A Piney Woods Tale

SALT CREEK

PRAIRIE

A Piney Woods Tale

A. ALLISON

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From Miriam—Miriam Amanda Ferguson, The Southern Belle Who Became the First Woman Governor of Texas by May Nielson Paulissen and Carl McQueary (pp.180-181, Sunbelt Media inc, 1995)

When Miriam won the [August 1932 Democratic Primary] runoff with only a 4,000-vote lead [out of nearly 1,000,000 votes cast] but with a landslide in certain East Texas precincts known to be controlled by her husband’s “vest pocket vote,” [incumbent Governor Ross] Sterling cried, “Crooked,” and demanded a recount. He alleged that the Fergusons had claimed more votes than there were poll tax receipts in a hundred counties. Sterling demanded, in fact, that the State Democratic Convention to be held in Lubbock declare the election a fraud. If need be, Sterling threatened, he would employ Texas Rangers to seat his delegates at the convention; the Rangers would make sure the election was declared void and Sterling named the real governor.

But Sterling did not count on the fervor of Fergusons’ friends from East Texas. “The boys from the forks of the creeks”—the farms in the “bottomlands” [sic] heard the call from Jim sent them through his “Little Christian Weekly,” the Forum. He had written in that paper that he needed all his friends to help at the Lubbock Convention: “Please be there!”

….Even if the East Texas delegates had no money to travel all the way across the state to West Texas, they managed to go somehow. So committees passed the hat in order to send delegates. One group of five traveled in a Model-T Ford with $6.75 to spend on the trip: gasoline was their only expense. They camped out for the two nights on the way and ate cold biscuits, a side of bacon, thirteen dozen eggs, and a can of coffee. Each wore his trusty sidearm for protection.

The six-hundred-mile trek took the East Texans through the Salt Creek Prairie 200 miles east of Lubbock, a stretch so infamous for Comanche and Kiowa attempts to stop the pioneer scourge in the years before and after the Civil War that it was known as the “most dangerous prairie in Texas.”

In September 1932, Texas Rangers likewise deemed the Salt Creek Prairie to be the best place to stop the East Texas scourge from reaching the Lubbock Democratic Convention, or so a man who claimed to have been there once told me.

The Swanger Generations

Cephalus “Seff” and Procis “Prosey” Swanger

Autolycius “Archie” and Mestra “Messie” Broady Swanger

III

Laertes “Lawdy” and Anticlea “Annie Lea” Swanger

Odysseus “Otis” and Penelope “Poppy” Swanger

Telemachus “Telly” Swanger

Salt Creek Prairie

Chapter I

People still told stories in those days.

Even as mass communications began to orchestrate ersatz values for mass consumption, folks still gathered around the winter fires and on the summer porches for the yarns and songs that for twenty thousand generations had imparted values so deeply that churches, synagogues, and schools could only paper over the contradictions.

Mrs. McClatchey’s cathedral was the pillared porchof her boarding house, one of four Main Street ramshackle Greek revival mansions built for the rambunctious elite of Jacksboro’s pre-Depression halcyon days. It was the evening sanctuary on which a half-dozen guests—usually a traveling salesman or two accompanied by one or two oil field hands, a cowboy from time to time, and the occasional vagabond—would relax with tobacco and, perhaps, a pint of something and listen respectfully to the inevitable tale by the storyteller. There was always a storyteller.

Thus, on a May evening in 1960, a telephone sales team rose from Mrs. McClatchey’s dining table, hitched trousers, paid appropriate compliments, presumptively moved through the screen door onto the porch, and took places in chairs and benches as if they’d been pre-assigned. The war hero, the tallest and gauntest, lighted a cigarette, sat facing the front lawn, and pointed to lightning bugs beginning to flicker in the dusk. “In my schooldays,” he said wistfully, “I’d cram ‘em into a bottle to make a lantern.” He’d said much the same the evening before and evenings before that on other boarding house porches.

“Lightning bugs and the low locust lullaby,” the stud half-sang to the tune of a radio country song while strumming his well-used guitar. His name was Greg but the team called him “the stud” because Swanger called him the stud in obvious recognition of a unique and mysterious talent, not entirely because he was nearly as tall as the war hero, not entirely due to his wavy black hair, not entirely due to the unblemished innocence on the face of a war baby.

“We’ve had a good day,” he said.

“Good enough to reckon commissions,” he added in hopeful voice.

“A little cash for that waitress?” the war hero said with characteristic deadpan. Swanger had once opined that New Guinea had stolen the war hero's smile.

From his perch in the large cane chair with its back to the wall, Swanger half-glanced at their portly foreman. He was staying at the boarding house with the team that night, something he did rarely.

“Cash? Like last week,” Swanger snorted, “and the week before that?” The cane chair seemed to envelope the slightly balding forty-year-old’s wiry five-foot six-inch frame.

