Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  Hugh Erwin had been a soldier in the Civil War and was missing a leg. Jasper, along with William A. Clark, had brought him home. But perhaps that way of putting it gives Jasper too much agency in this tale, perhaps I ought to say that William A. Clark brought his son home along with Jasper. In any case, Hugh Erwin fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. As did the slightly older James B. McMahan, who was from Lockhart just like Hugh Erwin.

  According to Cora, the two families, the Clarks and McMahans, had arrived around the same time, in the beginning of the 1850s, possibly even in the same wagon train. Regardless, the two boys, Hugh Erwin Clark and James B. McMahan, grew up in what was then a very small town, and they were soldiers in the same regiment.

  During the Battle of Mansfield in Louisiana in 1864, Hugh Erwin was shot in the leg. There were wild boars in the woods, and what many historians don’t know, or anyway don’t discuss, is that they emerged at night and gorged on the dead and wounded soldiers who’d been left behind on the field of battle. But the soldiers knew, James B. McMahan knew, and he hoisted his friend up in a tree for the night. There he sat on a branch, a young man of twenty, his leg shattered, abandoned to his altered future prospects in the pitch-black night, listening to the wild animals grunting on the forest floor.

  That one saved the other by arranging him in a tree is cause for great relief, because Hugh Erwin’s son and James B’s daughter would later fall in love and marry. And much later, in 1935, their daughter, Savannah McMahan, who was now an old woman called Grandma Clark, would sit on the porch and sew a quilt for her first grandchild …

  He saved his life! my dad says excitedly every time he tells the story. And he did. One of his great-grandfathers saved his other great-grandfather from being devoured by wild boars. The words my dad uses are razorback hogs.

  A telegraph connection between Shreveport, Louisiana, and Austin had been established in 1854, so news of fallen soldiers could reach Central Texas quickly. A message was sent to his father, and so William A. Clark rode off with Jasper in a buggy to retrieve his third-born son. Or maybe, Gloria writes, it was Calaway, who was known in the family as Cal? She doesn’t know which of the two it was. Jasper would have been thirty-one, Cal a boy of twelve. My dad says that it must have taken ten days for William A. Clark and Jasper or Cal to reach Mansfield and ten days to return with the wounded Hugh, whose leg had, in the meantime, been amputated in the field hospital. I’ve always heard that Jasper was the one to accompany my great-great-great-grandfather on the journey, the wedding-present slave, so he’s the one I picture sitting on the driver’s seat next to him, somber and quiet, but I can’t imagine what the two men talked about, or what Jasper must have been thinking. There was the reason they were on their way back now, the great lines, fundamental and moral, and economic and strategic, all the political and philosophical discussions that gentlemen in dress coats and tall silk hats held in Washington, and which had led to the war. And then there was the fact that they sat here, the two of them in a buggy on the way to Louisiana, that Hugh had been wounded, and that they’d been on this journey before, a nearly identical trip in the wagon train ten or twelve years earlier, in the opposite direction from Alabama to Texas. There was the close, the strange, let’s for the moment just call it the loyalty that often arises for the familiar, no matter how horrible it is, and there was the relationship between the two men whose lives were woven together in a complicated way.

  After the war, Jasper and Cal and their families remained in their homes, cultivating the land William A. Clark had given them. Cora writes that their newfound freedom didn’t change their habits, they lived as they’d always lived. Cora remembers Uncle Jasper from when her family had just moved from Oklahoma back to her father’s birthplace when she was a little girl. One of the first things her father did was to take Cora and her little sister on a wagon to go see Uncle Jasper. Since they were children, they weren’t allowed to address adults by their given names. “As a relative we did not say Mr. or Mrs.,” she writes. “It was uncle, aunt, or cousin.” Cora was born in 1913, and Jasper was born in 1833, so when Cora was a little girl, he was a very old man in his eighties. An old man who’d toiled in the cotton fields. Cal, whom her father was just as fond of according to her, was a little younger. Like Jasper, he’d taken care of her father when he was young, and he’d played with his children. Cal was usually the one who set aside the nuts from a particular pecan tree for the girls, because the shells were thinner than the shells of the nuts from the other trees. My great-great grandfather Hugh Erwin, who’d lost a leg in the struggle to preserve slavery, was given a wooden leg and became a teacher. My dad believes the injury contributed to him spending more time reading books than men typically did at that time, that it made him more scholarly.

