No Resting Place (2 page)

The eyes of Texas are upon you

All the livelong day.

The eyes of Texas are upon you—

You cannot get away.

Do not think you can escape them,

From night till early in the morn':

The eyes of Texas are upon you

Till Gabriel blows his horn.

In my native state patriotism flourishes as does the prickly pear: evergreen and everywhere, however poor the soil, and just as thorny. The cactus may be made edible for the Texas cattle by singeing it with a flamethrower, but not even one of those things could smooth a Texan when, rubbed the wrong way, his patriotism bristles.

Born a Texan, one remains a Texan, no matter where life takes one; however, it is not necessary to be born there to be one. Texans may, like cuckoo birds, hatch in strange nests, then when fledged find their way to their own kind. Texas is not a state but a state of mind, and Texans existed before Texas did. They came to it at first, and they have come to it ever since, like Jews to the Promised Land. As Sam Houston said of himself, he was a Texan as soon as he had crossed Red River.

It was during that centennial year of 1936 that the chronic Texas patriotism turned acute and reached fever pitch. Indeed, one year was not time enough for it to run its course, be contained and subside. Both Dallas's Centennial Exposition and Fort Worth's rival Frontier Days were held over through 1937 by popular demand. I was taken with my class to both. We were reminded that ours was the only one of the states that had been an independent country all its own, and that before we were defeated southerners we had been victorious Texans.

For us schoolchildren that year it was hard to believe that Texas had begun in 1836; to us it seemed more as though it had stopped then, for the study of that annus mirabilis all but preempted the curriculum and turned back the clock. With school out, on Saturdays, in vacant lots all over town, the Battle of the Alamo was refought weekly, and the following day, in Sunday school, there was a deliberate confounding of that exodus led by Moses of Egypt with the one of Moses Austin, and of Sam Houston at San Jacinto with Joshua at Jericho. In every home, whatnot shelves accumulated commemorative plates and miniature plaster busts of Texas revolutionary heroes. The winds of bombast, seldom still, blew over the land as incessantly as the dust storms.

To this epidemic of patriotism my father was immune and from all the hoopla he stood aloof, Texan born and bred though he was, with roots reaching back to the state's, or rather the republic's, beginnings. This was not a newfound streak of contrariness in him; Father always stood aloof from anything civic-minded, public-spirited, communal. He was an outsider—indeed, it is not too much to say that he was an out
law
. Texas, as we were reminded everywhere we looked that year, had lived under six flags; grandson of a Confederate veteran, and thoroughly unreconstructed, my ornery father would have sworn allegiance to any of those six flags indifferently, not caring what its regulations were, because he interposed the right to abide only by those that did not inconvenience him. As most regulations did inconvenience my father, he was what has since come to be known as an internal emigré, living in a country all his own, where he was a law unto himself. Which may be another way of saying that he was your true Texan, your Ur-Texan, a throwback to those rambunctious firstcomers whom we schoolchildren that year were studying about—in much expurgated accounts.

As part of the celebrations, our town, like most others throughout the state, planned its first San Jacinto Day pageant. Soldiers for the two sides would be levied from the boys of the junior high school. Our mothers would tailor and sew our uniforms, if we were to be Mexicans, or more motley costumes for us Texas irregulars.

Without a trace of real interest in my answer, my father asked me which I was going to be, a Texan or a Mexican.

As none of us boys wanted to be a Mexican, yet some of us—indeed, most of us, in order to reflect the original odds—had to be, we had drawn lots. I had been the second luckiest in the draw, after only the Sam Houston himself. I was not only to be one of the vastly outnumbered Texans, I was to be one of the two heroes of the battle, the man with the most resonant name in the annals of the state, none other than Mirabeau (My-ra-bo in the Texan pronunciation) Buonaparte Lamar. A lowly private only the day before the battle, Lamar had so distinguished himself in that day's inconclusive skirmish with the enemy that Houston elevated him on the spot to the rank of colonel and put him in command of the cavalry, the first rise in that meteoric career which in just three more years would make him the second President of the Republic, succeeding Houston himself.

