Read Michener, James A. Online
Authors: Texas
For a boy of ten, there was a beautiful world to be explored. It was spring, and the fields along the Guadalupe were studded with fascinating trees: the wild persimmon, the thorned huisache, the delicate pecans. There were the taller trees, too, that he had missed in those desolate flats by the sea: the post oaks, the cottonwoods, the ash, and always that persistent half tree, half shrub which fascinated him with its gnarled branches and sharp thorns, the mesquite. Sometimes as he wandered among his trees he would come upon a wild boar tusking the earth, or fawns grazing, or the silent slither of a copperhead, the noisy warning of a rattler.
Each evening, when he returned home, he found that Maria had prepared some new treat, for she was a most ingenious woman, capable of transforming the poorest materials into something delicious, and he grew to love the tortillas she made so patiently, kneeling before the stone metate as she beat the boiled corn into the gray-white mixture she later baked on the flat rocks.
But he liked especially the peasant dish she made with whatever bits of meat her lodgers might provide: bear, buffalo, venison, possum, goat, beef, all were alike to her. Collecting a few onions from her garden and red chili peppers that grew wild, she followed an unbroken ritual, which she explained to Otto in her flowing Spanish: 'You must have two pans. Brown the meat in this one so it looks good. In this one put a lot of bear grease, the chopped chilies, the onions and a bit of garlic if you can find it.' She was generous in the amount of grease she used, because she wanted the final dish to be golden brown in color and with lots of nourishment for her hard-working men.
When the two pans were properly heated on the coals and a rich smell was pervading the kitchen, she took from a treasured hoard imported from Monterrey or Saltillo small samples of two valuable spices, oregano and comino, and after measuring out the proper portions in a pot, she mixed in all the other ingredients with a flourish, stirred well, then placed the pot back on the coals. She would never allow any beans to be added to her dish: 'No true
Mexican puts beans in chili.' The result, after hours of careful cooking, was a rich, spicy, aromatic meat dish whose principal flavor was a marvelous mix of red-hot chili and oregano.
But she never served it alone. In the evening before she made this chili con carne she threw into a pot a large helping of beans, any kind available, and these she soaked overnight. She refused ever to cook a bean until it had been soaked, i think God would strike me dead if I just threw beans in cold water and cooked them,' she told Otto. They must be soaked.' She also insisted upon sieving them three times through her fingers: To sort out the little rocks. Many a person has lost a tooth biting into rocks, but not in my beans.'
She rose early in the morning, simmered her soaked beans for two hours, then boiled them for two more. When they were well done, she mashed them, added a little oil and fried onions, then fried them lightly in a pan. 'Now they're ready to eat with chili,' she told Otto, but she was most careful to see that the two dishes never mixed. Each was to be respected for its own uniqueness.
With such food and affection Otto had never been happier, but one aspect of his life along the Guadalupe did cause him worry
He was a true Macnab, descendant of a clan that had stolen cattle for hundreds of years, and he had seen how his father and his dear friend Zave had gathered strays during their trip along the Natchez Trace, but his developing sense of right and wrong had warned him that such behavior was criminal, and he was pleased when his father dropped the habit. Now he watched as Campbell instructed Benito in the tricks of bringing into his care any cattle or horses that did not have a specific home, and some that did.
Otto went to his father, pointing out that in Texas men burned marks on the flanks of their animals to prove ownership, and he had seen in Zave's fields animals with several different brands. Finlay dismissed his fears: 'All Campbells are like that.'
Worry of a more subtle kind was caused by Benito, now twenty-six, for slowly the boy of ten was beginning to realize that his Mexican friend had a violent and often vicious temper. Benito would pummel any Mexican workman who displeased him; often Otto saw that he wanted to punch Zave too, but was afraid; then his neck muscles would tremble and he would turn away and spit. In training mustangs he was needlessly cruel, and when Otto protested, he laughed: 'Horses and women need to be beaten. Then they become the best.' Otto, who had cringed when drunken men had thrashed their easy Under-the-Hill women, asked if Maria's Mexican husband had ever beaten her, and Benito snapped: 'Plenty, and she deserved it.'
Statements like that bewildered the boy, for he had witnessed Benito's ardor in furthering his sisters' interests, and he remembered his thoughtfulness in bringing Mattie Quimper those presents: Sometimes I don't understand him. It's like he has a dark side.
