Texas

by James A. Michener

  When the bag was secured, Finlay felt his throat choking up, so for some moments he looked away, but then he moved close to the faithful dog and talked with him: ‘Rob, I may never see you again. You were the best, the very best of all.’

  He could speak no more, so he knelt with his dog, embracing him, and finally he patted him lovingly and said: ‘Rob, go home!’

  Obediently, the red-brown dog left his master and started on the long, long journey back to the head of Glen Lyon. He would be nine days on the trail, and would from time to time come pleadingly to some inn or crofter’s cottage, where he would be fed, for the note about his neck assured the owner of that place that next year when the Macnab cattle came south to Falkirk, honest pay for the dog’s feed would be delivered.

  Rob had gone about a quarter mile on this remarkable journey when he stopped for one last look at his young master, and it was only with the sternest discipline that dog and boy refrained from dashing madly toward each other, but the time for parting had come, and each looked with love at the other and went his way.

  It was self-reliant lads like this who walked over the hills from all parts of Scotland to the ancient Kingdom of Fife where, at the eastern edge beside the North Sea, the premier university of Scotland stood. Glasgow’s was bigger, Edinburgh’s more notable, Aberdeen’s the most scholarly, but St. Andrews was the peer, the heart and soul of both Scottish history and the Presbyterian faith. It was a noble university, gray and quiet in outward appearance, vital and throbbing with intellectual intensity. Sometimes it seemed as if the preachers of half the Protestant world had come from this devoted town by the bitterly cold sea, where the warmth of theological disputation often compensated for the rawness of the climate.

  During his thirteenth year Finlay Macnab studied with Eoghann McRae, the tutor to whom Ninian Gow had recommended him; he lived with this penurious man and shared his meager table, at which, after the so-called meals had ended, he would pore over his Greek, his moral philosophy and his figures. But in the early mornings, when he and his tutor took their walk before breakfast, he would observe the glory of St. Andrews, for in obedience to a very ancient tradition, its students wore bright red gowns, never black until they had acquired degrees, so that the town seemed filled with brightly moving flowers, hurrying this way and that, a blaze of red gowns darting into doorways.

  At age fourteen, Finlay was incorporated to the Leonardine College of the university, and the principal of the college asked the young man to meet with him: ‘Macnab, I’ve good reports of your seriousness. I do hope you’ll be studying for the ministry.’

  ‘I have no call to the pulpit,’ Finlay said honestly.

  ‘Then avoid it, by all means. But make yourself a scholar.’

  ‘With help, I shall,’ Finlay said.

  During his entire stay at the university he would not see his grandparents or his dog or the lovely shadows of Glen Lyon. He continued to live with his first tutor and to share the miserable meals, but now he was entitled to wear the famous red gown and cherish this badge of scholarly fellowship.

  But at the beginning of his third year a totally unexpected transformation took place, as he explained to his tutor: ‘I find I am not suited for the higher learning.’

  ‘You’re a true scholar.’

  ‘I no longer like the university. My mind runs to the moors—to action, to trading cattle at the Falkirk Tryst.’

  ‘I must summon the medics. You’re sick.’

  He was not. His mind was clear and it was delivering a masterful image of the kind of man he was intended to be: one who acted, one who dared to take risks, one who loved the hurly-burly of the Tryst. Firmly he told his tutor: ‘I am ill-fitted to be a scholar. I shall go home.’

  At this moment of confusion he was visited by a man he had not expected to see again, Ninian Gow, who had been summoned back to the university to occupy a chair of some importance. Unaware of the agitation which had beset his young friend, he resumed conversation as if no change had taken place: ‘Well, Finlay, what shall you do, now that you’re on your way to becoming a verified scholar?’

  ‘The world has gone topsy-turvy, Master Gow.’

  ‘What could you mean?’ the new professor asked, and in a burst of words Finlay revealed recent developments. Gow, sensitive to such matters, allowed the torrent to flood along, then said quietly: ‘God has instituted this confusion because He has extraordinary plans for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He wants you to do His work in Ireland.’

