Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (32 page)

THE Truitts and the Mitchells (we still haven’t reached their exact home country on the river, but we seem to have edged abreast of them in time) furnish a fair example of the dangers of charitable action—or maybe, depending on the point of view that gouges your sympathy, of the dangers of getting tangled up with the frontier breed of Texans. Ewell wrote a little about the trouble, and so did the biographer of an East Texas lawman who got drawn into its latter calamities. Armed with what they had recorded and with old clippings, court transcripts, and letters, C. L. Sonnichsen, an eloquent specialist in feuds, went to Hood County a few years back when the old ones were dropping off life’s tree like November leaves, talked to the few who were left that knew anything about it, and wrote it all down as thoroughly and straight as such matters can be written down in the myopic aftertime, blinking back through the chaparral of fear and hate and love and pride and plain bad memory.

It always seemed to me (the myopia has an advantage: that dimly seen things can be shaped as one wishes and
given the moral one wants them to have) that the trouble was one in which the civilized new townsmen showed their brushed teeth, showed they were the future. It was a lot of other things, too, and was not at bottom a town trouble, but I think it did mean that. Old Nelson Mitchell, known as Cooney, was a countryman of the ancient, sharp-edged, let-me-alone stripe, with long back hair like Chesley Dobbs and a white beard, and the opposing Truitts had a Methodist preacher among them. For the Granbury-recruited jury that finally knotted a rope around old Nelson’s neck—though in the brawl for which they sentenced him he’d been unarmed, and his son-in-law and a friend who’d done some shooting were only sent to jail—for that jury, preachers had a symbolism. So undoubtedly, and unluckily for him, did longhaired Nelson Mitchell.

He had been there a good while before the Truitts came, and was there solidly, owning a big stretch of land in and about the bend that is still called after him. He was a cowman. He raised three sons in his own rough upright mold, and one day in the late sixties or early seventies the quick generosity that went often with that way of being caused him to do a thing he must have pondered over considerably, later on.

He and his oldest, Bill, working cattle near Comanche Mountain (“the Hoary Monarch of this wide domain”), ran across a sorry encampment, a broken-down, foodless, transportless, and by now hopeless family of the migrant westerers who in those years were gushing into the country, filling it up. They were gushing in a little bit late, not having harkened quite soon enough to the word or not having been willing earlier to play The People’s games. Now they had to take the leached leavings of the first-comers or the hard
scrabble stretches the first-comers hadn’t wanted, or else to leapfrog the first-comers out onto the plains where, disliked by ranchers and having no cattle tradition to work from, they blocked out the dry-land homesteads that bequeathed a Dust Bowl to their grandchildren.

“Hot God A’mighty!” maybe Cooney Mitchell said, looking them over—the scrawny, sad kids, the washed-out, hungry faces of their elders, the old wagon with one runty horse that couldn’t pull it by himself and the other one lying dead and ready to stink beside the whole mess.… “Fixin’ to have some birthday doin’s?”

“Had a little bad luck,” maybe the Truitt man said in stiff answer, for that is who they were.

“A little. Looks like they turned the whole damn thunder pot upside down on you.”

“No need to talk that way,” the other said.

“Tetchy booger,” Cooney said to his son Bill, raising on his stirrups so that the breeze could play against his sweaty rump. To Truitt he said: “Alabama, you sound like.”

“Mississippi.”

“All right,” Cooney said. What he did then—and some of his last words later, with the prickly new hemp around his neck and the wagon about to roll out from under him and leave him pendant from a limb, reminisced back bitterly to the thing he did—was to shoot the blasphemous force of his will into the sorry outfit under the oak tree and pick them up and move them over to his place on the Brazos, and to give them jobs and help them build a cabin, and to pay young James Morgan Truitt’s preministerial expenses, including a suit of clothes better than any Cooney himself had ever worn, and so thoroughly to reconstruct in the whole family its crumbled self-respect and solvency that before long
it’d bought the next place to the north and was suing Nelson Mitchell in Granbury court over where the boundary between them lay—or. some say, over whether or not the land, originally Mitchell’s, had been fully paid for and was the Truitts’ to possess.

