Texas

by James A. Michener

  Otto was disappointed in the capital of his new nation, for Columbia had only five houses, one of which was a store-hotel. Government occupied three of the houses: representatives in a two-story frame affair with no caulking to seal the openings; senators in a windowless shack that had been used for storing cattle foodstuffs; the president in another windowless affair of two small rooms, a smoky fireplace and an earthen floor that became a quagmire when water seeped in.

  As soon as Yancey saw the presidential mansion his bile began to rise, and he experienced such nausea that he stopped a passer-by to ask: ‘Is that where Sam Houston lives?’ When the farmer confirmed that this was the home of the president, Quimper asked: ‘Is he ever sober?’ and the citizen replied: ‘As a matter of strict truth, he is never sober before two in the afternoon, and since it’s only half past one, you can count on it that he lies in there dead drunk.’ The man said that although Houston was a famous drinker, ‘best in these parts, past or present,’ his average day was orderly: ‘Gets drunk every night of the week at seven and raises hell till midnight. Goes to bed about one in the mornin’, sleeps till noon, tries to sober up till two. You can’t knock him awake when he’s drunk, and if the house caught fire, we’d never get him out. That gives him about four good workin’ hours each afternoon, and then he does a prodigious amount runnin’ the affairs of the nation. When you catch him sober, you have yourself a very good man.’

  ‘Can we leave our affairs in the hands of such a drunk?’

  ‘He handled them pretty well at San Jacinto,’ the farmer said, and this incited Quimper: ‘He was a coward! Wanted to flee north to Nacogdoches. I led his troops to the fight with Santy Anny. When we got there, he refused to fight, but I moved among the troops and made him start the battle. I say “To hell with Sam Houston.” ’

  ‘Watch out! Here he comes!’ And Yancey stared across the dusty road to the ‘executive mansion,’ where, in midafternoon sun, the president of the new republic appeared ahead of time. Standing in the low doorway, Houston was forced to stoop while he rubbed his eyes. Then he moved out onto the road, preparing to walk the short distance to where his Congress was in session. He was very tall, very powerful in appearance, but his outrageous dress made him almost a caricature of a frontier leader.

  On his head he wore a George Washington tricorn hat from whose left side projected a feather. On his feet he had moccasins made of elk hide, with Indian beads along the high tops. What served as trousers were of a very thick homespun, no buttons, no belt, simply a huge swath of cloth wrapped about his middle and fastened with a length of rope. But it was his jacket that was most spectacular, for it consisted of a Mexican serape, brightly colored and well fringed, which he swept about his left shoulder so that its far end dragged along the ground. Thus attired, and with a three-day growth of beard, he moved forward to conduct the affairs of state, but when he spotted Quimper he interrupted his unsteady progress and said, without sarcasm: ‘Ah-ha! The Hero of San Jacinto!’ Yancey, taken by surprise, fumbled for just a moment, then flashed his toothiest smile: ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ and the President of Texas lurched on, not yet fully recovered from the previous night’s bout.

  It was on the trip home that Otto began to suspect that whatever Yancey Quimper did had to be inspected closely, because the boy could see that the enthusiastic innkeeper was apt to prove unreliable when his own interests became paramount. From something that Yancey said—‘Gettin’ the ferry started is our real job’—he suspected that when the time came to help the Ascots build their house, Yancey would find other obligations to keep him employed.

  Otto was wrong. As soon as Yancey reached the inn, shouting to Betsy Belle as he approached, he summoned Martin, who was reading his lawbooks, and cried: ‘Look what Otto and me bought for your kitchen!’ and to Otto’s surprise he produced a small oaken coffee grinder made in France. When Betsy Belle embraced Otto, thanking him for the gift, Yancey winked, indicating that the boy should keep his mouth shut. And next morning it was Yancey who shouted: ‘Let’s go downriver and build that house.’ In the days that followed he labored at least as strenuously as the other two men, and after many tedious days the Ascots had their shack.

  Martin’s advancement in his other field had been even more spectacular, for on the evening of his third visit to Judge Phinizy, the Arkansas jurist said: ‘Martin, I’m sendin’ in your papers tomorrow. You’re a lawyer.’