  ‘I know nothing of Ireland.’

  ‘God wants you to remain here at St. Andrews three more years, make yourself into a devout clergyman, then sail across the Irish Sea and save that benighted country.’

  ‘That I cannot do.’ At age seventeen, Finlay was a well-organized, stubborn-minded young man, able beyond his years and of firm convictions. He was devout, convinced that John Knox had been correct in leading the way to Protestantism, and totally satisfied that Presbyterianism was the Lord’s chosen instrument for the salvation of the human race, especially the Scottish. But he did not want to become a clergyman, for substantial reasons which he now revealed: ‘I could never be a saintly man. When one of the Campbells took away two of my cattle, I wanted to kill him. And would have, had I not been stopped.’

  ‘Campbells deserve punishment,’ Gow said, ‘but not killing.’

  ‘And when I walk through the shops, I like to stare at the pretty girls.’

  ‘Clergymen do the same. They marry.’

  ‘But I have not the inner calling.’

  Gow studied this solemn declaration for some moments, then said with that generosity of spirit which would make him a notable professor, next at Glasgow and finally at Oxford: ‘God summons us in different ways. He doesn’t require you to become one of his ministers, or even to finish university. Come with me, and remind yourself as to what service is.’

  They walked to that sacred spot where Patrick Hamilton, born a Catholic but inspired by the reform teachings of John Knox, had been burned at the stake by the local Catholics: ‘Finlay, he refused to recant even when they piled more faggots at his feet. He was an enemy of popery, and so must you be.’

  And beside the reddish stones which marked where Hamilton had died, Gow told of Ireland’s problems: ‘We have planted, successfully I’m sure, a mustard seed in the northern counties. Trusted Scotsmen by the score cross the Irish Sea to protect the land we’ve won and to advance Presbyterianism against the onslaughts of popery.’

  ‘What could I do?’ Finlay asked, and Gow said: ‘There is a need for husbandmen, for fine merchants, for anyone who will help strengthen Protestant roots in that ill-fated land.’

  ‘That’s the kind of work I’d be fitted for,’ Finlay said, and some days later, when Gow brought him the news that a Scottish landowner in Northern Ireland, a trusted Presbyterian, was seeking a man who understood cattle and horses to serve as factor on his estates, Finlay volunteered for the job. After submitting glowing testificates penned by Gow, by his longtime tutor McRae and by the principal of St. Andrews, he received from across the Irish Sea the exciting news that he had been selected.

  When he bade farewell to Professor Gow, he said apologetically: ‘My life was changed at Falkirk Tryst. I discovered that I belong with the sweating merchants, the mountebanks.’ When Gow indicated that he understood, the young man added: ‘And the swirling petticoats of the dancing girls.’

  ‘When a man once has the Latin, he can never be completely lost. God will find you proper work to do.’

  With little regret, Finlay Macnab laid aside forever the good red gown of St. Andrews, unmatched in all the universities of the world, and set forth like many another Scottish young man before him to walk across Scotland and say farewell to the lone cottage at the head of his glen, but when he reached it he found it occupied by a different set of Macnabs, for his grandfather and grandmother were recently dead, and even his dog Rob was missing.

  ‘
Did you ever know a dog named Rob?’ Finlay asked, and when the new Macnabs said no, he stood mournfully by the rough-walled cottage, tested the ropes that kept the thatched roof intact, and lamented the passage of the simple glories he had known here and would know no more. Adjusting his kilt, he started for that exquisite chain of western glens which would take him down to Glasgow, where he would be looking for a boat to Ireland.