“That sorry rascal!” my father exploded. “Like hell you are!”

It was not the blasphemy against one of our state's great men that made this so astonishing to me. What was astonishing was that my father should have an opinion of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, that he had ever even heard of him, beyond, perhaps, knowing that the county adjoining ours to the west was named after him. My father's knowledge of history was that of a man taken out of school after only four grades and put to work on the family farm. When I say “history” I mean Texas history, for that was the kind we were taught in school—two solid years of it, to one year, later on, for the remainder of the union; but we did not begin the study of it until the fifth grade, the level my father never reached. What he knew of history he had picked up from me as I brought it home piecemeal from school, and in that he had shown no more than a fatherly interest. In fact, of all my subjects history was the one that interested him the least. Not from me had he gotten his unaccountable prejudice against Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar.

“No son of mine is going to play-act that devil!”

And thereupon my father, who lacked book learning but who had history in his blood, told me of an episode from out of the earliest years of our state not known to my teachers, and which if they had known, they would have found unsuitable, especially in that glorious centennial year, for transmission to us schoolchildren.

Whether or not to tell me this old story after all had lately been causing my father perplexity. This indecision of his was something new. He had meant to tell it to me all my life, for he felt himself singled out and charged with a duty to keep alive in us this memory of the dead, and I was his only child. It was such a terrible story, he had been waiting until I was old enough for it, or at least until I was as old as he was when he was told it. With this, my thirteenth year, that time had come. Meanwhile, my father had begun to think not only of how old I was, but of how old he was.

With this year had also come our state's centennial celebrations. All those parades, all that pomp and pageantry, all that oratory, all that Lone-Star-flag-waving roused to even louder indignation and cries for redress the throng of ghosts that haunted my father and piqued him to speak out, to enlighten, which was to say to disillusion me, with their story, of which he was the custodian. The glowing account of the Battle of San Jacinto that I brought home from school omitted any mention of the contribution that was decisive in the Texans' victory, and of the ingratitude, the perfidy and the persecution with which that contribution was repaid. All accounts omitted it, suppressed it. My father was one of a bare handful of Texans, the others being a few college professors of history, who knew about it. The impulse for him to tell me was strong. What deterred my father was my wholehearted participation in those centennial observances. Texas molds its sons early. Had he waited until too late to tell me?

Having once hesitated, my father faltered in his purpose and temporized with his ghosts. Theirs was an old, old story, and nothing that anybody could do now, certainly nothing that a thirteen-year-old schoolboy might do, could atone for the injustice they had suffered, for history's neglect of them. By criticizing the textbook version of events, held gospel by all, I would only get myself in trouble with my teachers and my schoolmates.

My father began to wonder whether his child might not be happier not knowing about some of the things that had happened on his native soil. Evidence was everywhere that ignorance was bliss and that those who got ahead in life were not the mavericks like him but those of the herd, all bearing the same brand. In inheriting the suspicions and ancient hatreds of my color and class I would have a sufficiency without the addition of one all my own. Perhaps he ought to take that old story and that tribe of troubled spirits with him into the grave. Let my heart not be a battlefield for the strains of blood that coursed through it. Let the roses that bloomed wild in the spring have no more thorns for me than for others; let them be for me, too, pretty to look at, fragrant and above all mute—not fraught for me alone with bitter memories.

The roses were much on my father's mind just then. In fact, for the past several days they had allowed him no rest. They disturbed him waking and sleeping, mentally and physically: a steady prick to his conscience, a steady throb in his right forefinger from an infection following a prick by one of their thorns.