  ‘But, Judge …’

  ‘Hell, son, you know more law’n I do right now,’ and he curved yet another magnificent shot of tobacco juice into the bucket to punctuate his legal decision.

  When Martin expressed his gratitude for such assistance, the judge asked for the return of Coke and Blackstone and handed him in exchange the only two books he, Phinizy, had ever purchased with his own money: Fordyce on Pleading and Civil Code of Virginia: ‘I never finished either of ’em, but I have found that the more you know, the better lawyer you’ll be.’

  Martin’s introduction to the law came in two cases involving veterans, and since he appreciated their problems, he was a sympathetic counselor, but he learned quickly that in the tumult of a Texas courtroom good intentions on the part of a man’s lawyer or right on the side of a client could mean little.

  In his first case he represented a likable young farmer, Axel Vexter, who had fought at San Jacinto and had, with the approval of the Texas government, selected the 640 acres allotted him. He had surveyed the land with the aid of a licensed surveyor and had started erecting a small house when another veteran claimed prior rights. He, too, said he had governmental approval and a proper survey. The case rested, obviously, on the character and witnesses of the two contestants, and with considerable effort Ascot rounded up proof incontrovertible that it was Vexter who had prior rights, but when Phinizy rendered his decision, the land went to the other man, and Vexter’s certificate entitling him to 640 acres was available for use elsewhere.

  The young veteran was so infuriated by this obvious perversion of justice that he cursed Phinizy in open court, and was thrown in jail for contempt. When Ascot went there to console him, Vexter cursed him too, and threw the certificate in his face. In vain did the young lawyer strive to assure the prisoner that he would soon be released and that other land just as good could be found. Vexter would not listen: ‘Take the damned land as your fee. I don’t want it.’

  This Ascot would not do, and when he told Quimper about the affair, Yancey said: ‘Martin! When you have a case before Judge Phinizy, let me know. He owes me so many favors.’

  Ascot stared at the innkeeper: ‘Do you know what you just said?’ and Yancey replied: ‘You got to accept Judge Phinizy as he is.’

  But when Martin told Yancey about the certificate to land rights which Vexter had rejected, Quimper became quite excited: ‘Let me see that!’ and when he satisfied himself that it was a legal document assuring the holder of free land, he said: ‘I need these. If you have any other clients …’ He offered Martin ten cents an acre, $6.40, to keep as a fee for services, but Martin would not accept this: ‘I want you to hand it to Vexter personally. So he’ll know there can be decency in the law.’

  But when the time came to count out the few coins that Betsy Belle had been collecting at the inn, Yancey could come up with only $5.10. This certificate entitled the owner to 640 acres of the choicest land in the region of the three rivers, land that would later be of enormous value, but because there was no money in circulation, it could not fetch even ten cents an acre.

  ‘Will he accept five-ten?’ Yancey asked, and Martin told him: ‘He’ll be glad to get anything.’ So the two men went to the jail, a chicken-coop affair attached to Judge Phinizy’s office, and tendered Vexter the money. When he accepted, gratified by the amount, Yancey said: ‘If you know any others who want to sell their rights, send them to Quimper’s Ferry.’ Then he went to the front of the building and told the judge: ‘Let him go. He was at San Jacinto.’

  On his second big case Martin Ascot learned th
e extraordinary legal power of the words Yancey had spoken, for this time he was defending, before Judge Phinizy, a farmer of impeccable reputation and deportment who had been grievously defrauded by a rascal named Knobby Horsham, and the case was so transparent that Ascot felt he need not bother his friend Quimper, who appeared to have the judge’s ear. Carefully prepared, Ascot appeared on the morning of the trial date only to find that Sam Houston, dressed in Indian garb topped by his serape and with clanging spurs, had asked special dispensation to serve as lawyer for the defendant, despite the fact that he was the president. Judge Phinizy granted the unusual request and the trial began.

  In a masterful display, young Ascot deferred to the great Houston, at the same time proving beyond any doubt that Knobby Horsham had behaved despicably. The jury, nine farmers, obviously sided with Martin’s client, for some of them had been defrauded by just such rascals as Knobby.