  As he began the journey that would ultimately lead him to Texas, Finlay was eighteen, of average height, weighing eleven stone, four. He came from a line of men who had defended their rights in battle; he was himself a skilled cattle thief, a good man with the claymore, and one who loved the conviviality of his fellows. He had three fundamental characteristics which determined his behavior: he was a fierce Protestant whose ancestors had defended this religion with their lives; he had a stubborn sense of honor which lay quiescent when respected but flared into the wildest self-defense when insulted or transgressed; and he had a passionate love of freedom, which his people in the glen had sustained against Campbells and the English kings. Everything he had experienced—the lessons of Greek and Roman history, the accounts of his own clan, the records of his Scottish church, the works of the great philosophers—had instilled in him an almost fanatical dedication to liberty, which he would not surrender easily.

  He was, in short, one of the finest young men his world was then producing, and there were other freedom-seekers like him arising in France, in England and in Germany. But the most able pool of emigrating talent was developing within that intrusive Presbyterian enclave in Northern Ireland, where, in obedience to the thrust of history, many young people were trending toward Texas without ever realizing they were headed that way. When they arrived, they would prove a most difficult group to discipline, especially when the center of political control lay far distant in Mexico City, manned by persons of a different culture contemptuous of their aspirations.

  Finlay’s employer in Ireland was a big, rugged man with the reassuring Scottish name of Angus MacGregor, whose ancestors had received assistance from the crown in London in putting together halfway between the towns of Lurgan and Portadown, southwest of Belfast, a tremendous holding of spacious fields reaching all the way to Loch Neagh. It was on this estate that Finlay entered upon his duties: ‘Young man, you’re to make my herds prosper, trade my horses profitably, and keep the damned papists in line.’

  When the first MacGregor had come as a stranger to these lands, the population had been ninety-two-percent Catholic; by the time he died, it was down to half. When the present MacGregor inherited, his occupying farmers were about forty-percent Catholic, and now they were no more than eighteen-percent. In this orderly, irresistible manner the lush green fields of Northern Ireland were being rescued from popery, and after Finlay Macnab had been factor for a while, he could boast: ‘All my drovers are now trusted men from Scotland, loyal Highlanders who speak our tongue.’

  These invaders became known as the ‘Scots-Irish,’ which signified that in heritage, religion and firmness of character they were Scots, while in terrain and culture they were Irish. It was a powerful mix, this blending of two disparate Celtic strains, and they might more properly have been called Celts, for that is what they were: dreamers, wild talkers, men of dour concentration when needed, and great colonizers.

  The free-living local Celts exerted a powerful negative influence on young Finlay, for they taught him the pleasures of good Irish whiskey and the joy of teasing the local lassies, two occupations which delighted him but which also plunged him into serious trouble. One morning, after being unable to remember how the preceding night had ended, he looked at himself ruefully and mumbled: ‘I’ve made a far journey from St. Andrews,’ and he was pleased that Professor Gow could not see him now.

  In 1810, at the age of eighteen, he found himself involved in two situations from which there could be only one escape. He had fallen in love with the daughter of a Lurgan squire, and he coveted the jet-black mare of a Portadown butcher. The squire would not surrender his daughter to a lad who seemed bent on becoming a rascal, and the butcher would not sell his mare to a young fellow unable to pay a decent price. Young Finlay resolved the dilemma neatly: he stole both the girl and the mare, and after placing the former astride the latter, he led a merry chase over the fields and roads of Northern Ireland. In the end he abandoned both the girl and the mare, who were restored to their rightful owners, while he, always a jump ahead of his pursuers, made his way secretly to Dublin, where he caught a freight boat to Bristol in England, on the safe side of the Irish Sea.

  Unable to find work, he resorted to his traditional occupation of cattle stealing, only to discover that in England this had never been a game. When he returned to his lodgings one evening with a fine cow, his landlord whispered: ‘They’re after you, Finlay, and if they catch you, it’s the gibbet.’ Finlay suspected that this might be an evil trick whereby the landlord hoped to get the cow for nothing, but he hid in a grove of trees just in case the constables really did come, and when he saw three of them snooping about he scurried down lanes and through alleyways till he reached the Bristol docks. Leaping aboard the first ship available, he found himself, by ironic chance, headed for America’s most Catholic city, Baltimore.