Maria had other concerns, for when she was satisfied that her home in the dog-run was secure, and that her norteamericano husband was a good man, she began her campaign to find equal stability for her sister Josefina. Whenever the men complimented her cooking, she told them: 'Josefina did it,' even though Otto knew she hadn't. Any fine sewing was done by Josefina, and occasionally Maria would say to Finlay: This one, she's a good girl, believe me.' When Josefina smiled, Maria would ask: 'See that lovely, crooked smile she has? It came from our mother, Trinidad de Saldaria, a refined lady from San Antonio.'
Despite this constant advocacy, Macnab showed no interest, until one noon, when the stew was extra good, thanks to Josefina, Maria said in Spanish: 'Don Finlay, did it ever occur to you that if you married Josefina, you could get a whole league-and-a-labor next to ours?' Macnab said nothing, but he did sit straighter. 'And when Xavier and I die'—she pronounced the name Hah-vee-EHR —'who would get our land but Otto?' Now Macnab was all attention. 'Don Finlay, can you imagine your son coming into possession of two leagues and more?'
On this day Finlay made no response, but often during the next month, while Maria continued to stress her sister's abilities, he thought of the good land along the river which Josefina, as his wife, would enable him to claim, and she became increasingly attractive. One afternoon he rode in to Victoria to talk with Martin de Leon, who held rights to this huge tract of land, an entitlement from the government in Mexico City in 1824, and without identifying Josefina, he asked whether a converted Catholic would also be ceded a league-and-a-labor if he married a Mexican woman.
'Of a certainty,' De Leon assured him in Spanish. Then De Leon said in good English: 'But it would be good if you would caution your friend Xavier about fooling with other people's horses. Tempers can grow very short in Tejas.'
Finlay did speak to Campbell, but not about cattle rustling. He asked: 'Zave, what would you think if I married Josefina? And claimed on the league next to yours?'
The big man rocked back and forth for some time, staring at the prairie, which could be seen from his porch: 'Your wife dead?'
'Divorced.'
'Legal?'
'Yep.'
'Marry her. Land is land.' But later, when Macnab was off tending cattle, Zave asked Otto: 'What happened to your mother in Baltimore?' and the boy replied in some confusion, for his memory of his mother was clouded: 'Things happened, and we left.'
'Was there a judge?' Zave asked.
'There was a lot of yelling,' the boy replied, and Zave said: 'I bet there was.'
The big man never mentioned the matter again, but when Finlay suggested going back to Quimper's Ferry for the wedding, Zave said: 'More better we use the priest from the mission at Goliad.'
'Why?'
'I hear the new priest serving Quimper's is very strict. Lots of questions. Maybe even letters to Baltimore.'
'You mean the priest at Goliad . . . he'd be less rigorous?'
'He's always in a hurry. Better we use him,' and Zave was so insistent that in the end he and Maria, Finlay and Josefina, Benito and Otto rode their horses over to Goliad, where the ceremony was performed. When the priest asked in Spanish whether any man had reasons to oppose this marriage or knew of any impediment to forbid it, both Zave and Otto looked straight ahead.
As soon as the newly married couple returned home, Finlay hurried in to Victoria and laid claim to his league-and-a-labor. He received it promptly, with one hundred and sixty acres as a bonus for his son.
With full encouragement from Maria and Zave, the Macnabs delayed building their own house; they stayed on with the Campbells, adding an improvised room to match Benito's, thus increasing the value of their holdings.
Under Benito's tutelage, Zave was becoming an expert in breeding mules and herding wild longhorned cattle; Maria and Josefina made some of the best food in the area; Otto helped everyone; and Finlay specialized in marketing the various goods they were producing. They also offered the dog-run to the transient public as a kind of inn, one dollar a night, four dollars by the week. Guests slept in a third lean-to which Zave and Benito built, and the rambling affair became one of the better stopping places in that part of Texas, with respectable meals provided by the wives, plus occasional treats that Finlay acquired through sharp trading with ships putting into Matagorda, or from caravans of merchants hauling their goods overland from Mexican cities south of the Rio Grande.
