I have mentioned already that reading Benjamin’s pages cast me into a time of deep thought. In reflecting on the family that had cared for me with such innate generosity of spirit, I then began to reflect, with more emotion than I had previously allowed myself to feel, on the family I had been taken from as a child.
I had long planned to search someday for the parents I was born to in Mexico, but knowing I would have so little information to guide the search, I had procrastinated, not fully considering the disappointment I would feel at the end of my life if I did not at least make the attempt. The Gospel of Luke instructs us to put our hands to the plow and look only forward, not back. And yet, now in the vicinity of my seventieth year, I began to feel the impending sorrow of future regrets and to wonder if my parents might still, by the grace of God, be living and if I might have siblings and other living relatives in Mexico.
With only a vague notion, then, of what I hoped to discover but doubted I would, and uncertain if I was acting on the will of the Lord or merely on a simple and fruitless wish that I had held since I was a boy—to reunite with my family—I drove south across the border and began my search, traveling eastward through the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon.
I will not burden you with details of the journey or of the rise and fall of my hopes. I met a great number of fine people at border ranches who had long ago lost family members to Indian raids, but I was unable to discover anyone who knew of a boy taken in about the year when I suppose myself to have been.
I would consider this futile search a failure and disappointment, misguided and unblessed by God, if it were not for the fact that in the course of these extensive inquiries I happened across a curious piece of intelligence in Nuevo Leon, in the village of Santiago, that resulted in a provocative discovery toward which only the Lord could have guided me.
With the knowledge of this discovery, I traveled directly to Texas in search of Benjamin, going first to the town of Comfort, where I was greeted warmly by many old acquaintances and by my sister, who still resides there. I located Herman Hildebrand, the son of the postmaster Bernard Hildebrand, whom Benjamin had known. You can imagine my happiness when Herman told me that there existed a series of notes Benjamin had sent to the elder Mr. Hildebrand over several years, to inform him of his various locations so that Samantha might be told where he was if she should come looking for him, and that these notes were in the care of the current postmaster, who kept them stored in a box at the post office.
I called on the postmaster, who on hearing my purpose was delighted to open the box and allow me to read the notes.
The most recent was dated forty years ago. It relayed the simple information from Benjamin that he had married and purchased a small piece of property ten miles from the town of Cometa, Texas, in Zavala County, and that Samantha might find him there if she were to come looking. He said his wife’s family, with the surname of Valdez, was well known in the area and it would be no trouble to find him.
After spending the night in my sister’s home, I rose early and drove in the summer heat a hundred and fifty miles south to the town of Cometa, where I had only to speak the name Benjamin Shreve to the first person I encountered—a woman walking alongside the road—to be told, in a mixture of Spanish and English, directions to Benjamin’s house.
It stood at the end of a long road in the midst of vast pastures of cattle. Two cars and several trucks were parked in the yard, and I encountered small children and a number of chickens and dogs as I pulled in beside them. The house was nicely painted and well kept. An elderly man, seated on the porch, set aside a stack of papers and rose from his chair as I got out of my car. I knew him almost at once. He did not recognize me at first, as I was hardly more than a boy when he had last seen me. He seemed to think I had come for directions to some other place, but when I told him my name he knew me without hesitation and came down the steps to welcome me with a look of boundless warmth and a mighty handshake.
My visit lasted throughout the hot afternoon and well into the evening. It is enough to say that Benjamin’s wife, Estela, treated me as family, and that numerous of their kin came throughout the day to meet me. Two of Benjamin’s sons live on the property and help him manage his cattle, and one of his three daughters still lives in the home. A number of grandchildren were present and other people besides, including one young man who told me he had come to Zavala County thirteen years ago in flight from the Mexican Revolution and that Benjamin had taken him in and taught him English and how to read.
At dusk, after a long dinner with many members of the household, Benjamin and I sat alone on the porch remembering old times in the hill country and talking about my father and what he had meant in our lives. When I felt the time was appropriate I asked about Samantha and inquired if he had heard anything of her.
He was slow to answer and finally said, in a thoughtful manner, that he was grateful to have me ask about her, as he had not heard her name spoken in a while and had not seen anyone in many years who had known her. He then spoke of her with great feeling for some time. I recalled how she had shouted at me to get away from the windows when I first saw her and how my father had told his grandchildren and me to turn our faces to the wall. The memory brought a smile to Benjamin’s face. He said it was good to remember how cantankerous Samantha could be. He said his memories of her have grown increasingly dim but only weighed more heavily on his heart, and he continues to hold out hope that she might one day appear at his door.
It was then I told him of reading the testimony he had written to Judge Carlton. He was astounded and overwhelmed to know that it had been preserved. I told him of your letter and of how you said the judge had treasured his testament and thought of him with fatherly affection.
