Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘There isn’t that much money in the world,’ Roy Bub said. ‘We paid very heavy for the Allerkamp acres.’

  ‘I think it could be managed,’ Rusk said. ‘If it could be, would you run the place? I mean really first class, everything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be interested in no chrome motel, Mr. Rusk, like some of them others.’

  ‘To hell with the customers. I mean the animals.’

  Roy Bub thought a long time as to how he should reply, and then decided to share his vision of Allerkamp: ‘Mr. Rusk, if you have the money, and they tell me you do, one of the best things in this world you could do with it is put together a real game refuge on the Pedernales. Sure, we’ll rent out fields for hunters and charge ’em like hell for the shootin’ of game that can easily be replaced … eland, elk, zebra. But in the back fields, where you only go with cameras, we could hide the animals that are in danger.’ He stopped, walked about the room, then said: ‘Helpin’ to preserve an animal that might disappear from this earth, that would be a good thing to do, Mr. Rusk.’ And before Ransom could respond, Roy Bub added: ‘I thought that’s what Morrison and I would be doin’, not shootin’ sables for a few lousy bucks.’

  They spent the next two days in the Driskill, drawing maps and meeting surreptitiously with Rusk’s lawyers and real estate men, and when they were through they found themselves with an imaginative design for a master exotic-game ranch covering 44,000 acres along the Pedernales, with a small contributory stream running in from the north. It was divided into seven major fields, each of which would be defined by game fencing eight and a half feet high. It would contain the old Allerkamp and Macnab buildings as lodges for guests, but a central administrative building just inside the gates would also be required. ‘Low key,’ Rusk said, ‘like the best buildings in Africa.’

  ‘How do you know Morrison will sell?’ he asked Mr. Rusk, and the latter said: ‘For money he’ll do anything. Don’t worry about his acres. We’ll have them.’ And he added: ‘When the deal goes through, Roy Bub, I’ll insist that he give you a share of the purchase price,’ and Roy Bub said: ‘You can try, but he never surrenders a nickel, especially if it’s an Indian head worth nine cents.’

  It was Roy Bub’s job to figure the cost of the fencing, which Rusk proposed erecting right away, and when Roy Bub placed the figures before Rusk, he was apologetic: ‘You see, we’ll have to rebuild that fence along the Pedernales. Morrison wanted to use every inch of our land and he put the posts too close to the river. Floods wash them out. And we have to fence both sides of the creek. To do the job right, and I’m ashamed of these figures, almost eighty miles of fencing at about ninety-five hundred per mile, that means well over seven hundred fifty thousand dollars just for fences, let alone the animals.’

  Rusk turned to his real estate men: ‘Let the contracts right away, but get a much lower price than that ninety-five hundred.’

  When the second day ended, Rusk and Roy Bub shook hands, after which Rusk’s Austin lawyer said: ‘Mr. Hooker, you’ll have ten million dollars for the purchase of animals. Scour the dealers and the management areas, but get the best prices possible.’

  ‘Ten million?’ He gasped, but Rusk placed his arm about him and said: ‘This isn’t an ordinary ranch. This is a Texas ranch.’

  Two nights later, as Rusk was at his Larkin estate watching the armadillos, his Austin lawyer called: ‘Mr. Rusk! Have you heard?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Roy Bub Hooker has just shot Todd Morrison. Three shots. Stone-dead.’

  There was silence, then Rusk’s quiet voice: ‘Have Fleabait Moomer call me … immediately.’

  • • •

  In his historic defense of Roy Bub Hooker, Fleabait made several prudent moves. Claiming local prejudice, he had the venue changed from Gillespie County, in which the Allerkamp Ranch stood, to Bascomb, a more rough-and-ready county just south of Larkin where juries were more accustomed to a good murder now and then. Also, he employed two private detectives to trace every business deal in which Todd Morrison of Detroit—which was how the dead man would be invariably described during the trial—had ever been engaged, whether in Michigan or Texas.

