moscow did.’

  ‘But the nation perceived it as a Dallas crime, and I must admit, so did I.’

  ‘Why?’ Miss Cobb asked.

  ‘I was working for President Kennedy in those delicate days … twenty-one years ago this week. I’d accompanied Adlai Stevenson to Dallas when the women leaders of your society spat upon him.’

  ‘It was not my society,’ Miss Cobb protested. ‘They were right-wing extremists. You find them everywhere.’

  ‘But especially in Dallas.’

  Since no one could reasonably contest this, Steer plunged ahead: ‘I was in the advance party that bleak November day in 1963 when Kennedy made his fatal visit. I was not near him … far off to the side when the motorcade came swinging into Dealey Plaza. But at breakfast I had presented him with the Dallas Morning News and its dreadful, irrational attack. You know what the last words he said to me were? “We’re heading into Nut Country today.” And a short time later he was dead. In my interpretation, and it remains very firm this November, Dallas killed him.’

  There was with Texans like the five of us a residual shame for what had happened back in 1963, and we were sophisticated enough to realize that some of what Professor Steer was so arrogantly reconstructing was true. The climate of Texas at that time, especially in Dallas, had been antithetical to much of what Kennedy as President stood for, even though the state had voted for him in 1960, and even though our own son, L.B.J., had been instrumental in squeaking him into the White House by the slimmest margin ever. We were not disposed to argue vehemently in defense of Dallas.

  But now Steer, obviously pleased with the progress he was making in hacking Texas down to size, continued his impetuous drive: ‘What happened was that Johnson came to impersonate the worst of Texas as opposed to the best of New England. Texas was anti-labor, we were pro. Texas was fundamentalist in religion, we were enlightened. Texas was deficient in education, we stressed it. Texas was uncouth, the voice of the barbarian, New England was gently trained, the voice of academe. Texas was cowboys and oil, the North was libraries and theater and symphony orchestras. Texas was the raw frontier, Boston was the long-established bulwark of inherited values. And what was especially difficult for us to accept, Texas was flamboyant nouveau riche, and the Northeast had long since disciplined such ostentation.’

  I saw that Quimper was about to explode, but what Steer said next delayed the fuse: ‘I grant you that in those days Texas had energy and wealth and sometimes valuable imagination. But it was not a likable place, and few in the Establishment liked it.’

  For the first time Rusk spoke, deep in his chest: ‘How exactly do you define the Establishment?’

  This was the kind of question Steer liked, for it provided an excuse to parade his skill at summarization: ‘I suppose I mean the opinion makers. The agencies that give us our mind-sets. Two newspapers, New York Times and Washington Post. Three magazines, Time, Newsweek, the London Economist, the three networks, and one special publication, the Wall Street Journal plus the faculties of the better universities and colleges.’

  ‘And what are those better schools?’ Rusk asked as if he were ignorant, and Steer obliged: ‘Yale, Harvard, Princeton and maybe Chicago. Brown, yes, and maybe Dartmouth. A few of the smaller colleges like Amherst and Williams. A smattering of the old girls’ schools, Vassar, Smith, perhaps Bryn Mawr.’

  ‘They’re the ones who passed judgment on Lyndon Johnson?’ Rusk asked.

  ‘We found him quite unacceptable.’

  Again I watched Rusk carefully, and he said no more, just kept studying his knuckles, which were now white. He was not under pressure, but he was listening intently.

  Steer, unaware of how close he was to a live volcano, proceeded with what was for him a fascinating bit of social phenomena: ‘I think Texas is destined to play Rome to our Greece.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Quimper asked, and Steer responded: ‘When Greece lost world leadership to Rome, she fell back to the perfectly honorable role of providing Rome with intellectual leadership—art, history, philosophy, logic, world view. Rome had none of these, could create none from her own resources. But she could borrow from Greece … import Greek tutors, Greek managers. And the symbiosis proved a fruitful one.’

  ‘What’s symbiosis mean?’ Quimper asked naively, even though I’d heard him use the word at our last meeting.

  ‘Interlocking relationship, each part depends on the other.’