Last of all I told him what I will now tell you—that I discovered, in Santiago, the story of a young woman who stayed in that village for a brief time in the early 1870s. She had worked at a shabby cantina on the edge of town and lived in the quarters in the back. By all descriptions, she was a mulatto with a face scarred by the claws of a panther. She was said to have been disagreeable to the owner of the cantina and to have fled the town one night after a violent altercation when a customer insulted her face and she spit in his food. According to the story, which has become something of a local legend in the ensuing half century, she bolted from the cantina, pursued by angry customers, and escaped through the streets of Santiago into the dark of night, never to be seen in the town again. On the morning after her flight, the owner of the establishment entered her unkempt room and took possession of her effects.
As long as I live I will not forget Benjamin’s astonished inquiries, his rapt attention, and most of all his expressions of grief and gratitude, and ultimately of joy, when I told him that I had been to the small cantina, which still stands at the edge of the town. There I had seen, behind the rustic bar, nailed to the boards of the wall, the hide of a great panther. Beyond a doubt, I can verify that it was the hide of El Demonio de Dos Dedos. I saw for myself the right hind paw. It was not, like the rest of the hide, deprived of its skeletal structure but displayed the full array of the bones, intact but for two missing toes.
After I had finished relating to Benjamin what I had heard that day in Santiago, and what I had seen in the cantina, he and I sat for a long time on his porch in the warmth of the evening, listening to the pulsing chirp of the crickets and the lowing of cattle. We were quiet in our companionship much of the time. I reminded him of what my father had said on the riverbank when Samantha lay crying in the mud, believing that the hide was downriver and gone forever. He had said she would have to forsake the hide as her treasure, because where her treasure was, there would her heart be also, beyond the reach of those who loved her. He had called on her to take courage and to walk on.
We pondered the unanswered questions while darkness settled. Why had Samantha never returned to Santiago for the hide? Perhaps it had not given her the satisfaction she was seeking and she h
ad been lost without the sustenance of longing. Perhaps she had gone in search of another elusive thing. I thought of my own journey through life, and where it had brought me, and how the hard wanderings of my childhood had led me into the keeping of Preacher Dob and eventually, through the avenues of time, to the life I now had. It was possible Samantha might have found a similar blessing.
As the night deepened, Benjamin spoke of his struggle between hope for her and despair for her. His face was placid, his manner reserved, and his eyes held a calm and steady gaze as he looked out over his cattle grazing in the pasture. But now and then his voice could not hold back his emotion, and he paused to gather his words.
Where had she gone? To the mountains, to the ocean, to the desert—who could say? I shared with him my belief that she is all right in the way God intended her to be, for we are told in Hebrews 10:35: Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.
I apologize again for my delayed response to your very great kindness in sending Benjamin’s testimony to me. It was a thoughtfulness that I will appreciate for the remainder of my days. You will perhaps be pleased to know that before parting with Benjamin I promised to return for another visit and to bring to him the original letters and testament that he posted from the Comfort postal office fifty-nine years ago. Without your care, and that of Judge Carlton, Benjamin’s tale would have disappeared alongside countless other tales of old times in Texas that have been forgotten and vanished into the host of days gone by.
Sincerely yours,
Jackson Beck
Acknowledgments
For the story of The Which Way Tree I owe thanks to the following people.
Kenneth Groesbeck advised me on everything from bee bush and possumhaw to the necessary height of a goat pen, the heft of an 1860s Colt six-shooter, and the mechanics of how a rainstorm from the south can precede a cold front from the north and drop temperatures in the hill country down to freezing within hours. Thank you for your patience, Kenneth.
Stephen Harrigan, brainstormer extraordinaire, helped me find my way into the story and all the way through it, his off-the-cuff notions often opening paths out of what seemed to be box canyons. For thirty years Steve and I have been passing our manuscripts back and forth, swapping ideas, sharing research, and scribbling our thoughts in the margins of each other’s drafts. When I was puzzling over what sort of character might own a panther dog, it was Steve who said, “How about a preacher?” Steve, thank you for everything except all those snide comments about my spelling.
Jeff Long, invaluable reader and dear friend whom I’ve known even longer than thirty years, was in this case also a great wrangling partner. Thank you for believing so passionately in this book from the beginning, Jeff.
By an unforeseen happy circumstance an early draft of the manuscript found its way into the hands of Robert Duvall, who has been my favorite actor since he played Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae in the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove. I’m beholden to him, as well as to Eric Williams, Salli Newman, Alberto Arvelo, and Ed Johnston for embracing the story with so much passion and for their indispensable insights. It was Bob Duvall who first loved the title The Which Way Tree and persuaded me to settle on it.