  There is a photo of him around age fifty, standing in front of his house in Lockhart with his family, his wooden leg, and his crutches. The house is still there, occasionally my dad thinks of buying it, he says, in dreamy idle moments.

  can a bond develop between someone who was given as a wedding present as a boy and the person to whom he was given? Cora Clark insists that was the case in her book, and my dad sides with her, maintaining that Jasper probably felt great loyalty toward the wounded Hugh, since they’d both grown up on the family farm. See? In the South people are friends. Cora also uses the word loyalty. In her book, she passes the hot potato, the thousands of stories of cruelty and barbarism that she believes are doubtless true. And at the same time, she writes, there were slaves who were treated kindly, and were even allowed an education. “In such cases,” she writes, “there was often a deep feeling of love and loyalty between slaves and their owners.”

  The sentimentalization of slavery is widespread. W.J. Cash, a Southern man himself who in 1941 wrote a famous book, The Mind of the South, even called Reconstruction-era Southerners the most sentimental people in the history of the world. He writes ironically about the cult of “The Great Southern Heart.” The whip never existed, the only bond between slave and master consists of understanding, trust, and loyalty.

  The Scandinavian in me reacts at such elastic use of the word loyalty. Why is the temptation to sentimentalize so great? To reconstruct the dignity of one’s forefathers? It was the North that won and, as the South sees it, claimed the right to decide how history would be phrased, while the South was left smarting, its men castrated, the white Southern man with a bitter taste in his mouth. It was all about identity, the loss of it, a humiliating loss. How to start over? What words do you use when you talk about how father had lost his leg?

  The women became crucial. They gathered in memorial associations like the one Gloria was a member of, Daughters of the Confederacy, to rehabilitate their men’s lost honor, the spouses, fathers, and sons who’d either died in the war or returned home broken and disillusioned. It was the women who forged the words of a tolerable truth, a roomy truth, a truth containing very significant revisions. The bone of contention was somewhere else, in Cora’s book she doesn’t even call it the Civil War but a “War Between the States,” and the war hadn’t been about slavery as much as states’ rights and autonomy, and now that cause was lost. The Lost Cause. Writing history as a form of collective memory loss.

  We’re left with contradictions that luminate with the afterglow that so much here seems to radiate and which makes it all a bit unreal. Just as the sky is higher, the horizon longer, and everything’s a little bigger, the cars, the roads, the cowboy hats, the belt buckles, the sense of self, the mindset also seems to be quite a bit larger in its ability to accommodate and coordinate and even fervently believe things that, to a Scandinavian mindset, seem rationally irreconcilable. The longing for what was lost seems to be felt with a more intense ferocity, the urge to mythologize and romanticize fiercer than anywhere else. Slavery as a general abomination but our family as a happy exception. Why should Southern women, white Southern women, why shouldn’t they be able to honor their dead relatives with the same beating hear
ts as everyone else? The air still smelled of gunpowder and blood, and the ground was littered with the bones of those who’d either won or lost the battle for it. Texans believe that the soil remembers, it’s a widespread notion here, it’s practically in their blood, the very same blood that can defile the soil. History can defile the soil. Perhaps the need for the rationally compatible, the so-called coolly explained, the “Nordic,” exists in places where the metallic smell doesn’t linger quite as sharply in the air?