  The county prosecutor in Bascomb, having heard of these investigations, summoned his first assistant and gave him the stirring news: ‘Welton, I’m not going to prosecute the Roy Bub Hooker case. You get the assignment. Now, don’t thank me. Frankiy, I’m running out because I have no desire to face Fleabait Moomer with the local press looking on. You’re young. You can absorb the punishment.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the Yale Law School graduate asked.

  ‘You’ve never seen Fleabait in action? Suspenders and belt, both. Snaps the suspenders when he throws off some rural expression like “Of course bulls are interested in cows, but only at the right time.” ’

  ‘I’m sure I can handle that. Besides, the case is cement-proof. Hooker did it before five witnesses, three of whom heard him utter threats at the killing of the sable antelope.’

  ‘Welton, you miss the point. Fleabait is not going to defend Roy Bub. He’s going to convict Morrison.’

  ‘Not if I—’

  ‘Welton, it doesn’t matter what you do, or what the judge does. Fleabait is going to conduct this trial, and he is going to condemn Todd Morrison of crimes so hideous that your jury is going to commend Roy Bub Hooker for having removed him from the sacred soil of Texas.’

  ‘But that won’t be allowed.’

  ‘Allowed? Fleabait determines what is allowed. Two bits of advice. Study up on Michigan and Detroit, because they’re going to be on trial, not Roy Bub. And when Fleabait stops, sticks both hands under his coat and begins to scratch, hold your breath, because what he says next will blow your case right out of court.’

  ‘I’ve handled exhibitionists before,’ Welton said, whereupon the older man warned: ‘But Fleabait Moomer is not an exhibitionist. He believes everything he does. He’s protecting Texas against the Twentieth Century.’

  Mr. Welton of Dartmouth and Yale Law required only one morning to nail down his case, and an irrefutable one it was: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I shall show you that Robert Burling Hooker, known as Roy Bub, threatened his trusting partner Todd Morrison with shooting, and I will bring three witnesses who heard the threat. I shall show you that two persons of excellent repute heard the argument between the two men on the day of the shooting, and I shall put five men on the stand who actually saw the shooting. Furthermore, I will bring you the gun that did the shooting, and an expert to prove that it was this gun that fired the bullet which killed Todd Morrison. Never will you sit on any jury where the evidence makes your vote so automatic. Roy Bub Hooker killed his partner Todd Morrison, and you will be present at the murder.’

  Fleabait, scowling at his table, challenged none of this evidence, but he did go out of his way to show extreme courtesy to Todd Morrison’s widow, who would sit every day of the trial in somber dignity, accompanied by her daughter, the famous baton twirler from the University of Texas, and her son-in-law, Wolfgang Macnab, the giant linebacker of the Dallas Cowboys; cautious members of the Cowboys’ staff had deplored his association with a murder trial and had even hinted that he might wish to take a hunting trip to Alaska, but he said: ‘If Beth’s family is in trouble, I’m in trouble,’ and sat stone-faced as Fleabait’s plodding defense paraded before the court unsavory details of his father-in-law’s life.

  Mrs. Morrison’s son, Lonnie, the electronics expert, also attended each day with his wife, to whom Fleabait was also unctuously courteous. Said one watcher: ‘You’d think he was defendin’ the Morrisons, not Roy Bub.’

  Ransom Rusk did not attend the trial, even though he was paying for the defense; the state did not know that Roy Bub had also threatened to shoot him, and Fleabait was certainly not going to introduce such incidental evidence. But when the trial recessed for a long lunch on the morning of the third day, Fleabait jumped in his car and drove not to the restaurant where lawyers ate,
but twenty-two miles up the road to Larkin, where he consulted with Rusk in the latter’s mansion: ‘It’s possible I could be wrong, Rance, but from watchin’ Mrs. Morrison closely, I’m convinced that if we could get her to testify, she’d support everthin’ I’ve been tryin’ to prove. She knows her husband was a jerk. She knows he hornswoggled everybody he ever did business with.’

  ‘Leave her alone. She has a heavy enough burden.’

  ‘Her son-in-law would testify the same way. He’s a clever lad. He must know.’

  ‘Fleabait! Don’t touch the family!’

  ‘I’m pretty sure we can win without their evidence. But it would be neat to startle the court with a request for a surprise witness.’