And won the case …

Historical differences that take people into civil or criminal courts—or both, as here—usually leave a pretty good record of themselves. It is a by-advantage of the common law’s slow-grinding, cumulative muddle. But there were a swarm of people in Texas in the seventies and eighties who didn’t want to have a pretty good record left of themselves in legal papers. In the years after the War, when the surly throngs of Spanish kine in the brush went from being practically wild meat, free for any hungry man’s taking and welcome to it, to valuable property salable for hard Yankee cash at the north end of the cattle trails, few cowmen’s hands from the Big River to the Red stayed rosy clean. The old way of brands and cow hunts, based on barter and trust and too much meat, was loose. Mavericking and related activities offered temptation that even the righteous didn’t withstand. The unrighteous, as Heel Flies or whatnot, had been hard at work with iron and rope and quill even during the War. Land titles had been forged. Vengeance for transgressions and self-defense against such vengeance brought murder. The Reconstruction tug of war between scalawags backed by Negro troops and Confederate mobs dressed in bedsheets or Comanche buckskins didn’t help. In the old courthouses—frame or log, most of them, combustible heaps—facts and the names of men stacked up in unpleasant files, ready to smear that honor which in those days was a commodity, or to make second and third offenses more painfully punishable.

So they burned down the courthouses. Scores went in that way, and scores of the quaint Victorian ones that replaced them (whose own occasional replacement now by block-modern, air-conditioned structures we as quaintly bemoan) date back to that time and that reason. The unpleasant papers went up in slip-sliding bright embers against the night skies, and the arsonists could start stealing one another’s beeves and land and killing one another all over again.

Granbury’s courthouse went thus in 1875, after the land dispute between the Truitts and the Mitchells, after the bloody fight that came out of it, after old Cooney Mitchell was in the jailhouse waiting for the rope. (What did the subsequent brawl on the square between Dr. Turner and James Counts, “desperate men” both of them, have to do with that burning, Mr. Ewell? You don’t say; you just put the two facts into one paragraph.…) Therefore no one now
(I
told you that phrase recurs) will ever know just what went on in either the land dispute or the old man’s trial for murder.

What is sure is that the Truitts had won the land suit, regardless of its details, and that on the afternoon it was over the two factions unfortunately ran into each other on the road back down into the Mitchell Bend, not over a mile or so from where Cooney and Bill had found the Truitts in the beginning.

Or were the Mitchells lying in ambush in a creek bottom, shotguns cocked, as Sheriff Spradley was told? …

Or did they, as newspapers reported, purposefully overtake the Truitts six miles out of Granbury and open fire (with shotguns; they’re in all the versions, and had a sight more to do with most Texas squabbling than Colt’s pistols), and if so how many did they kill, and whom? The father and the
eldest of the three sons, as Sheriff Spradley heard? All three of the sons, as the newspapers said? The middle brother, Sam Truitt, and the youngest, Ike, as Sonnichsen decided on his evidence?

And did old Cooney Mitchell, unarmed, caper about the outskirts on his pony hollering: “Give ’em hell, boys!” as the slaughter progressed, and did he when little Ike Truitt, fifteen years old, was screaming with the pain of wounds, yell: “Somebody put a stop to that boy’s damn mouth!” so that Bill, as the child knelt begging for pity, shot the top of his head off? … The Reverend James Morgan Truitt, M. E. Church South, said so, and maintained it in court dressed in a black suit better than any Cooney had ever worn, and made his point.

The Mitchells said (or the Mitchells’ friends told Sonnichsen that the Mitchells had told them) that the Truitts had done the overtaking on the road, and had ridden past them singing a song about an old nigger man who had gone out to steal himself a hog, but got caught. The Mitchells held their tempers and their tongues. Out of sight around a turn ahead, the Truitts turned their horses into the brush and hid till the Mitchells had passed again, then overtook them yet another time, still singing. The Mitchells said nothing.

Then little Ike (a problematical personality; here, though still fifteen years old, he is all nerved up and meaner than hell and carrying a derringer) rode back past them chanting the song’s scurrilous burden, and still couldn’t make them turn their heads or blink their eyes, and finally galloped his pony up behind Bill Mitchell with his derringer out and snapped it, a misfire, at the back of Bill’s head. An old man in the Mitchells’ party, James Shaw, saw it and blasted little Ike out of his saddle, and Bill Mitchell, watching the guns
rise, picked out Sam Truitt and shot him, and there it went.…

Was
that
the way it was?