The foreman sighed. Swanger’s remark was more tease than complaint, but it meant that the crew was onto the scam. It meant they knew that he would report only just enough in collections to keep boarding expenses in credit and cover running costs of the five-year old Plymouth that took them from Texas town to Texas town. But he also knew that some men, these men, needed only the fantasy of just reward to keep them going. He knew that men like these would never demand an actual accounting, for an actual accounting might threaten what the fantasy gave them: decent meals, clean beds, tolerable bathrooms, and, above all, the road ahead, the road ahead leading to the ineffable destinies that made life worthy. The foreman knew that these men would tolerate the scam to preserve this last shred of worth.

“Hasn’t kept you from getting your share of tail,” he retorted to the stud as he stood and walked to the porch rail, head lifted as if sniffing the air. “There’s rumbling in the west. What do you reckon fellows? More weather tonight?”

“Are you hoping that it’ll wash away our confounded curiosity?” chuckled Swanger. Then, suddenly remembering that the conversation wasn’t entirely private, he looked at the traveling salesman sitting just outside the circle of conversation, the only man on the porch not on the sales crew. “Don’t mind us, Mister,” Swanger said. “We always grouse at the boss when we can. Otherwise, we’d have to listen to each other’s lies.”

The traveling salesman smiled and wordlessly took a swig from a half-pint that he then offered it around.

Taking it, the war hero said, “Hell, Telly, you haven’t put us all the way to sleep yet.”

In truth, the team had yet to tire of Swanger’s yarns, especially if the alternative was one of the war hero’s chilling, cathartic tales of jungle horror that followed one of his malaria bouts. He’d shake, sweat, and moan for a day or so, screaming intermittently at Swanger, who was always at his bedside, gently holding his hand, mopping the sweat, and coaxing him to take the medicine that brought him to his senses. Then, he’d come back to the world, take a shower, and be first on the phone in the morning. In the evening, he’d command the cathedral with another disinterred memory long buried under a mountain of pain, as if the demons had told him they would leave only if he told of the nightmare slime of guts splattered on jungle paths he’d trod, of the five headless GI bodies used in place of sandbags for the Japanese machine gun nest he’d taken singlehandedly, of malarial body parts scattered in the remains of the field hospital splattered by a Japanese light howitzer.

The stud never told a story. When Swanger would prod him about his conquests, he’d either “aw shucks” and grin or respond with a chord on the small, scratched-up guitar, leaving others’ imaginations to fill in details about the women he’d met in coffee shops or at service counters or in office pools. If he made a rare comment about one of them, he insisted that the team appreciate her as whole and worthy. He made the team accept that each good-bye kiss was with an actual, meaningful person, that she sensed that he was the one stud who loved her for who she ought to be, who meant every word of his promise to send a postcard, who would call when he next came through town, who made the existential encounter worth the risk.

The college boy had no tales worth telling, and no one credited him otherwise.

So most nights the storytelling was left to Swanger, and most nights he’d find something to prompt him, usually something that had occurred during the day or something he’d heard on the radio or something he’d read in the local newspaper. That night, it was the freshening south wind, or so it first seemed.

“Yep. Likely another crash-banger on its way,” he said, “but this time of year folks around here will yawn. Sure enough, they’ll just yawn. Just another night when gentle Gulf winds choose this very spot to make another valiant stand against the annual arctic invader, rendering a maelstrom folks around here call ‘weather.’ A creek on the rampage isn’t news around here. Trees down, telephone lines snapped, and some fool drowned attempting to drive across a flooded road is just God’s ordained pattern of life.”

The team was nodding. Nodding acknowledged that Swanger was again about to make sense of a chaotic world, just as he made sense of what they were saying on those telephones every day, just as he made working for room, board, and travel expenses as worthy a life as any,just as he seemed to sense the seeds of a tale in the locust love song and the approaching weather, just as he made the story-telling ritual as essential to their peculiar consciences as that indefinable end of the road. Nodding indicated readiness for the tale about to be told.

The college boy was too new to the team to grasp the full import of the ritual, but he did note how the old hands lighted up and sat back, anticipating. He didn’t catch all the subtle gestures of such fraternal communication, but he’d been with them long enough to keep quiet and observe, conscious of his being an odd outlier—suspiciously odd, with no meaningful narrative and a thin excuse for being on that porch, being anywhere, in fact. He sat in the corner, trying to stay out of Swanger’s line of sight, trying not to act to like the Kerouac-inspired dropout for whom the near-certainty of nuclear annihilation had made classrooms absurd.

The travelling salesman, an outsider but by no means an outlier, seemed to sense what was coming. He seemed to sense that Swanger’s tapping a Lucky Strike pack against the back of his hand indicated a story to come. In silent demonstration of concurrence, he removed his pipe, tapped out the bowl against the arm of the bench, and packed it with a pungent mix of tobacco.

