"I got along fine with Big Henry," I was telling Skipper at lunch now, "but the cultural shock of re-entry from a champagne dinner flight and an air-conditioned Cadillac to that was something."
There were nine rooms in the log house and the clapboard cabin that the Harrises had jockeyed together fifteen years before. There was a naked light bulb centered in the ceiling of each room, and in the kitchen there were a refrigerator, a freezer, and a washing machine. Loose screening hung over the windows in the clapboard section, but the others were open to the flies, moths, and mosquitoes. Behind the house there was a hundred-gallon water tank on twelve-foot pipe legs, and it supplied the faucet in the kitchen and an outdoor spigot. The water was forced up into the tank under gas pressure from one of the oil wells that dotted the area and that Big Henry tended, and it tasted as if it were laced with gasoline.
"For an hour or so," I was saying, "Lou Viscusi and I sat on that porch and Big Henry answered my questions, and then they invited us in to lunch. The men sat down and the women served. They brought on these ham steaks, about three-quarters of an inch thick. The men, bearing down on their forks, cut right through the steaks, but I couldn't make it. I looked over at Lou and he was having the same trouble, so I said to Big Henry, 'I'm sorry, but may I have a knife?' He nodded to his wife and she went into the kitchen and came back and handed me a wooden-handled butcher's knife. Lou and I passed that knife back and forth. And then there were the flies. I kept shooing them off my food, but I noticed that the others paid no attention to them. They'd cut a piece of ham steak and then, as they brought it up, flip it or something, because the flies would leave before the food went into the mouths."
"Are you planning on us dining out there this trip?" Skipper said.
"I don't even know if anyone lives out there now," I said, "but I sure want to revisit the site."
About fifty feet from the house there was a weather-beaten boxing ring, and beyond it, on the shore of a mustard-colored fish-and-alligator pond, the upper half of an old, heavy punching bag hung from an elm festooned with Spanish moss. From another branch a climbing rope dangled, and a light punching bag on its support was affixed to a limb of a sweet-gum tree. Over the pond Big Henry had rigged a natural gas flare that burned night and day to attract insects that, singed by it, dropped into the pond as food for the perch, bass, catfish, and bream.
'The boxin' started here," Big Henry was telling me that first day back in '57, "when I had some old ducks. Tobe said, 'Can I have those ducks?' He took 'em down the road, and when he come back, he'd traded them for a set of boxing gloves."
"Then Roy and I started pokin' one another," Tobe said.
"We put that ring up seven-eight years ago," Big Henry said, "but they never did use it much. They fought all their lives barefoot on the ground. We made sort of a ring there. Two sides were barbed wire from the vegetable patch, and the other two sides were ropes, and others used to come in. What I did was run me up a gas flare over it, and they'd box under that, startin' every afternoon at five o'clock. We'd have six to a dozen here every night, with just me and Uncle Cleve settin' up here on the porch in these chairs and watchin'."
"And how long would these sessions last?" I said.
"Maybe to midnight," Big Henry said, "dependin' on how many arguments started. Then I used to go in and haul the bullies out of those honky-tonks. You know, those I-kin-whip-anybodies? I'd haul 'em out here and put 'em in with the boys, and the boys'd lick 'em."
Big Henry was six-feet-two-and-a-half inches, handsome, and at age forty-seven weighed 237 pounds. He said that when he was in his twenties he weighed 210, and had a thirty-three-inch waist, a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck, and sixteen-inch biceps, and I used to imagine him—rather than his six-foot, 190-pound second son —fighting Floyd Patterson.
"Each community had their strong boy then," he said, "and their best roper and their best rider. I was their stout boy, and I never was beat."
The Harris clan had been led out of Oklahoma early in this century by John Wesley "Cussin' " Harris. He had made the land rush there in 1889, but when the Territory became too crowded for him he moved south into Palestine, Texas, then into Conroe and finally, in 1913, into the Big Thicket. During the next twenty-five years, three of his sixteen offspring—Jack, Bob, and Henry— established themselves as the best fist, knee, knife, club, and heel fighters in the area.
"Is it true," I asked Big Henry on the second day that Lou Viscusi had driven me out there, "that one afternoon Bob laid out fourteen men with an ax handle?"
"Don't know how many Bob got himself," Big Henry said. "I remember they took sixteen to the hospital. After it was over, there was a tuft of brown hair here, a tuft of black hair here, teeth over there. Lookin' at that piece of ground, you'd think men fought over it for ten hours."
"How long did the fight last?" I said.
"Ten minutes," Big Henry said, "but I'd rather not talk about that kinda thing. I don't want no damn family fracas startin' up again."
I had bought this, and all else that was to follow, because I had been prepped by Ed Watson, the editor of the Conroe Daily Courier, who had led me to J. T. Montgomery, then the principal of Conroe's William B. Travis Junior High School and a local historian. He, in turn, had referred me to Guy Hooper, a former sheriff. Twenty-five years before, Hooper had had a stockade erected to hold the Harrises and the other nesters of the Big Thicket they led on horseback into open warfare against the invaders who had discovered beneath the sandy loam and clay the nation's third largest and richest oil field. Now Hooper was retired on an oil fortune, and we talked on the phone.