  A good friend of mine once visited the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in his apartment in Buenos Aires. This was in the seventies, and my friend was young back then and busy making idealistic documentary films about the isolated Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Borges, old and blind, fumbled around between the books in his grand apartment. At one point in the conversation, Borges stood and opened the window facing one of Corrientes’ large public squares and said: Out there my forefathers whipped los indios. Then he closed the window again, and all talk of the tragic and beautiful people of the mountains ceased.

  Maybe he wanted to say that it was easy to sit at the distance of generations, inflamed by moral sensibility. You have to look at it soberly. Life has always been a great roll of the die. When Obama was a candidate for President, it was revealed that his forefathers had been slaveholders. A genealogist discovered that his great-great-great-great grandfather had owned two slaves in Kentucky. And there was another, his great-great-great-great-great grandmother—who’d had two slaves. And even further back, in the 1600s, one of her forefathers had owned at least eighteen slaves. In response, Obama’s spokesman wrote that Obama was not affected by this discovery. His forefathers, he said, were all representative of America.

  For this reason it seems so random when people, in order to commemorate their forefathers in associations like Gloria’s, are asked to prove their distant relatives’ participation in some battle that they themselves had as little personal involvement in as the next person. But the point, I assume, is the opposite. To elevate and give meaning. The further away, the more absurd, and vice versa: the further away, the more we can all be a part.

  I remember the time my dad sent me an excited email telling me that we were descended from Charlemagne. Three minutes later I got another indicating that all Europeans, upon reflection, descend from Charlemagne. All Africans descend from Nefertiti, was his point. All Asians descend from Genghis Khan. The temporal distance makes us one large, not especially happy family. Each one of us is Lucy’s daughter or son, and the luckiest among us, those with genealogical papers, stand in the kitchen licking honey from the spoon. They point out the window and say: There. There my forefathers whipped los indios.

  gloria doesn’t hold the yankees in high regard. While my dad is in the photocopy store on the square in Lockhart with the genealogical documents that should qualify us for Daughters of the American Revolution, Gloria and I wait at the car farther down the street, and she’s busy telling me about the time the Yankees stabled their horses in Lockhart’s Anglican church. That was so rude of them, she says. She shakes her head and her earrings jingle. The church is still here, somewhere, and it’s said that the congregants are very active. That was so rude of them, she repeats, and now we see my dad emerge from the store with two copies of the genealogical papers, one for Gloria and one for me, in a strangely elongated format I’ve never seen before. I hand Gloria the car keys. Tacky, she says of the Yankees. They were tacky. Boorish and unfair.

  My dad drives Gloria’s car, because he’s the one who recalls where Momma and Poppa lived. Explain what it was about those Yankees, I ask. Well, they were just mean, Gloria says, repeating the story of the horses in the church for my dad, and says: Remember? even though it occurred in 1865.

  Please tell me about the Civil War, I say. What we always hear is that the war was fought over the right to slavery. Before I manage to say that Cora refers to the war as the “War Between the States” in her book, Gloria says: Well, it’s debatable. I think they just wanted the money. She asks my dad whether he believes they would have been kinder to the South had Lincoln not been shot? Yes, he believes that is true. They wouldn’t have ripped us to pieces, Gloria says.

  What did they do?

  Oh, you know, gobbled up land, Gloria says. Landowners in the South were forced to sell their land at low, low prices in order to pay the oppressive taxes.

  Basically, all males lost their vote, my dad says. People came down and essentially took over the government.

  Who did?

  They called them carpetbaggers, Gloria says.

  Because that’s all they came with, my dad adds.

  That was the cheapest thing to put your clothes in, Gloria says. Carpetbags.

  Opportunists, con artists, et cetera, my dad says. Greedy types with carpetbags.

  Slavery had something to do with it, Gloria says to my dad.

  It definitely did, he says.

  Gloria points out the window. Now, did you live in the yellow house?