He’d sensed correctly. On another evening, on the porch of another boarding house, Swanger had tapped a pack before he told about shaking hands with the Russian soldier at the Elbe. “My Mama would have said that that canteen vodka would make a rabbit slap a bear,” he’d chuckled. “Little wonder we heard stories of thousands of Soviet boys mowed down as they ran headlong into German machine guns.”

One evening on a Corsicana porch, he’d tapped a pack and removed a cigarette before he told them about a Jewish fellow— the man had said he was Jewish—who had picked him up when he was hitchhiking in New York and had spent the entire hour ranting against Israel. “He taught me a few things I didn’t know, but mainly I re-learned Mama’s lesson that who someone is doesn’t signify. It’s how they act and what they think, and this fellow seemed not to think like who he said he was.”

A dozen postwar years hitching rides over most of America and some of Mexico had given Swanger a library of stories—a bank robber looking for an accomplice, homosexuals who dropped him in the middle of forests or cornfields after he’d resisted their overtures, a woman wrestler who threatened to break his arm if he made the wrong move, and, yes, a few lonely, homely ladies. The stories also revealed what he seemed to want to hide. He seemed not to want his porches to know that he had a close familiarity with college learning—perhaps a few colleges—presumably on the GI Bill, but where or when he never said. Given his oft-expressed disdain for college boys, no one had the temerity to ask.

“This weather makes me think about where we are, fellows,” Swanger said following a long moment savoring the tobacco taste mixed with the lingering flavor of Mrs. McClatchey’s peach cobbler. “I bet you didn’t realize that we’re sitting at the epicenter of Texas weather, right on the spot where the gentle breezes from the Gulf and harsh winds swooping in from the north furiously clash to devastate the Texas plain. Not just weather, either. About eighty years ago, not too far from here, over yonder about twenty miles, a stretch called Salt Creek Prairie was the epicenter of manmade maelstroms involving the soul-rich Indians of the southern plains and soul-starved Anglos swooping in from the north.”

“Over yonder,” he repeated. “Twenty miles, or thereabouts.” He was pointing westward.

“Then, almost thirty years ago in the aftermath of the political hurricane called the 1932 Texas gubernatorial Democratic Primary, that prairie was the scene of an epic collision between the forces of Texas’s cold establishment ‘bourbons’—that’s what my Papa called them, ‘bore-bones’—and the warm-blooded piney woods supporters of Ma and Pa Ferguson, both former governors, notorious to some, loved by the rest. I don’t think I’ve told you that I was present at that one.”

He paused to survey the porch for signs of recognition of the Ferguson name. Non-plussed faces caused him to lean his small frame forward, exhale, and rub his chin thoughtfully. “Well, that was a political maelstrom we can talk about sometime.” Then, he turned his body in the chair and looked up at Mrs. McClatchey, who had just finished the dishes and was standing in her apron by the door.

“Tell me if I’m wrong, Ma’am, but wasn’t the Salt Creek Prairie once called the most dangerous place in Texas?” Swanger asked quietly.

Mrs. McClatchey said that she had heard something like that. “In Indian times,” she added.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Swanger said. “I understand that during the twenty years following the Civil War it was where Anglo settlers riding on the cold wind of western migration clashed with warm-blooded Kiowa and Comanche. Runner, you might know about it from your seventh grade Texas history.”

For reasons that were too humiliatingly apparent, Swanger had nicknamed the college boy Runner, but it was an improvement on “college-boy.”

The red-faced student shook his head.

“Well, according to your seventh grade Texas history—yours and mine—that prairie had been a prime feeding ground for the buffalo and that made it a prime hunting ground for Comanche and Kiowa, who, after discovering a natural affinity with the Spanish horse, had made an evolutionary leap from decrepit pedestrian tribes on the brink of extinction into superb, mobile warriors thriving in perpetual company of the buffalo that dominated a thousand-mile corridor of the Western grasslands.

“Tell me if I’m wrong, Mrs. McClatchey,” again Swanger turned his body and looked up, “but, as I recall, it didn’t take long for Civil War cavalry veterans to build forts from here to Mexico and thus impress the Indians enough to cajole them onto the reservation at Fort Sill, about a hundred miles north of here.”

“I reckon that’s what people say,” Mrs. McClatchey smiled, as if bemused that he considered her an authority.

“Well, the cavalry got them onto the reservation,” Swanger smiled in return, “but keeping them there was nigh impossible. Large bands of warriors would sneak out, be gone for days, wreak havoc, and then return to their Fort Sill safe haven. The tasty grass at Salt Creek Prairie made it a favorite destination for the buffalo and thus for those resurrected warriors. On occasion, they were also treated to loot and scalps from settlers and transiting wagons.