The informal inn had both a good reputation and a bad one. j Travelers said: 'No better hospitality than what these women provide at Campbell's. But Zave is exceptionally sharp. Got to keep your eye on him.' Travelers as far away as Nacogdoches and Bexar said this of the posada west of Victoria.
It was Finlay who made the proposal that since mules and cattle were prospering at the plantation, as it was called by travelers from Georgia and Alabama, why did not he and Otto, enlisting Benito as their guide and two of his relatives as helpers, take a herd to New Orleans, where Louis Ferry had promised to buy them at a good price? 'Victoria to the Sabine, maybe two hundred and fifty miles. Sabine to New Orleans, about the same,' estimated a man who had traveled it, whereupon Finlay said: 'We drove cattle lots farther than that on the Trace,' but Zave corrected him: 'Trace is four hundred and eighty. I walked every step, three round trips.'
When it was agreed that such a drive was practical, Finlay hurried down to Matagorda Bay and posted an inquiry to Mr. Ferry, and in a surprisingly short time, less than four weeks, had an answer:
Bring all the mules and longhorns you can manage. Also some good horses. Market even better than when you were here a year ago.
Louis Ferry
With this encouragement, Macnab assembled a herd of forty longhorns, thirty-one mules and two dozen mustangs broken to the saddle, and with a double supply of horses for himself and his helpers he set forth, and quickly he found himself on the famous Beef Trail.
Since those early days when Benito Garza had pioneered a trail to New Orleans for his mules, so many Texas drovers had followed in his steps that a well-defined path had taken shape. The Beef Trail flourished half a century earlier than the better-known trails like the Chisholm, which cattle followed on their way to the Kansas railheads, and in its day it provided Texas frontiersmen with a chance to earn hard cash.
Otto had been on the trail only a few days when he realized that his journey down the Natchez Trace had been, in comparison, merely a pleasant excursion. For one thing, the Texas rivers were infinitely more difficult to cross, because their banks could be steep and their currents swift after a rain. Food was scarcer and more poorly prepared, if that was possible, and above all, there was the constant threat that Indians might hear of the movement of so
many horses and try to steal their share on the first moonlit night. Finally, the roads and trails in Texas were not yet as clearly marked as the Natchez Trace, which had been used by white men for a long time when the Macnabs traversed it.
But without question, the Beef Trail, rugged though it was, offered more delights to young Otto than anything in Kentucky or Tennessee. This was true wilderness, with birds and animals he had never seen before, with bayous lined by moss-covered trees, with a daring Mexican rider like Benito to search out the trail, and with always the sense of a new country to be explored in whatever direction one might care to go. Also, as Otto confided to his father at the end of a long day: 'It's a lot more fun to ride than to walk/
Already skilled as a horseman, he now acquired from Benito those extra tricks that would make him a true expert, but Garza was powerless to make him proficient with the lariat: 'Damnit! I know you're not stupid,' he would shout in Spanish. 'You can ride. You can shoot. Surely you can learn to throw a rope.'
But Otto could not. His hands were small and his arms short, and when he tried to twirl the stiff and heavy rope about his head in great circles, he not only got it tangled but he nearly succeeded in strangling himself.
'Damnit, Otto, no! You're supposed to throw it over the mustang's neck, not your own.'
It was hopeless. Despite his sweating determination, the young Scots-Irish-German-American boy could not do what the Mexicans did so effortlessly, and sometimes he would sit astride some huge horse watching in awe as the three men competed in roping; they were superb. But if they wanted to race with Otto, they found him now able to ride as effectively as they, swaying with the horse or leaning far over the neck of his mustang until he became one with his steed, flying over the empty land.
And if the four dismounted and took their guns to hunt for food, or merely to compete at targets, young Otto proved superior. He was a superb marksman: cool, hard-eyed, even of hand and steady of wrist. 'Eres un verdadero tejano,' Benito said approvingly one day, but then he added: 'Of course, if you want to rope cattle, you must hire a real mexicano.'
One evening as he and Benito rode in, tired and dusty from chasing one of the few buffalo left in those parts, Otto washed down his horse, but then stayed with it, saying to himself: I'll never forget this day. I'll never have a friend better than Benito. Nor a mother better than Maria. Nor a dog better than Betsy. Where's Baltimore? It seems so far away. I'm half Texican, half Mexican. Driven by a sense of wild joy, he leaped back onto his horse and