Randolph B. Campbell and the Honorable Thomas R. Phillips allowed me to pester them with numerous questions about the nature of judicial districts and circuit courts in Texas in the years after the Civil War. My sincere thanks to both for being so generous with their time.
My literary agent, Gail Hochman, with her perfect instincts, submitted the manuscript to Ben George at Little, Brown, who took Sam and Benjamin into his care with as much attention, and what seemed to me like real affection, as if they had been real children. I can hardly believe my good fortune in having this book with the team at Little, Brown and with an editor as meticulous and discerning as Ben.
Family and friends were my earliest readers, as always. I owe the usual heap of thanks to my mother, Eleanor Crook, my sister, Noel Crook, my brother, Bill Crook, my husband, Marc Lewis, my uncle Charles Butt, and my friends Marco Uribe and Sarah Bird for spurring me on from the get-go.
My most heartfelt gratitude is forever to Marc and our kids, Joseph and Lizzie, who during the time I was writing this book somehow managed to keep me happily grounded in the twenty-first century even while my thoughts were rolling back to the nineteenth.
Joseph especially deserves thanks for planting the seeds of this story on a night in the canyons in Bandera County when he was fourteen years old. He and a friend overshot the cabin where they intended to camp—easy to do in that terrain—and became lost in a web of narrow ravines. Our discovery, on driving out to check on the boys at dark, that they had never arrived at the cabin led to nine harrowing hours of driving the rocky roads in search of them, shouting into dark gullies, making our way along stream banks by flashlight, and watching the searchlights of a helicopter fan over the hills as we prayed for the pilots to see something. Sometime after midnight the chief deputy of Bandera and two companions searching with him on the ground radioed that they had seen an enormous mountain lion, known in the old days and in this book as a panther, trailing, quiet and ghostlike, through the canyon into which the boys had disappeared.
Not until we had searched for several more hours did the pilots finally spot, deep in a tight ravine, the glint of a small, smoky campfire with two figures beside it. They landed to pick up the chief deputy and transported him to the bluff above the campsite, from where he hiked down into the canyon, found the boys, and hiked them out. They were flown to a landing spot in a pasture, where we met them. The helicopter was lifting off and the boys safely guzzling water when the deputy turned to me and shouted over the wind noise of the rotor blades, his face lit by the flashing lights, “I don’t mean to scare you, ma’am, but when I got there that cat had its eyes on your boys.”
Most likely, the cat was simply curious about the unusual invasion of his canyons and the boys at their campfire. The boys, for their part, were not aware he was there until they were told afterward. For Joseph the night was no more than a childhood adventure during which he was thirsty, lost, a little nervous, and subsisting on a shared bag of marshmallows and a few prickly pear fruits he managed to dethorn. It faded quickly from his thoughts. But a writer can never anticipate where stories will come from. The eyes of that mountain lion held me for years.
Finally, I would like to express my abiding gratitude to my grandparents Howard Edward Butt and Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth Butt, to whom this book is dedicated. They grew up in the heart of the Texas hill country, in Kerrville—originally known as Kerrsville—not far from Camp Verde. After they married, they moved to south Texas and finally settled in Corpus Christi, but their roots remained deep in the hills of Kerr and Bandera Counties. Their property near Camp Verde has been the gathering place for our family since long before I was born, and is still in family hands, profoundly loved by all of us down to the fifth generation.
I would be negligent here not to mention a liberty I’ve taken with the history of Prison Canyon. The last of the prisoners were marched out of there in July of 1862, while in this story they remain into 1863.
I would also be remiss not to state my appreciation for James Wilson Nichols, who came to Texas in 1836 at the age of sixteen and remained until his death in 1891. I’ve read many firsthand accounts of early days in Texas, but none more thoroughly captivating than Mr. Nichols’s journal, published after his death with the title Now You Hear My Horn. I was stalled in the early stages of thinking about the story of Sam and Benjamin, in need of finding Benjamin’s way of speaking, when I stumbled across the book in a library corner in the home where my grandmother was born, on the property near Camp Verde that I’ve mentioned. It was signed from my grandmother to my grandfather and dated Christmas 1968.
Reading Mr. Nichols’s writing, I perceived the first faint intonations of Benjamin’s voice. The manner of speech eventually gained clarity and settled into its own,
but a vague semblance of Mr. Nichols’s sentence structure, and possibly a phrase or two, have found their way into the telling of The Which Way Tree. I wish my grandmother could have known how her gift to her husband would one day, half a century later, be a gift to her granddaughter, too.
About the Author
Elizabeth Crook has published four previous novels, including The Night Journal, which received the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, and Monday, Monday, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014 and winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. She lives in Austin with her family.
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