‘And one has to be amused at the famous bass-fishing contest held at the Lake O’ The Pines near Jefferson. Total prize money, one hundred and five thousand dollars. Created an open scandal because Texas sportsmen were caught fastening onto their hooks twelve-pound frozen bass flown down from Minnesota, allowing them to thaw in the warm water, then reeling them in with delighted cries: “Hey! Look what I caught!” When this was detected, other contestants hired scuba divers to swim to the bottom with live bass from Wisconsin to fix to their lines. Solution? Give every fisherman a lie-detector test. When sixty percent of the winners failed, loyal Texans cried: “Understandable. They were all from Oklahoma.”
‘Historically, Texas Christians, good church members all, have been loath to face up to the moral problems of their time. Joel Job I was a stout defender of slavery, and both Harrison II and III leaped into Confederate uniform during the War Between the States to serve as chaplains, for they believed that slavery was ordained by God and must be prolonged. Harrison IV, who led the fight against drink and Al Smith, also led the fight for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and preached two notable sermons explaining why it was doing God’s work in Texas.’
At this point he coughed, rather nervously I thought, and fumbled among his papers for a small document, whose nature I could not determine from where I sat, before continuing: ‘Nothing exemplifies better the complexities of the moral order in Texas than this well-edited little publication: The Blue Book for Visitors, Tourists and Those Seeking a Good Time While in San Antonio, Texas, 1911–1912. It defines the red-light district, Via Dolorosa to Matamoras, and lists the more luxurious houses of prostitution therein. Lillian Revere seems to have run an attractive place at 514 Matamoras Street—Old Phone:1357, New Phone:1888, Private Phone:2056. To get there, her advertisement said, you took the San Fernando streetcar, got off at South Pecos and Matamoras, and there you were. The book divides the women into three classes—twenty-two A’s, twenty B’s, sixty-two C’s—and gives addresses and phone numbers. It also lists thirty-three cabdrivers who can be trusted. Among the names, several attract attention. Beatrice Benedict, Class A, apparently ran three houses, but how she did this is not explained. One of the Class B girls was named El Toro, one of the Class C’s was Japanese. One of the cabdrivers was John Ashton (English Jack). And on page seventeen is something I rather liked, the complete baseball schedule for San Antonio’s games in the Texas League.’
Reverend Harrison told us that he had often pondered these apparent contradictions and had decided that they did not really represent moral confusion: ‘The Texan who guns down his neighbor does not visualize himself as committing a crime. He is merely settling an argument within the accepted Texas tradition. The Texas billionaire who has three wives, three households and three families of children at the same time cannot conceive of himself as doing anything wrong. He is merely perpetuating the free life of the frontier, and he sees himself as being a better Texan for so doing. With no apologies he supports his church, helping to finance its attack on immorality and loose living.
‘Every example of social disorganization which the Northern critic might cite in an attack upon Texas can be explained away by the Texan apologist with the statement: “But that’s the way we’ve always done it in Texas.” If any item of behavior is accepted by the majority, then it becomes part of the Texas theology, serving as its own justification. The good people who published The Blue Book were satisfied that they were providing a constructive service.
‘In no instance is this more clearly demonstrated than in the case of wetbacks along the Rio Grande. For generations, Texas planters, first in cotton then in citrus, utilized those people under living conditions which were appalling at best and tragic at worst. Good church members who sent their sons and daughters to SMU or TCU saw nothing wrong in treating their Mexican workers worse than they did their animals, and their justification was: “They’re better off here than they would be back in Saltillo.”
‘In the early 1900s the fiery Baptist minister John Franklyn Norris led a noisy crusade against horse racing, gambling and alcohol. Distressed by the perfidy of women, he launched fevered sermons against short skirts, bobbed hair and dancing. But his fiercest ire was reserved for any professors at Baylor, the Baptist university, who veered even one inch from what he felt was the literal truth of the Bible, and he succeeded in getting several fired. Idolized by Texans as their revealed prophet, he startled some of his weak-kneed supporters in 1926 by winning an argument with a gentleman and winning it by the simple expedient of whipping out a revolver and shooting the man dead with three well-placed bullets. The jury found him innocent on the grounds, I suppose, that he was a member of the cloth, and therefore incapable of doing wrong.