He had gone hunting in Red River Bottom. That was the roses' territory; however, this was not their season. They would not bloom for yet another month. But it was impossible for my father ever to find himself in those woods at any time of year and not think of the roses, of the story of which they were so much a part, of which they were the sole surviving reminder, and it was this, of course, this old association in his mind, that made him imagine now that he smelled them. As real as real the scent was—and just as bitter. Such a sweet smell to everybody else—of all roses, one of the most fragrant; to him all the more bitter for their seeming sweetness. He had gone there to get away from all that saddened and disgusted him in the town: the preparations for the San Jacinto Day ceremonies—the bunting and the buncombe: all the more reason to imagine now that he smelled their bittersweet, their accusatory smell.

It was not solitude and silence that my father went to those woods in search of. To him they were populous, with a presence behind every tree trunk, and murmurous with a multitude of voices speaking in a Babel of tongues. The wind sighing in the tall pines: that was not the wind, that was the concerted, ceaseless sigh of a people persecuted, dispossessed, pursued, all but exterminated, forgotten. Quiet as a graveyard now, the woods had once echoed with a steady stream of humanity, most, but not all, of them on a one-way journey. The history books taught that the first American immigrants to Texas came in 1821. These were those Missourians, victims of the Panic of 1819, in search of a fresh start, for whom permission to found a colony had been won from the newly independent Mexican government by a former St. Louis banker, Moses Austin, who, however, died soon thereafter, bequeathing the completion of his mission to his son, Stephen F. But the Austin colonists were not pioneers, not the first immigrants. They entered and rode south through Texas over a well-traveled road, one that began where Texan began, on Red River—not a game trail but a man-made road, surely the first one in all the New World to be landscaped, beautified, a road bordered with roses that bloomed white streaked with red and by their fragrance fulfilled the colonists' dream of entering a new Eden.

Everybody now thought they were wild roses. My father was one of the few people who knew they were not wild, not even native to Texas, but descendants of imported roses carefully, lovingly set along the margins of the state's first highway, the one over which had come those founders, heroes and martyrs whom his son was being taught about in school, and, as that son was not being taught, over which had fled those who traced and blazed and cleared and decorated it—the ones who survived their massacre, that is. The roses had been in bloom then, and if the scent of them was bitter to my father now, when it was not even real but only in his mind, a product of the power of association, he could imagine how it must have seemed during that week when they were hounded out, hunted like wild animals the length of their own road, to those who had set them there.

The road lay so near to where my father stood that he could have sworn he smelled the roses although they could not possibly be in bloom yet. Lured by the promise of a new life in a new country, people had ridden over it coming from the states, from England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, people of every station and stripe, political refugees, utopians, cultists, speculators, failures, felons, soldiers of fortune, bankers and bankrupts, plain farmers, riffraff—the ordinary, the less than ordinary and the extraordinary. That very tree, that towering red oak now leafing out for yet another spring, had stood there when Davy Crockett, seeking a new life, had passed through here on his way to death at the Alamo, and Sam Houston, not yet two days ride from the wife he had left—the second one, the red one—having crossed his red Rubicon to found a red empire, and founding instead a redneck republic.

Again that scent assailed my father, so heady this time he could hardly believe that he only imagined it, unlikely as the alternative was. Never in all his many springs had he known one that forward. And yet as he crept nearer the old roadbed, drawn there by the chatter of a squirrel, it seemed to him that the scent hung still heavier on the air.

A bushy tail twitched high in the crotch of a tree. My father raised his rifle, took aim, drew a deep breath—then lowered his rifle and walked directly to the roadway, and found the roses in full, furious bloom.

It was unheard-of for them to bloom so early. Their doing so in this centennial year could only seem to my father a message sent to him, who alone could interpret it. It was as though the roses had been expressly forced so as to be out on this San Jacinto Day, reminders of a sordid betrayal connected with, yet forgotten amid, all the festivities, and an admonition to him to keep their meaning alive in me. Almost stifled by that scent, my father stood listening to the silence which for him was peopled by a host of spirits attending upon his decision to do his duty. But what was that? To whom did he owe it?