  ‘Could the Texas-Massachusetts symbiosis be fruitful?’ Quimper asked, and Steer said he thought that perhaps it could: ‘You’ll continue to inherit our representation in Congress, and you’ll provide the money, the energy and, yes, the vitality I suppose, all very necessary if an organism is to survive.’

  ‘What will you give us in return?’ Lorenzo asked sweetly, and Steer said: ‘The intellectual analysis, the philosophical guidance, the historical memory. Believe me, a raw state like Texas will not be able to go it alone. Rome couldn’t.’

  ‘Will Texas ever be accepted? By your Eastern Establishment, I mean?’ Quimper asked.

  ‘Oh, when time softens your raw edges. When the television show Dallas slinks off the tube, if it ever does. When your petroleum reserves deplete and you can no longer terrorize us with your oil money.’ Up to this point neither Rusk nor Quimper showed any inclination to dispute our visitor’s analysis, but Steer stumbled ahead and triggered a bear trap: ‘The real test will be whether any of your colleges or universities can become first class. If they do, maybe the rest of America will be able to tolerate your extravagances.’

  Now came an ominous pause, during which I looked at Professor Garza, who was smiling quietly and shrugging his shoulders as if to ask me: ‘Why should we two sane people get mixed up in this?’

  So I was not watching when Rusk rose from his chair and straightened his drooping shoulders to their full height, but I did turn quickly when I heard him say in his deep, rumbling voice: ‘Get out of here!’

  When Steer mumbled ‘What? What?’ Rusk lost control and fairly bellowed ‘Get the hell out of here!’ and I saw with horror that he was trying to grab our visitor by the neck.

  ‘You can’t do this!’ I cried, interposing myself between the two men, but then Quimper lunged forward, as if he too wanted to throw the Harvard man out, and I looked to Miss Cobb for help, but to my dismay, she was encouraging the men.

  Before either Rusk or Quimper could reach Steer, I engineered our tactless visitor out the door and put him on the path to where his son would be. When I returned, I looked in dismay at my associates, but they showed no remorse. They had been mortally offended by the Establishment’s ren
ewal of its assault on the dignity of Texas and had absorbed all the abuse they could tolerate. They were pleased at having ejected him.

  ‘Why did you become so enraged?’ I asked, and Rusk said: ‘When a Yankee denigrates L.B.J., he denigrates Texas. And when he insults Texas, he insults me.’

  ‘You never supported Johnson,’ I said, and he agreed: ‘Voted against him every time he ran. But he was a Texan, and I cannot abide—’

  I broke in to ask Quimper if he’d ever voted for Johnson, and he said: ‘I’ve voted in various ways at various times.’

  At this point Mrs. Quimper appeared with a plate of fresh barbecue, and I was privileged to witness Quimper’s face-saving victory in his war with mesquite. When Garza asked: ‘How do you make your barbecue so delicious?’ Lorenzo took him by the arm: ‘I’ll show you!’ and he led us to a huge woodpile back of the house where rows of mesquite logs, twenty-one inches long, lay stacked.

  ‘On each of my ranches I have crews doin’ nothin’ but harvestin’ mesquite. We grow it now as a cash crop.’

  ‘What for?’ Garza asked, and Quimper said: ‘We ship it to topflight restaurants all over America. ‘Twenty-One’ in New York, the Plaza, that type. Everyone with money to spare orders Texas-style beef.’ He kicked at the pile affectionately: ‘I’m known as The Mesquite King of Texas. I’m makin’ more on mesquite than I am on my boots. Like I always said, don’t ever think Texas is licked till the fat lady sings.’ Then he stared at us and snapped his fingers: ‘Tomorrow mornin’ I’m stoppin’ all shipments to Boston. Those Ivy Leaguers don’t deserve mesquite.’

  DURING MOST OF ITS HISTORY THE CITIZENS OF TEXAS WERE poor.

  When the Garzas trekked north from Zacatecas in 1724 they were virtual slaves, with pitiful housing, inadequate food and never a second set of clothing. The early Quimpers lived in an earthen cave without knowing bread for almost a year. The Macnabs did through a ruse get land, but they were always land-poor, and when young Otto finally became a Texas Ranger he served for miserable pay, if any, and was expected to provide his own horse, gun and clothing. Because the supply of money was so rigidly controlled, he rarely had any.