‘How tragic these Texas religious debates could become was illustrated in the case of W. C. Brann, the Voltaire of Waco, who in the 1890s published a famous muckraking journal, The Iconoclast, which delighted in castigating Baptist for their spiritual and moral deficiencies. Unable to bear his gibes, which circulated about the world, religious fanatics took stern measures: once they thrashed him in public; then they kidnapped him; they came close to lynching him; and finally they killed him with a shot in the back, “right where the suspenders crossed,” and later they desecrated his grave.
The contradictions have survived into our time, for recently Brother Lester Roloff, another powerful evangelist, ran children’s homes in the Corpus Christi area which broke every rule in the book, yet the state excused him on the grounds that he was a God-fearing clergyman and therefore exempt from normal restraints.’
‘What should we, in fairness, say in our report?’ Miss Cobb asked, and Joel Job VI was prompt in his response: ‘That Texas really is a state which honors religion far more than most. Basic to everything we do is a reverence for religion, but we insist upon constructing our own theology.’
OF THE VARIOUS NATIONAL GROUPS THAT SETTLED IN TEXAS, and there were more than twenty—Germans, Czechs, Poles, Wends —the one which gave the area its basic character came from Ireland. They arrived in great numbers, filtering down the famed Natchez Trace from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
They were a resolute, courageous, self-driven, arrogant lot. Often surprisingly well educated, the vast majority had been raised as Presbyterians, although many in recent years had become Methodists or Baptists. To appreciate their unique qualities, it will be instructive to follow one stubborn fellow as he makes his way slowly, accidentally toward Texas.
To do this it will be necessary to jump backward in time to the blustery winter of 1802 and to a long, beautiful glen that ran west to east at the center of Scotland. At its far end, Glen Lyon was marked by a small mountain-girt loch, from which tumbled a sparkling river that bred trout and provided water for the sturdy Highland cattle grazing along its banks.
On the shore of the loch, so positioned that a man could survey the protecting mountains and also see any enemies who might be climbing the glen, stood a dwelling, low and dark, of but three rooms. Its foundation was of solid boulders; its sides were of heavy half-worked stone; and its thatch-and-turf roof was held down by a network of thick heather ropes from whose ends dangled large rocks to offset the lifting power of the winds which often howled down the mountains.
This dwelling, Dunessan by name, was occupied by the family of a redoubtable man in his seventies whose forebears generations earlier had fled into the remote fastnesses of Glen Lyon after being harried and driven from their ancestral lands. A stubborn clan, they had persistently backed the wrong side in wars and had paid the penalty.
The old man was Macnab of Dunessan, patriarchal head of the local branch of the Macnabs, one of the most contentious clans in Scotland. He was a big man, veteran of a dozen Highland battles, and he looked especially formidable when clad in the crimson-green-red tartan of the Macnabs, with dirk and claymore at the ready. He wore white mutton-chop whiskers and a Highland bonnet, and seemed always ready to take up arms for some ne
w battlefield, but recently an old bullet wound in his left leg had begun to impede him, forcing him to stay close to his house, from which he still roared orders to his kinsmen.
On this morning he was in a gentler mood, for he rested with his grandson Finlay on a wooden bench outside the door, trying to catch whatever heat the wintry sun provided. ‘Have you ever wondered,’ he asked the boy, ‘why we Macnabs always cling to the Macdonalds and guard against the treacherous Campbells?’
‘Glencoe,’ the lad said promptly.
‘But why Glencoe?’
When the boy, only ten years old, displayed an imperfect understanding of that tragic name, the old man drew him closer: ‘In the long run of human history no event surpasses the villainy of the Campbells at Glencoe.’ And he proceeded to summarize that Highland horror in which the Campbells, seeking to curry favor with an English king, insinuated themselves into the good graces of the rebellious Macdonalds. Appearing suddenly in the remote and gloomy fastness of Glencoe, they passed themselves off as friendly travelers, but after more than a week of feasting and singing and wooing the Macdonald lassies, the Campbells, in dead of night, fell upon their hosts and slaughtered them.