"The Harrises are really great people," he said. "They fight like hell, but they're honest. They never lie."
I visited J. T. Montgomery at the junior high school, and found him affable, filled with his subject, and hoping to write a book about the Big Thicket. It is one of this continent's natural phenomena, for within its five thousand square miles there are more than one hundred kinds of trees, among them fifteen that are the tallest known specimens of their species, thirty species of ferns, four types of insect-eating plants, thirty species of orchids and nine hundred varieties of other flowering plants. There are an estimated one thousand species of algae and fungi and at least three hundred bird species, and for a hundred years it was a refuge for those who just wanted to get away—Indians, runaway slaves, Confederate Army deserters, outlaws, and moonshiners.
"Cut and Shoot got its name from a church squabble they had there in 1910," Montgomery told me. "There were two factions in the Baptist Church on the banks of Caney Creek, and I don't know how much cuttin' and shootin' there was, but Alfred Morris, a lawyer here in Conroe, named it, and the name stuck.
"I'll tell you one thing about those people in the Big Thicket, though. When they like you, they're for you all the way, and Henry Harris is the best friend I've ever had in my life. When they don't like you, though, you don't know it until you wake up in the hospital or with somebody throwin' cold water on your face. You never know what those people are thinkin'.
"You have to remember that they're independent people. That's why they went into the Thicket—to maintain their independence. They've always believed in the law, but their own law. They've got an extremely high code of honor, and they've always fought for it. You ask Roy about that. Ask him about the time his Uncle Bob cut a man's head off."
"Ask him what?" I said.
"Ask him about the time his Uncle Bob cut a man's head off," Montgomery said. "He'll tell you about that."
"You're not stringing me?" I said.
"No, no," Montgomery said. "You just ask Roy. He'll tell you the truth."
Roy was twenty-four years old, mild-mannered, polite, and it seemed to me, the least likely of the Harris adult males to be challenging for the heavyweight championship of the world. He had been an honor student in junior high and high school, and the year before he had been graduated from Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, thirty miles north
of Conroe. When he was not boxing he was teaching spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography in the Stephen F. Austin Elementary School in Cut and Shoot. He also taught in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve.
I had met him that second day—he had returned the night before from two weeks of maneuvers with the 90th infantry Division at Fort Polk, Louisiana—on the porch of the Harris homestead. While in his senior year at Sam Houston State Teachers, he had married Jean Groce, whom he first met in a homemaking class in high school, and they were living in a new white, blue-roofed, three-rooms-and-bath cottage just beyond the fish-and-alligator pond.
"This pond," I said to him, as we skirted it on the way to the cottage. "Are there any alligators in it now?"
"Only a couple," he said.
"How big are they?" I said, eying the pond.
"Well," he said, "about six years ago Tobe went over to a lake about ten miles from here, and he got out in a boat and he roped one. The 'gator turned the boat over and he dragged Tobe through the water for a while, but finally Tobe got ashore and he tied the rope around a button-willow tree, and he came home.
"All that night that button-willow tree played that 'gator like a fish pole, and the next day my dad and Tobe went down in the truck. They horsed that 'gator with the truck for a while to tire him out some more, and then they pulled him out and brought him over here. He was fourteen feet, two inches, and weighed about a thousand pounds. Then he ate a couple of our dogs, so Bob shot him."
"After all that trouble getting him in here?" I said. "Does that sort of thing go on all the time?"
"We had a couple in here that were eleven-and-a-half-feet and nine-and-a-half feet," he said. "We had this English Bull six weeks old, named Rowdy, and he'd go down to get a drink, and one morning we couldn't find him. A week or two later we had a hound pup, three or four months old, that disappeared. We had these fox hound puppies and one was sleepin' and a 'gator got him. The other puppies got scared and ran to the house, and they bayed that pond for two weeks. They got fifteen or twenty of our hogs, too, but my dad didn't care. We had lots of them, and they were mixed breeds."
The cottage was immaculate, and we talked at the kitchen table I asked him about his schooling and about some of his fights, amateur and professional, hoping meanwhile that I would be able to maneuver the dialogue so that I might gracefully, if that could be possible, bring up the subject of his Uncle Bob and the other man's head.
"I've spent some time with J. T. Montgomery," I said. "He has great respect for you Harrises, and he was telling me about some of the fights your folks have had. What brought those fights on?"
"Mostly," Roy said, "they'd come about when somebody'd invite them not to come to a dance."
"They'd invite them not to come?"
"That's right," he said. "Once they invited Jack not to come to a dance, and he and Henry and Bob went. Jack, he went around and asked each lady to dance, arid none of them would. Then he walked to the middle of the floor and he said, 'There isn't a lady here wants to dance. I asked them all, and before I let any of you make 'em dance, I'll die and go to hell.'
"One of them pulled a pistol on Jack, and Jack took his pistol and beat it to pieces on him. That pistol was pretty shackledy when he got done, and that fella was bleedin' from the mouth and ears, and if Bob hadn't turned him over he'd a drowned in his own blood. Then another one ran up behind Jack and hit him with a rail off a rail fence, and Jack grabbed it and hit him across the back and broke his back. You see, when people came out to Cut and Shoot to a dance and got back in one piece, they thought they'd really done something."