  In 1812, at the age of twenty, he arrived in America just in time to become involved in the war starting that year, but after trying to decide whether he was an American patriot or a British partisan, he concluded that he was neither and offered himself to both sides, providing each with horses, cows, pigs, sheep and goats.

  By 1820, when he was well established in Baltimore, whose German citizens liked to do business with him, his careless dalliance with Berthe Keller, daughter of a Munich baker, obligated him to marry much sooner than he had intended. Berthe was a hefty blond young woman he would never normally have chosen, but when his father-in-law died in 1824, Macnab found himself proprietor of a flourishing bakery, which he quickly enlarged into a ships’ chandlery of impressive dimensions.

  He liked working on the beautiful Baltimore waterfront and was on his way to becoming a man of some importance, with a stodgy wife and three flaxen-haired children, when the inherited Macnab tendency surfaced, for in 1827 he was detected in a most nefarious transaction involving cattle owned by neighboring Germans. With no alternative but a term in jail, he decided to leave town.

  When his complaining wife, disgusted with his irresponsible behavior, refused to accompany him on his flight, he was rather relieved, for she had proved an irritable woman and he was glad to be shed of her. Leaving his two daughters with their mother, he kept his son, Otto, slipped out of Baltimore before the enraged cattle owners could pounce upon him, and headed for the National Road leading west.

  They were nearly eighty miles out of Baltimore, approaching Hagerstown, when young Otto gained his first insight into the nature of this trip, and indeed his first childish glimpse into the structure of life itself. Although not yet six, he was a precocious lad who suspected that he and his father were leaving his mother for good, and this caused pain. He knew that where his father was involved, his mother had been a bossy woman, but with Otto she had been a loving protector, standing always as his principal support, and he missed her. Often in the morning he expected to see her coming toward him with a bowl of porridge, or at night with hot sausages.

  He was so confused in his loneliness that sometimes he wanted to cry, but his stern heritage—half dour Scot, half stubborn German—plus a warning look from his father forced him to bite his lip and march resolutely ahead. But at dusk, when he crawled beneath his blanket, he did not try to hide the fact that he was miserable.

  But he felt no uncertainty about traveling with his father, and even though he did not fully understand why Finlay had fled Baltimore in such a hurry, he was sure that no blame fell on his father. A perplexed little boy, he stepped forth boldly each morning as they probed into the wilderness.

  One evening as they plodded along the ill-kept road, tr
ying to decide where to spread their thin blankets for the night, Otto saw through the growing darkness a light that shone from the window of some cabin situated well off the road, and the little hut seemed so established, so different from the wandering life he was leading that an overwhelming hunger assailed him.

  ‘Poppa, let’s stop here!’

  ‘No, we’ll find a valley before real darkness.’

  ‘But, Poppa, the light!’

  ‘On ahead.’

  They kept to the road, this stubborn father and his son nearing six, and it was then that the little boy fixed in his mind the image which would live with him for the rest of his life: a cabin secure in the wilderness, a light shining from the window, refuge from the lonely, shadow-filled road. And it was also then, because of the way in which his father urged him to move on, that he first suspected that he would not be allowed to share in that forbidden warmth, at least never for long. And whenever afterward he saw such lights at night his heart hesitated, for he knew what they symbolized.

  Twenty-five miles west of Hagerstown the Macnabs had to make a crucial decision, for there a path deviated to the north, heading over the hills to Pittsburgh, an enticing target.

  ‘Is it true?’ Finlay asked a traveler as they stood at the junction. ‘Do boats with steam engines leave Pittsburgh and run all the way to New Orleans?’

  ‘They do,’ the stranger assured him. ‘But you’d be wise to beware of them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For three solid reasons,’ he said. ‘They’re very expensive and would eat up your savings. They’re very dangerous, for they blow up constantly. And the criminals who sail them will steal what money you have left, cut your throat, and toss you overboard. Stay clear of those boats at Pittsburgh.’