‘It wasn’t the killing, mind you,’ the old man said, his hands trembling with rage as he recalled this ancient wrong. ‘Our glens have seen murder before. It was the perfidy. To sup with a man for ten days in a row, and on the eleventh, when your belly is filled with his bread, to slay him in the dead of night, befouling his own home …’
‘Why didn’t the Macdonalds fight back?’ young Finlay asked.
‘Those trapped in their own homes had no chance. But those clans outside who pertain to the Macdonalds have never stopped seeking revenge.’ Taking his grandson’s hands, he said solemnly: ‘Laddie, wherever, whenever you meet a Campbell, expect treachery. Never forget that your father died fighting them.’
The next two years in Glen Lyon were marked by the arrival of a tall, gawky man who intended to bring piety and learning to this embattled area.
He was Ninian Gow, Master of Arts from the University of St. Andrews in eastern Scotland and ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian church founded by John Knox. He was deep-visaged and had large dark hairs which grew out from his Adam’s apple and moved in the air when he preached; he was incontestably a man of God and a fearless champion of decency. He loved his church and had made great sacrifices to serve it, but he loved mankind more. His two abiding convictions were that Scotland could not be truly saved until its young people, boys and girls alike, learned to read, and that it was doomed unless it combated the evils of popery.
‘The Campbells are Catholics, you know,’ he roared during his first sermon in the glen. ‘The glorious Reformation which brought us the true religion, Presbyterianism in its moral grandeur, never reached the blighted glens in which the craven Campbells lurked. They remained unconverted, as they do to this day, ensnared in the web of popery.’ At this point he halted his sermon and stared out at the small gathering of Macnabs and Macdonalds, asking finally in a hushed voice: ‘Is it any wonder that they saw no evil in worming their way into the affections of the Macdonalds and then slaughtering them?’
Silence filled the tiny kirk, broken only by Gow’s deep voice crying: ‘Let us pray.’ This was an ominous invitation, for a prayer by Ninian Gow was apt to last a good twenty minutes, and on those sulphurous Sundays when he paid full attention to the papist menace, it could consume twice that time.
He had not been in Glen Lyon long when he began to recognize that Finlay Macnab, grandson of the clan’s patriarch, had unusual prospects, and when he consulted the local dominie he was pleased to hear: ‘The lad masters his numbers quickly and learns to read more ably than others older than himself.’ The teacher said that Finlay had also acquired a fine, open style of lettering, and this obviously pleased him, for he said: ‘Clear handwriting is proof of a clear conscience.’
When Ninian Gow made his first report to old Macnab on the boy’s progress, he broached the subject of the University of St. Andrews as a likely target for the lad’s ambitions. Finlay’s grandfather had never considered sending his grandson to college, but he had such a high regard for the good sense of the new minister that after he heard him out, he said he would think about it, then asked: ‘And where is this St. Andrews?’
That simple question was all Master Gow needed: ‘It lies on the coast of Fife, an old city of gray stone hard by the Northern Sea. It is marked by ancient ruins and fine new college buildings. It’s the foundation of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and it is not by accident that its once Catholic cathedral is now in ruins. God struck it down. And along its hallowed streets, set deep within the cobbled stones, stand memorials to the founders of our religion whom the papists burned to death for refusing to abjure their new Presbyterianism.’
‘It sounds like a holy place,’ said Macnab, and his wife nodded silent agreement.
‘It’s more!’ the minister said, revealing a hitherto hidden side of his character. ‘For a small town it has an unusual number of taverns, twenty-three in all, it’s said, where the scholars gather after their studies, and of course it has the gowf.’
‘The what?’ Macnab asked.
‘The gowf. A links of fair green stretching beside the sea. A wee ball stuffed with feathers. Three clubs to smash it with, and four happy hours in the windy sunlight.’
‘Surely it’s not a game you’re speaking of?’ the dour Highlander asked.
‘Aye, the grandest game of them all. All the scholars at St. Andrews play at the gowf, I more than most.’