  The case really did not need to be submitted to the jury, but Judge Phinizy, in a show of judicial impartiality, asked Sam Houston if he had any witnesses. ‘Only one, your Honor.’ Limping to the witness box, his right leg dragging so conspicuously that the jury had to notice, he moved close to his client and looked down upon him as a loving father might, despite the fact that the man was a proved rascal. The audience leaned forward, expecting their voluble president to unlimber a scorching oration, but he uttered only two sentences: ‘Knobby, you’ve heard the serious charges made against you. Where were you on the afternoon of 21 April 18 and 36?’

  Knobby looked up like an innocent child and whispered: ‘Leadin’ the front-line charge at San Jacinto.’

  ‘The defense rests,’ Houston said, limping back to his chair.

  ‘Case dismissed,’ Judge Phinizy cried.

  The next months were the ones that crystallized Otto’s character, for he spent them almost equally divided between two contrasting lives that attracted him almost equally. He lived in the rude shack built for the Ascots, which Betsy Belle had converted into a place of warmth and illumination. As finished by the three veterans of San Jacinto, the cabin was little more than a collection of rough-cut logs piled loosely in the form of a large kitchen, a small alcove for the Ascots and a cubbyhole for Otto, but after she finished with making it habitable, it was a snug refuge in the wilderness.

  First she took Otto to the river, where they routed out long lengths of soft weeds and pailfuls of mud to caulk the crevices through which wind had been blowing and rain dripping. Then she herself took thin reedlike limbs of trees growing along the Brazos and fashioned them into chairs, four in all, which were both sturdy and comfortable. After what seemed like interminable searching, she procured two iron hooks for the fireplace and three pots to hang upon them. She smoothed out five successive layers of a claylike mud to achieve a level, largely dustless floor. And to make the kitchen seem more like a city home, she nailed to its walls two colored lithographs, one sent down the Mississippi from Cincinnati, the other up across the desert from Mexico City. The first showed Andrew Jackson astride a horse at New Orleans; the second, Santa Anna in the battle at Zacatecas. Whenever Yancey Quimper visited the kitchen, he spat at Santa Anna, whereupon Betsy Belle would bang him on the ear.

  To Otto this kitchen became a university, for here the Ascots introduced him to true learning, Martin speaking of the principles of law, Betsy Belle reviewing the lessons she had mastered at a school in Mississippi. They talked of Napoleon and Charlemagne and Thomas Jefferson, and always they tried to penetrate to those motives which force men and women to behave as they do. Night after night Martin would review cases which he had tried before Judge Phinizy, with Betsy Belle analyzing why this man and that woman had behaved as they had: ‘You must have seen she was lying. Surely the judge pointed this out to the jury.’ And Martin would explain why it was most unlikely that the judge would have done so.

  From such instruction Otto began to formulate his own interpretation of society, and the Ascots might have been surprised had he revealed it. Drawing upon what he had seen at Natchez-under-the-Hill and at Goliad, he discovered that for a man to make a mark in this world, he had better have a tough core of righteousness which he should allow nothing to scar, neither the lure of money nor the pursuit of pride. He had better identify his enemies quickly and beat them down before they had a chance to do the same to him. And it would be best if he kept quiet.

  Early in their evening talks around one of Betsy Belle’s homemade candles, he decided that he was not fashioned to be a scholar, because the first time Martin handed him a lawbook that explained the topic under discussion, he found that his interest quickly flagged. And whenever Betsy Belle spoke reverently of some romantic tale she had picked up from her study of history, he would dismiss it as imagination. He was a tough-minded little realist, soon to be fifteen, and he would leave the life of letters to others better qualified.

  But he never dismissed the essence of what the Ascots were saying. He knew from looking into their excited faces that there was a lower order of life and a higher, and he was instinctively drawn to the latter. In every court case that Martin discussed, he found himself siding with right, and justice, and what Martin sometimes called ‘the only sensible thing to do.’