Well, I was thinking, this is it. If I don't ask it now I may never, and even if I do and get an answer and write it, they may not believe it in Philadelphia.
"J. T. Montgomery," I said, "told me to be sure to ask you about the time your Uncle Bob cut a man's head off."
"There was this gang of boys," he said, and it evolved as if I had asked him to tell me about trapping a fox or treeing a coon. "They had beat up several people in town. There were eleven of them, and one night they called Bob out on the road to give him a drink of whiskey. When he turned it up to drink, they hit him over the head with a car jack, and then one of them jumped Bob on the ground and started knifin' him.
"Bob, he opened his own knife with his teeth, and he cut that fella's neck through on one side and then the other. That fella got up and ran in a circle about fifteen feet, like a chicken with his head hangin' back, and then he fell dead. But he'd cut Bob to the holler in thirteen places."
"To the what?" I said.
"To the hollow parts of his body," he said. "They thought Bob was gonna die, but he didn't. They ruled it was self-defense, and Bob always said that other fella was the best one of the bunch, and he was sorry he'd had to kill him. He said the others had talked that fella into it. About four years ago one of them came up to his daddy's funeral, and Bob told him to leave, that the county wasn't big enough for both of them.
"Bob," he was saying now, "he got in fights with his knife a lot of times. My dad has a place in his head you can put your two fingers in, but Bob is shorter and active and fast. He used to run the hundred in less than ten seconds, and he could turn a flip backwards and forwards easily. I can turn a front flip, but I never could do the back flip too good. Bob is fifty now, and there was this mound of soft dirt, and he hadn't done a back flip in ten years. He went six feet in the air and landed on his head."
"From what I've heard," I said, "from your dad and J. T. Montgomery and Ed Watson, at the paper in Conroe, you're not of the same temperament. Have you ever had any fights outside the ring?"
"Only one, really," he said.
"Tell me about that one."
"Just a second," he said, and he stood up and was looking out of the window. "There's a squirrel come in and stole an ear of corn. Let me holler to Bob and let him go over there and kill him. Hey, Bob! Hey, Henry! There's a squirrel in the corn!
"Bob or Henry'll get him," he said, sitting down again. "What was it you asked?"
"About the one fight you've had outside the ring."
"It was in college," he said. "I was in the ROTC and this fella was my CO, and he'd chew on me. In military class he'd say how shaggy I looked, and he'd straighten my cap. He'd do that four or five times in one day, in front of everybody, and I'd just say, 'But I haven't touched my cap, sir, since you fixed it.' At first I thought it was a joke, but then he'd do it in civilian clothes, too.
"He was from Houston Heights, and a dignified dresser, and a lot of times I wore blue jeans, and he'd say how country I looked. I didn't wear shoes until high school, and a lot of times I didn't wear 'em then. Well, this particular day I guess I was a little on the bad side and he met me on the campus. He said something about my clothes, and I swung on him with a right hand. He kinda ducked and it grazed him and spun him around, and I hit him a left hook over his eye and and split it and knocked him down. I kicked in a couple of his ribs, and I kicked him in the face. I skinned most of the hide off one side of his face and part off the other. There were some teachers came runnin', and some were hollerin' out of the windows, and they stopped it.
"If I'da had time to do a good job on him," he said, "I believe I'da made a friend of him. Half whippin' a man like that doesn't do any good. You just make an enemy, and I felt sorry about that. I really did. That was on a Saturday, and on Monday I came back and they called me before a board with three military men on it— a colonel, a major, and a captain. They kicked me out of school, but the student organizations threatened to go on srike. They wrote all kinds of deals and put them on the bulletin boards, so after a couple of days they let me back."
After lunch now Skipper Lofting and I got into his car to drive to the County Court House. A light rain was still falling, and he was backing the car out of the parking space.
"How good a fighter was Roy?" he said.
"He was good enough to beat Willie Pastrano
, and later Willie won the light-heavyweight title," I said. "In the Patterson fight he had Floyd on the deck in the second round."
"I don't remember that fight," Skipper said.
"It was in Wrigley Field in Los Angeles and on theater TV," I said. "Patterson used to bob straight up and down, and in the second round, Roy caught him with the perfect combination—a left hook to the body, and when Floyd ducked straight down, a right uppercut under the chin dropped him. He got right up, and after that round it was all Floyd. Roy was cut over both eyes and his nose was bleeding and he was down four times when Big Henry, who was in the corner in a bright red shirt, and Bill Gore, who trained Roy for the fight, stopped it in the twelfth round. Patterson just punched too fast for him, and afterwards everybody wrote about Roy's guts."
In the nineteen years since I had been in Conroe the population of the county had more than tripled to about 125,000. Traffic was crawling over the wet streets, and we found what seemed to be the last parking space across from the white marble and white brick County Court House. We managed to become lost in the big building, but in the office of the County Clerk, one of the women at the more than a dozen desks behind a waist-high counter led us back to Roy's office.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 25