‘Do you still play?’ Macnab asked.
‘Aye, that I do. We have no links, that’s true, but I have my clubs and I brought with me three wee balls, and in the evening I like to hit them far and away down the meadows, making believe that I am once more at St. Andrews, studying the Bible at St. Mary’s College and playing along the links at the seaside.’
On many occasions he returned to the subject of St. Andrews and the feasibility of young Macnab’s reporting there for schooling, but finally the old man told him why he opposed the idea: ‘I have no mind to seeing a grandson of mine take up the ministry.’
‘Oh, sir! Only a few who attend St. Andrews elect the ministry. It’s for everyone. The merchant. The laird. The man who sends his ships to Holland.’
‘But what would a grandson of mine profit from such a place if he was to come back to this glen and live as I have lived?’
‘The learning, man, think of the learning!’ And he spoke with such reverence for the simple act of knowing that Macnab began to consider this curious possibility: that a son of the glen could attend the university and become a better man for having done so, regardless of what occupation he followed thereafter.
The practicability of such a move became so challenging to Macnab that one afternoon he walked down to the kirk and asked the minister: ‘Tell me one thing. What boy in a crofter’s glen needs Latin?’ and Gow said softly: ‘The boy who is destined to leave the crofter’s glen.’
The answer was so perceptive that after supper Macnab held a quiet discussion with his wife and their clever grandson. ‘Would you like to go to St. Andrews, as the minister says?’ he asked the boy, and Finlay replied: ‘I’m good at books. First in Euclid and Cicero.’
‘To what purpose?’ the old warrior asked in real perplexity.
‘I don’t know,’ Finlay said honestly. ‘I like to play about with figures and words.’
‘What say you, Mhairi?’ Macnab asked his wife.
‘I have always thought he was a lad of promise.’
‘That means he would make a good drover.’
‘I would,’ Finlay said eagerly. ‘I could drove the cattle to Falkirk for the Tryst this year.’
‘You?’ the old man asked in wonder, for he had not perceived his grandson as ready for such responsibility. ‘How old are you, lad?’
‘Twelve.’
‘At twelve I had not left the glen,’ th
e chieftain said.
‘But you had fought the Campbells … three times,’ his wife reminded him.
‘So you would like to go to the college?’ the old man asked.
‘I am so minded.’
As the summer progressed, Macnab ruefully conceded that he would never again trudge over the far hills to Falkirk, and that it was time for his grandson to do so: ‘Besides, there will be older friends to help when it comes time to bargain with those clever buyers from the south,’ and once this big question was settled, the old man agreed that Finlay should keep some of the money from the cattle sale and proceed to the University of St. Andrews. By July all was settled, and Ninian Gow was writing letters to a friend of his in the old gray city:
I am sending you a fine wee laddie, Finlay Macnab of Glen Lyon, age thirteen when he arrives. Take him under your wing and tutor him for the University, which he should be ready to enter at age fourteen. He has completed Euclid, is knowledgeable in Sallust and is capable in all ways.
Nina Gow
Post scriptum: I am converting heathen Highlanders into good Christians at such a rate that John Knox must be smiling.
The last half of July and all of August were spent in preparing Finlay for the arduous task of droving his cattle to the great market at Falkirk, nearly eighty long miles to the southeast over steep mountain crests and down beautiful glens. The boy practiced with Rob, the deerhound-collie who would do most of the work; whistled signals would direct the dog to round up strays and keep the herd moving forward, but at times it would seem as if the dog was directing the boy and not the other way around, so quick and intelligent was this remarkable animal.
Meanwhile, the boy’s grandmother had been gathering the things she must supply: the strong cheese, the beef strips dried in the sun, the oatcakes hardened on the windowsill, and particularly the great kilt in which her grandson would live for many weeks. It was not one of those townsman’s kilts, little more than a pleated skirt tied at the waist; this was a Highlander’s fighting-droving kilt, a huge spread of patterned fabric—crimson-green-red for the Macnabs—which covered the body from head to heel, with much left over to form a cape in case of storms.
Texas Page 43