The way it was, like the way so many things were, is a fog. All that is certain is that some Truitts were killed with shotguns and that Cooney Mitchell, Old Man Shaw, and a Mitchell son-in-law named Owens were tried for it, Bill Mitchell and another in-law having meanwhile hit the brush. Whatever Truitts had died, the Reverend James hadn’t; dimpled here and there by large buckshot, he was the major witness. On the strength of Granbury’s genteel respect for ministers’ words, Owens and Shaw went to the state prison, and old Nelson Mitchell, known as Cooney, got the rope. Before he hanged, his youngest boy Jeff was shot dead trying to sneak poison to him in his cell so that it might not be of record that a Mitchell had been executed as a criminal. Cooney’s cup was full and bitter. At the ceremonial itself, just north of Granbury, the sheriff asked the usual question.

“Hell yes, I got somethin’ to say,” Cooney told him. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

He said it. There was a big crowd to listen. He said he’d always paid his debts and no man could call him a cheat, and waited to see if any man would. None did. He said it was a damned lie he’d told anybody to shoot little Ike Truitt, though he’d needed shooting bad, and that it was that lie that had put him there on the wagon where he stood.

He called: “Jim Truitt!”

People on the crowd’s fringes turned to stare at a man in a good black suit who held his eyes on the ground. Loudly and surely, Cooney Mitchell asked Jim Truitt to cast his mind back to a time when one starving pony couldn’t pull a certain wagon any farther west, and asked him how about
that? And how about a big Bible and a suit of clothes that somebody had bought somebody else? …

The Reverend James Morgan Truitt, M. E. Church South, didn’t answer.

“All right,” Cooney said, his white hair and beard wild about his face in the October wind. “All right. Easy does it, Shur’f, Fm putt near done.”

He said: “All right. I just want to make a ree-quest. I ain’t makin’ it to Jim Truitt. I’m makin’ it to somebody else out there that knows I’ve told truth. I want that somebody to look up my boy Bill, wherever he’s hid out. I want him to tell Bill that the last single thing I had a God-damn word to say about in this world, was how I hoped Bill would never lay down and rest till he run down and kilt the liar that put his old daddy up here with a rope around his neck.”

The sheriff said, embarrassed: “Cooney …”

“I’m thew,” Cooney said. “Hit was a lot of talkin’.”

And a pair of unstarving sleek mules pulled another certain wagon quite smoothly out from under old Nelson Mitchell, known as Cooney, and that was that.

Before long, people decided that Bill Mitchell either hadn’t received the word or he didn’t want to do anything about it. They erred. For eleven years, a fugitive and a saddle tramp, he drifted about the Southwest nursing sour remembrance, working for other men under a name not his own, probably riding up the cattle trails two or three times or more. James Truitt left Granbury and prospered elsewhere.

Then in 1886 Bill Mitchell, not having forgotten a thing, sniffed James Truitt down in a village in East Texas called Timpson, where he was preaching and running a newspaper and raising a family. Bill walked in, spoke not harshly to Mrs. Truitt to make sure he’d found the right house, and
shot the seated minister through the head with a pistol, riding away afterward on a sorrel horse with a little coffee pot tied up behind on his bed roll. The coffee pot helped to trace and identify him, but even so it took the law’s bulldogs twenty-one more years to grab him out in New Mexico and bring him back, and they got scratched doing it.

Maybe Granbury was a little bit nagged by what it had done to old Cooney, or maybe it was just that later on, to keep the courts from choking on fodder, a kind of amnesty was understood to cover the multitudinous murders of the seventies and eighties which hadn’t been collected for on the spot. Anyhow, a court there vindicated Bill of the ’74 killings, and it took five more years for the concerted labor of several people to get him sentenced to ninety-nine years for the murder of the Reverend James Morgan Truitt. He went to jail finally in 1912, aged sixty-four, served two stoic years, slipped casually over the wall one night, and hasn’t yet been seen again.