  I think it was the yellow house, yeah. He points at the house next door. And this was the Kreuzes’ house …

  We eat lunch at Smitty’s, which Gloria definitely prefers over the new Kreuz’s near the highway overpass. Smitty’s has more ambience, she says in a French accent. My dad buys a selection of brisket and sausages, and we sit in the high-ceilinged room next door and unpack the meat onto one of the long tables. The place makes no bones about its aversion to eating with knife and fork, a hand-painted sign warns: No forks! Armed with three plastic knives and our fine fingers, we begin to eat. The atmosphere is loud and warm-hearted. Beside us three Hispanic men sit with their empty, glistening paper on the table, sated and content, washing down their food with red soda, and to our other side sits a chubby little man on a small mobility scooter. The man beside him is his cousin, he readily explains. Frank is his name, he works as a consultant for suicidal war veterans. The cousin nods in affirmation to everything the little man says, maybe an occupational hazard. They’ve driven almost fifty miles to eat here. The man on the scooter talks and talks and while Gloria shows us newspaper clippings from her time as a journalist and youthful photographs of her and my dad’s respective cousins, I polish off three pieces of brisket and a quarter of a sausage. Aren’t you a vegetarian? Gloria asks. Yes, I was, actually, I say. Or: I am. I try to dry my fingers by scraping long trails of grease across the butcher paper. Truth be told, I don’t like meat at all. It’s just that I like it here. Oh, Gloria says. You must be a Texas vegetarian.

  After I’ve dried my fingers, she shows me a photo of family hero James B. McMahan in his Confederate uniform. The image is no larger than a postage stamp, a photocopy of one she found on the internet, but the resolution is crisp enough that you can see how he resembled a film star. He’s seated on a porch, probably in Lockhart, with long, slicked-back hair, a gleam in his eyes, and a big gun in his lap.

  It’s not a gun, my dad says. It’s a pistol.

  He looks so handsome in his uniform, Gloria says.

  ◊

  The sun beats down. The wind blows mildly, and the air feels soft, but the insects are buzzing, and the earth is full of the bones of those who’d recently fought for it. We tramp around the cemetery nine miles east of Lockhart, searching for James B. McMahan’s grave.

  Smart but mean, my dad says. That’s what he’d always heard about the McMahans. They were smart but mean.

  Gloria finds James’s grave. When Gloria is present, it seems as if her stepmother, Cora, is always just behind her, ready to point a finger at her from the other side. Apparently, Cora was in the habit of mocking the McMahans, the family roots she herself did not share with her stepdaughter, and who she didn’t believe were quite as distinguished, wealthy, and sophisticated as the Clark family.

  Cora always let me know the McMahans didn’t own any slaves like the Clarks did, Gloria says. She said we were nothin’ but poor little cotton farmers …

  Back in the car,
Gloria scolds Obama’s critics again. Of course they say it’s not racist, she says, imitating his critics in a high-pitched voice. “It’s not racist, we just don’t like his politics,”—she rages so that her large gold earrings clatter, grrr, don’t get me started!—and except for my dad’s nervous throat-clearing beside her, all is quiet. She curses the cursed Republicans, bigoted racists, the worst of whom is the idiot governor of Texas. Her beloved Texas. But oh, the politics of this place! Don’t get me started …

  Her children in Oregon would like her to return. The agreement was that she could move home to Texas and live there a few years, but that she would move back before she became too old to take care of herself. But when is she ‘too old’? She doesn’t want to leave Texas, but she’s wondering if it’s time for her to comply, say farewell to her home state and her two memorial associations. Gloria’s beloved Texas shimmers bright and unreal in her conversation, as if the place already exists only in her memory. Her son has given her six months, she says. Then he’s ordering a U-Haul.

  Half a mile from the cemetery where James B. McMahan lies buried is a spit-splatter-sized town where we go to the only bar. The town is actually called McMahan as well, probably after James B’s father, or maybe an uncle, but ever since a man on horseback rode through the town’s only street sometime in the 1800s, it’s gone by the name Whizzerville. Even the map says Whizzerville, probably so that the residents, of whom I believe there are around sixty, never forget the swish of air.