  These growing convictions served him in good stead when he worked with Yancey Quimper at the inn, for there he saw a completely different type of person. To begin with, Yancey himself was about as far removed from the Ascots as one could be. For example, when the Ascot cabin needed caulking, Betsy Belle tied up her skirts, went into the Brazos, and dug the clay for it; at the inn when there was work to be done, Yancey always looked about for someone else to do it. He could in a single day find a dozen things for Otto to attend.

  The motivations of the inn customers were also quite different from those of the Ascots. Everyone seemed to be conniving for some advantage or trying to acquire land or belongings owned by someone else. Arguments were settled not with carefully marshaled words but with fists or a flashing Bowie knife. Otto was by no means afraid of a fight; he knew from experience that he could control adversaries much bigger than he, but he saw that to engage endlessly in brawling was not productive.

  Yet he enjoyed the liveliness of the inn, and despite Quimper’s obvious defects in character, he liked being with him, for something was always happening, like the time two toughs from Kentucky stopped on the far side of the Brazos and clamored loudly to be ferried across. ‘Go fetch them,’ Yancey said, and Otto had gone down the steep bank to where the ferry waited, its two guide ropes attached by rings to the wire that stretched to a big tree on the opposite side. With deft hands he grabbed the forward rope, allowed the current to carry him downstream till the rope was taut, and then pulled sturdily so that the ferry moved forward along the fixed wire.

  ‘What kind of contraption is this?’ one of the frontiersmen bellowed as they climbed noisily aboard, and at midstream on the return trip, the man who had spoken grabbed the rope from Otto’s hands, while his partner grabbed the stern rope, and pulling in the opposite direction, nearly upset the craft.

  ‘Stop that!’ Otto shouted, recovering the rope, but he could do nothing to move the ferry because now both men heaved on the back rope. He was stronger than they and knew better what he was doing, so they did not succeed in taking the ferry away from him in their boisterous game, but they did make orderly progress impossible.

  Dropping his rope, Otto whipped from his belt the pistol that Zave Campbell had taught him to use so effectively. Pointing it at the two roisterers, he said quietly: ‘Drop that rope.’ When they refused, he calmly put a shot between the pair and said: ‘Drop it or I’m coming after you.’

  The threat was so preposterous, this boy challenging two grown men, that they began to laugh, and if Otto’s pistol had had the capacity of a second bullet, he would have blazed away at them. Instead, he leaped forward, knocked one sideways so that he fell into the river and flattened the other.

  The pistol shot had aroused men in the inn, and they came
streaming down to the bank. A good swimmer, seeing that the first Kentuckian might drown, plunged in to save him, while others waded out to bring the ferry to the bank. When the two travelers were at the bar drinking the watered stuff that Quimper sold as whiskey, one said: ‘You got yourself a son who’s a tiger,’ and Yancey said: ‘He ain’t my son,’ and they said: ‘You better adopt him.’

  Next morning Yancey tried to do just that: ‘Otto, I’m makin’ you an offer. You run the ferry, help around the place. I’ll give you room and keep, and soon as there’s any money, you’ll get a share. Meantime, you got yourself a leg up in life.’

  ‘I’ll think about that,’ Otto said, and he might have accepted, for he knew he needed a home somewhere, and that continued residence with the Ascots was both impractical and unfair. He might have become a river-crossing roustabout had not Martin Ascot been called to the new town of Houston on an important court case. Taking Betsy Belle with him, and inviting Otto to ride along, Martin set out for what was now the capital city of the republic. The three-day ride southeast, across the low, rolling hills between the Brazos and the Trinity, was a reminder of what the new nation might become if it ever stabilized and found enough money to operate, for the fields were rich, the trees grew in attractive clusters, and flowers bloomed everywhere. It was a rougher land, Otto thought, than the terrain he had seen in Ohio, but it was powerful, and he was proud to be a part of it.

  The first night out they slept under the stars, but on the second they found a farmhouse where the wife welcomed them and the husband was eager to talk politics: ‘As soon as that drunk Houston serves out his term, what we got to do is elect a real fighter like Mirabeau Lamar to the presidency.’

  ‘Who’s he want to fight?’ Martin asked, and the man said: ‘I’ve heard him twice. He wants to kick the Indians out of Texas. He wants to fight Santy Anny and whip him proper. And he wants us to take Santy Fay.’