Michener, James A. (202 page)

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: Td 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, Sena-

tor 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.

Cobb found in the distraught area one local leader who seemed to have as firm a grasp of reality as he, Cobb, had. It was Mayor Simon Garza of Bravo, who toured the Valley ceaselessly, organizing relief operations, and as the two men worked together, Cobb ten years the older, they formed a pact that would endure through the years ahead: 'Garza, you make more sense than anyone else I've met. People live on the land, the rancher out west, the citrus grower down here, the farmer up the coast. We're restricted by what the land will allow us to do, and when we forget that, we're in trouble.'

Garza said: i read an editorial the other day. It said: "God has gone out of His way to remind us that even Texans are mortal." These are devastating years, but we can build upon them.' And the two men, optimists as all Texans are required by law to be, went quietly ahead with their plans, however fragmentary, to save the citrus industry in the Valley, ranching on the high plains and water supplies everywhere.

But Cobb, like his valiant ancestors and like his aunt Lorena up in Waxahachie, was an ebullient man, and as he toured his state, proud of its ability to fight back, he savored the many hilarious behaviors that made Texas different from any other state he knew. And as he witnessed these crazy things he jotted down brief notes, which he mailed back to his wife so that she, too, could laugh.

In Jefferson, I attended in the schoolhouse a lecture entitled The Heritage of Robert E. Lee,' and at the end the chairlady said, voice throbbing with emotion: 'Now if we will all stand, please,' and with her hand over her heart she led the singing:

'1 wish 1 was in de land of cotton Old times dar am not forgotten

Fervently we sang of a glory none of us had ever known but whose legends were etched on our hearts, and when we reached that marvelous chorus, one of the most powerful ever written, I was shouting with the others:

'In Dixie Land I'll take my stand

To lib and die in Dixie.

Away, away, away down South in Dixie.'

When the song ended, with some of us wiping our eyes, I said to the man next to me: 'If a bugle sounded now, half this crowd would march north,' and he said: 'Yep, and this time we'd whup 'em.'

. . . You and I have often talked about what our favorite town in Texas was. North Zulch always stood high. Oatmeal was good. You liked Muleshoe. The other day I drove through my favorite. Megargel, population 381, with a sign that says watch us grow. As I drove through I saw a pickup with the bumper sticker support jesus and your local sheriff. Carry on, Megargel!

... At Larkin, where they have that famous statue you wouldn't let me photograph, I saw something I hadn't noticed before. On the courthouse lawn were two bold bronze plaques, one proclaiming that for three glorious years during the 1920s the Larkin Fighting Antelopes had been state champions in football, the other that one night in 1881 the notorious one-armed gunman, Amos Peavine, had slept in Larkin prior to his gunning down of Daniel Parmenteer, respected lawyer of the place, and as I studied the two memorials I had to reflect upon the mores of the small Texas towns.

I'm sure Larkin must have produced dedicated women who taught their students with love and constructive influence. It surely had bright boys who went on to become state and national leaders. It must have had brave judges who tamed the western range, and men who built fortunes which they spent wisely. And there must have been citizens of no wide repute who held the town together, perhaps a barber or a seamstress on whom the weak depended. I can think of a hundred citizens of Larkin that I would like to memorialize, but what do we do?

We erect monuments to a murderous gunman who slept here one night and to a football team whose coach and most of whose players came from somewhere else. )ust once I would like to drive into a Texas town and see a bronze plaque to a man who wrote a poem or to a woman who composed a lasting song.

. . . Returning from the session on catchment dams, I had the radio on and heard the song I'm going to recommend as the official state song of Texas, because it honors the two noblest aspects of our culture, football and religion: 'Drop-Kick me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life.'

... 1 grow mournful when I hold a water meeting in some little town that used to flourish but is now dying. There must be hundreds of such places doomed to disappear before the end of the century, and I've constructed Cobb's Law to cover the situation: 'If a town has less than four hundred population and stands within twenty miles of a big shopping center, it's got to vanish.' The automobile determines that and there's not a damned thing we can do about it. Texas, always dying, always arising in some new location with some new mission.

I love the redneck songs of Texas, 'San Antonio Rose,' 'El Paso,' and the new one I've memorized so I can sing it to you when we're traveling:

Blue flies lazin' in the noonday sun,

Dogies grazin' at their rest, Old steers drinkin' at the salty run . . . This is Texas at its best.

Sleep on, Jim, I'll watch the herd, Doze on, Slim, fly northward bird. All the range is peaceful.