  ‘You old fraud, you know you can’t use a wife to testify against her own husband.’

  ‘That’s what the layman always thinks. There are a dozen ways—’

  ‘Fleabait!’

  ‘You want that boy to walk out of that courtroom free, don’t you?’ With Fleabait, an accused client was always a boy; his nefarious opponent, whether living or dead, a corrupt, evil man.

  ‘I certainly do. And you’re the man to do it.’ At the door, as the lawyer started back to the courthouse, Rusk said: ‘In my divorce trial, when you accused me of sodomy, sort of, that was just good clean fun. This case is real. Haul in your biggest guns, Fleabait, but leave the Morrisons out of it.’

  On the fourth day of what should have been a simple trial, Fleabait spent the entire morning interrogating the other two members of the original Morrison-Hooker hunting quartet, the oilman who had transferred his affections to Scotland, and the dentist who loved dogs, and rarely did he have two witnesses who supported a case more handsomely. Each man in his own way proved that he was a dedicated sportsman, and each disclosed secrets of Todd Morrison’s behavior which proved that he had never been. ‘He was not a true sportsman,’ the oilman said with a decided English accent. ‘He never gave the game a fair chance.’

  ‘You mean he would fire at a quail sitting on the ground?’ Fleabait asked in horror.

  As soon as the oilman replied ‘He would,’ the county prosecutor leaped up: ‘Objection! Distinguished defense counsel is leading the witness.’

  ‘Objection sustained. The jury will ignore that last reply.’

  Fleabait stood apart, as if detached from the proceedings, and shook his head as if in pain. At the same time he muttered to himself, but loud enough to be heard throughout the courtroom: ‘Shot a sittin’ bird. I can’t believe it.’

  He then sighed, returned to the trial, and asked the oilman: ‘And he shot a doe out of season, with no license to shoot one even in season?’

  Again the charade was repeated: ‘Objection!’ ‘Sustained.’ And Fleabait brooding aloud: ‘A doe out of season. I can’t believe it.’

  And then, patiently: ‘Did Mr. Hooker, the man you call Roy Bub, did he ever do such things?’

  ‘Oh, no! Roy Bub taught us all what sportsmanship was.’

  ‘Now, as to the financial arrangements covering your lease at Falfurrias, I understand that when you pulled out, some rather harsh words were spoken.’

  ‘I believe that was the dentist … about his dogs.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Very harsh words indeed. We’ll get to that. But in your case it dealt with money matters, did it not?’ And in this patient way the sleazy shifts and dodges of Morrison’s operations were unraveled.

  The dentist was an admirable witness.

  ‘You say you never fired a gun at the Falfurrias lease. What in the world did you do?’

  ‘I trained my dogs.’

  ‘You brought your dogs along so that the other three could profit from their skill, which I am told was extraordinary.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You surrendered all your free time so that others could enjoy the hunt? I call that true sportsmanship. Was Todd Morrison a sportsman?’

  ‘Didn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘When you quit the foursome, I believe you had words with Morrison. About his financial dealings.’

  District Attorney Welton objected to this line of questioning, charging that without any kind of substantiation, it was mere hearsay, but the judge overruled the objection.

  ‘In my dealings with Morrison, he invariably tried to chisel me. He was not a likable man.’

  ‘But you were his partner, so to say—in the lease, I mean?’

  ‘At first I thought he had no money, so I sort of carried him. Later I discovered that he had more than I did. He was not a pleasant person.’

  On the fifth day Fleabait practically destroyed Todd Morrison, proving much, intimating more, and then, after a dramatic pause, thrusting both hands under his armpits and scratching. The jury, having been alerted to watch out for this, smiled knowingly.

  ‘Now, you know and I know, that people from Michigan do not adhere to the same high moral principles that govern behavior in Texas. They can be fine people by their own lights, and they can get along fairly well in the more relaxed moral climate of Detroit and Pontiac. But when they move to Texas, as so many do, they find themselves confronted by a much stricter moral code. Here a man is supposed to behave like a man. A sportsman has certain clearly defined patterns of acceptable behavior, which the newcomer from Michigan has a difficult time honoring.

