Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves Read Free Book Online Page B

river was pretty where I was—wide and clean and evenflowing, with curious, arching, limestone overhangs along the right shore—and after the rain had stopped I dawdled, reluctant, only steering in the current, wondering if a house I remembered near the bridge would have a telephone, or if I’d have to hitch to Palo Pinto. On those country roads the first car along usually gives you a lift.
    Except that just then, with the abrupt autumn changefulness that I’d just about quit believing in, a big wind blew up out of the southwest and cleaned the clouds from the sky in a scudding line, and all of a sudden everything was the way it was supposed to be. The pale green of the willows came alive; big frost-golden cottonwoods flared where I hadn’t noticed them.… A cardinal flew dipping and rising across the river, red as a paint splash in the washed sunlit air, and five feet under the canoe I could see stone by stone the texture of the bottom as it slid past. The passenger came out of his hide-hole to climb up onto the tarp and growl at a Hereford cow and her calf, dubious-eyed, who watched us move by.
    There was no guarantee the weather would stay good; I doubted that it intended to.… We rounded the curve. The new bridge was there beside the creek, skinny and tall on its concrete piers.
    (It was up Dark Valley that settlers saw the last of 600 good stolen horses in one bunch, pointed north to the Territory ahead of the big band of Indians who had hit the Landmans and the Gages and the Browns and the Shermans, cruelly hard. But that story goes later, if it goes at all. You can’t get them all in.)
    I said: “Hell, bridge.”
    The bridge said nothing.
    I said: “Passenger, are we going to quit?”
    The passenger construed it as an invitation to play, and came scrambling back to gnaw on my pants cuff. There is a big rapids under the bridge, an ugly one. It has old rusty car bodies sticking up out of it, and crashes straight in against a rock bank before veering left into a long shallow chute. Smart boatmen don’t run it when the river’s high, but walk the gravel bar on its inner curve, letting the boat down gently by a line.
    But I had the feeling that if I stopped there, I might be obliged to quit, and dawdled still until the sucking funnel at the head of the rapids caught me. Because my stupidity didn’t deserve good luck, I had it. We flicked the jagged remains of a Ford and then I was pulling deep and hard on the right, the paddle spring-bending in my hands, to bring the bow left and clear of the stone bank at the turn, and did bring it left, and rammed the paddle head-on against the rock to keep the stern from hitting, and yelled aloud as we straightened into the long run.
    Then I was ashamed in the way that you’re ashamed when someone else hears you talking to yourself. A man and a woman were fishing at the lower end of the chute; those are the places where the countrymen drop their lines, the places where the big catfish feed. They watched me slide down toward them, and as I passed the man tossed his head in resentful greeting. They were alone and liked being alone, and hadn’t liked my crazy shout. I resented their being there, too, and so respected his right.…
    Hungry, I stopped on a gravel bar and made bouillon on the little alcohol stove, and with it ate crackers and cheese and slices of onion. The sun bit warm into the knotted muscles of my back as I ate, and relaxed them. The sky and the water and the multicolored chert gravel of the bar shonewith a brightness that I’d forgotten, and made me a little sleepy. It was payment for three bad days and I took it so, and lay down for a while, and threw pebbles up into the air and heard them fall in the current, and drank coffee and smoked.
    Across the river a gap showed in the cottonwoods where Elm Creek comes to the Brazos from (inevitably) still another historic spot, a vale they used to call the Indian Hole. People are less “married” now, in Yeats’s