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

Oliver Loving on the Pecos (there’s a hair prickler, but it’s a long way from the Brazos), and Mr. Charlie lived to tell both their stories. He lived a long long time, and when he was ninety-one and a widower he took a second wife, twenty-odd years old.
    A tale exists. I heard it once about Goodnight and once about another of the old ones who stayed alive long enough to get rich, and it may not be true about either of them. But it could be true—ought to be.… When Goodnight was old, he lived on what was called the Quitaque ranch, having been eased out of the JA operation by the New York socialite widow of his Irish milord partner. Once a scraggly band of reservation Comanches, long since whipped and contained, rode gaunt ponies all the way out there from Oklahoma to see him.
    No buffalo had run the plains for decades; it was their disappearance, as much as smallpox and syphilis and Mackenzie’s apocalyptic soldiers, that had finally chopped apart The People’s way of life. Jealously, Mr. Charlie had built up and kept a little herd of them.
    He knew one or two of the older Indians; he had fought them, and later had gone to see them and reminisce with them in Oklahoma. They asked him for a buffalo bull.
    He said: “Hell, no.”
    They said: “They used to be ours.”
    “They used to be anybody’s that could kill one,” the old man said. “These are mine. They wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for me. You go to hell.”
    “Please, Buenas Noches,” maybe one of them said. Maybe not—The People seldom begged.
    He said no again and stomped in the house and stayed there for a couple of days while they camped patiently in his yard and on his porch, the curious cowhands gathering to watch them. In the end he made a great deal of angry noise and gave them the bull they wanted, maybe deriving a sour satisfaction from thinking about the trouble they’d have getting it back to Oklahoma.
    They didn’t want to take it back to Oklahoma. They ran it before them and killed it with arrows and lances in the old way, the way of the arrogant centuries. They sat on their horses and looked down at it for a while, sadly and in silence, and then left it there dead and rode away, and Old Man Goodnight watched them go, sadly too.
    I parked the canoe in eddying water between big rocks, thankful for the casualness that fiberglass permitted, and climbed up to a nose above Keechi mouth, a picnic spot. A good place, with the hills rolling up behind and the green stream junction swirling below among its boulders … In an overhanging tangle of roots a mass of daddy longlegsclung each to all the others and vibrated with the rhythmic ecstasy that seizes them in the fall; the pup charged into them and they scattered. Under a cedar stood a table made from an old barbed-wire reel set on its side. Strewn thick about it were layers of that heterogeneous litter whose concoction is one of our glittering talents as a people: paper napkins and brown sacks rain-molded to grass and shrubbery; bullet-pierced beer cans brightly plated and painted against the rust that alone might have made them bearable; bottle caps and bottle shards; a yellowed latex memento of love’s futility; tarnished twenty-two shell cases by the hundreds.
    Yes, ma’am, I’ve drunk beer and with others like me have hurled hillbilly songs against the woods’ stillness, and have made country afternoons hideous with the pointless explosion of cartridges. Having done it doesn’t make it look any better to me, though.
    Above there the old Painted Campground lies, twenty or so acres of worked-flint chips, potsherds, burn-marked hearthstones.… There are dozens of places like that along the Brazos, traditional stopping places that, judging from the thickness of the midden in some of them, must have been in use for unknowable centuries before white men came, by tribes in migration or seasonally encamped. If you poke around any of them long enough, you can usually pick up a