  ‘I have nothing against Michigan. I’m sure there are fine people in Michigan, many of them. But when they come into Texas they are held to a nobler code of behavior, and to tell you the truth, many of them fail to meet the mark. They are not ready for Texas. They are not prepared to face our more demanding standards.

  ‘Todd Morrison was such a man. I do not want you to judge him harshly, because he knew no better. He had not been raised with the clean wind of the prairie blowing away the cobwebs that entangle human beings. He never rode a horse across the plains. He was not trained in the harsh lessons of honor and trust and sportsmanship. I do not want you to condemn this poor dead man who lost his way in a new and more exacting land. I want you to forgive him.’ (Here he scratched again.) ‘And I want you to understand why an honest, God-fearing Texan, born in the heart of good sportsmanship, felt that he had to shoot him. You surely know by now that Todd Morrison, this pathetic stranger who never fitted in, who could not obey our strict code of honor, deserved to die.’

  The foreman of the jury asked the judge if it was obligatory for them to leave the jury box before handing in their verdict, and he said: ‘It would look better,’ so they marched out and marched right back in.

  During Sherwood Cobb’s first two years as a member of the Water Commission he could make no headway in his campaign for a sensible water plan for Texas, but now two natural disasters struck which awakened the state to the fact that it lived in peril, like all other areas of the world, where though the perils might be different, all stemmed from the inherent limitations imposed by nature.

  Drought hit some portion of Texas about every ten years, but the state was so large that other areas did not suffer; however, about once each quarter of a century great portions of the state were hit at the same time. Farms were wiped out, ranches were decimated, and land-gamblers were reminded that there were definite limits beyond which they dare not go. In 1932 the Great Drought had struck in Oklahoma, reaching Texas in 1933 and converting large areas of both states into dust bowls, and 1950 had delivered a savage drought which lasted seven years. Now another crushing dry spell gripped the western half of the state. Water holes went dry, rivers that were supposed to be perpetual failed, and even a supposedly safe coastal city like Corpus Christi was forced to institute water rationing.

  Now when Cobb moved about the state, seeking to generate support for his plans, people listened, and he told his wife: ‘I used to say we’d have no serious approach to our water problems till the year 2010. A few more years of this drought and you can advance that to about 1995. But I want to see it happen in 1985!’

  He went to all parts of Texas, pleading with farmers,
ranchers and businessmen to devise a water system for their state, but in addition to talking, he acted, sometimes twenty hours a day, to rescue ranchers who were about to lose their cattle. He arranged for grasslands in the unaffected eastern half to truck in cattle from the arid areas and water them without cost till the emergency waned. He organized auctions at which ranchers with no water at all could sell their animals to buyers from other states whose fields did have water, for as one rancher who had to sell at distress said: ‘I’d rather see my cattle live and make a profit for someone else than stand here and watch them perish.’ And Cobb persuaded other Texas cattlemen to adopt the same attitude.

  In short, Sherwood Cobb acted in this emergency the way his ancestor Senator Somerset Cobb had responded to the disasters of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and as another ancestor, Senator Laurel Cobb, had acted when great changes were under way in the 1920s: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. Like Ransom Rusk gritting his teeth and bearing his enormous financial setbacks, Cobb accepted the challenge of the natural ones, but in the midst of his constructive work Texas was struck with a final assault of such magnitude that even Cobb reeled.

  Folk legend said that once every hundred years snow fell in Brownsville, the southernmost city in Texas and a land of palm trees and bougainvillaea. On Christmas Day in 1983 the thermometer along the Rio Grande dropped far, far below freezing, and the results were staggering.

  When Cobb arrived two days after Christmas on emergency assignment from the Department of Agriculture, he found entire grapefruit orchards wiped out by the excessive cold. Avocado trees were no more. Orange groves were obviously destroyed. And the famous palm trees of Corpus Christi and other southern towns were dead in the bitter winds. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost in this one terrible freeze, so that communities who had watched their stores close because of the fall of the peso, now saw their agriculture destroyed by a fall in the thermometer. The Valley, staggered before, now lay desolated.