He had a chance to sing this ballad to his wife when she accompanied him to two water meetings held by chance in two of the truly bizarre places in Texas. The first was the schoolhouse in the little oil town of Sundown, southwest of Levelland. The feisty town fathers, discovering that the oil companies would have to pay for whatever the board legally decided, opted to have the finest school in America. So for a total school enrollment of only a hundred and forty pupils they built a seven-million-dollar Taj Mahal, featuring a gymnasium fit for the Boston Celtics, an auditorium finer than most New York theaters and an Olympic-sized swimming pool under glass.

'What staggers me,' Cobb told his wife, 'is that in the pool they teach canoeing. Yep, look at those two aluminum canoes, and there isn't any water within miles. When I asked about this, a member of the school board said: "Well, some of our kids may emigrate to Maine, where canoeing is real big." ' Mrs. Cobb preferred the miniature condominium built into the center of the school: 'What's it for?' And an official explained: 'We want to teach our home-ec girls how to make beds.' The superintendent's office was special: directly under it at a depth of thousands of feet,

rested an oil well, drilled at an angle. 'It's how we get our petty cash,' an official said.

But what gave the Cobbs renewed hope for Texas every time they saw it was an amazing structure in the roughneck oil town of Odessa, where the oil rigs Rusk had been unable to sell even at a heavy loss rusted in the sun. There, years ago, a young woman schoolteacher without a cent had fallen in love with William Shakespeare. Driven by a vision that never faltered, she had begged and borrowed and scrounged until she had accumulated enough money to build an accurate replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. There it stood in the sandy desert, full scale, and to it came Shakespearean actors from many different theaters and countries to orate the soaring lines of the master.

'We don't do many of his historical plays,' the director told Cobb. 'Our customers prefer the love stories and the gory tragedies.'

Til be sending you a check one of these days,' Mrs. Cobb said, for the Globe was kept alive by families like the Cobbs who felt that Shakespeare added a touch of grace to the drylands.

As Cobb left the meeting at which, speaking from the Shakespearean stage, he had pleaded for water legislation, he stopped and looked back at this preposterous building: 'I love the craziness of Texas. It's still the biggest state in the Union . . . without Eskimos.'

Maggie Morrison had been shocked by the murder of her husband, not by the fact that his shady behavior had resulted in the shooting, for she had anticipated something like this, but by the fact that it was Roy Bub who had done it. She knew him to be a man of intense integrity, and for him to have pulled the trigger added extra pain.

After the verdict was returned, a proper one she thought, she learned that she stood to inherit all of Allerkamp, a fair portion of which morally belonged to Roy Bub. With the honesty which characterized her, she flew to Dallas to consult with Rusk: 'I cannot keep Allerkamp. Much of it is Roy Bub's, but I can't offer him an adjustment because it would look as if we had conspired to have my husband eliminated.'

'Allow the will to be probated. Take Allerkamp and keep your mouth shut.'

'To do that would strangle me.'

'Maggie, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I've taken care of Roy Bub. What we call a finder's fee.'

'What did he find?'

'Allerkamp. Before Todd died, the scoundrel was preparing to

sell me Allerkamp. He was going to quit the exotic business.'

'What about Roy Bub?'

Tour husband never gave a damn about him.'

'I'm not surprised. Houston ruined Todd. When we first came down we held family meetings: "Kids, Maggie, we're going into this deal and we could lose our shirts." We shared everything. Then, when he began to shave corners, we knew only the honest parts. Finally we knew nothing.'

'Your husband and I agreed on a fair price for the place. I'll show you the papers. His lawyer, mine will confirm their authenticity. You should allow the deal to go through.'

'What will it mean to me?'

'Four million dollars.'

The deal did go through, and on the day it was settled Maggie initiated three moves which symbolized her changed attitudes. She drove out to Allerkamp to inspect the manner in which Roy Bub Hooker had laid out the seven main areas that would make it one of the best exotic ranches in Texas, and when Rusk explained how it would be used, she told the partners: 'You're putting the place to good use. May it succeed beyond your dreams.'

The second thing of importance she did was surrender the family's fancy condominium along Buffalo Bayou. As she confided to her children: 'I feel uneasy sitting here and looking across the way at those three towers of The Ramparts, thinking how I bought them at distress from the Mexicans and sold them to the Canadians three weeks before the hurricane. It haunts me... seems immoral.'

She moved instead to a beautiful, dignified condominium well west of the center of town, The St. James, where she bought one of the smaller units on the twenty-third floor for $538,000 and spent another $92,000 decorating it. There, overlooking a park, she did the brainwork for her real estate business, driving to her office early each morning.