Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves Page A

armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him.…
    But there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do.…
    There was old Sam Sowell. He didn’t live on the river, but not far from it either, in the limestone and cedar country near Glen Rose. His home was a dugout on a hill with a grove of live oaks, on the backest back end of 180 acres that belonged to him. In those depression days the land would have been expensive at seven dollars an acre, but it was his bank. He subsisted on flour and beans and fatback and squirrel and mustard greens and such luxuries, and he dipped snuff. When he needed to buy anything, he would chop two cedar posts out of the matted brake that covered most of his estate, and would shoulder them and walk straight across country the three and a half miles to a store on the Stephenville road. There he would trade the posts for two bits’ worth of whatever merchandise it was that he wanted, and would walk back home.
    The dugout held an iron cook stove and a bunk, and on sunny winter days Sam would come up through the slanting trap door and sit like a gopher on the forward slope of the turfed mound that covered his home, blinking out over the dark hills, skeeting amber snuff juice onto the limestone rubble. I’ve studied him like that from a half-mile off, through a field glass. He had no woman nor wanted any, could not read or write, kept no dog, and had reduced friendship to a three-inch wave of his hand and a waggle of his gray narrow head to briefly encountered persons who had known him all his life. Anyone who hadn’t known him all his life got neither waggle nor wave. He bothered no one and, it seemed to me, wanted more than anything on earth not to be bothered.
    One winter night with a raw spit out of the north, four young men were drinking white whisky in a shack not far from Sam Sowell’s place. One of them was named Davis Birdsong; he runs a kind of ranch for a friend of mine now, but I didn’t know him then. They had put out dogs after bobcat, but the cats knew better than to run abroad on a night like that, and after a while so did the hounds, who were huddled now on the shack’s little porch, having been cursed and tethered. The young men were keeping warm both by drinking white whisky and by burning what was left of the shack’s teetering furniture in a potbellied stove with a big crack down one side, through which from time to time live embers spilled out onto the wooden floor. This disturbed none of them, since the shack wasn’t theirs.
    (It still stands, disastrous, with inch-wide gaps between the grayed boards of its sides; I have slept there with the cotton rats and the skunks, and at noon in summer sometimes the rattlesnakes’ dry buzz sounds from beneath the floor, where they lie impatient for cool night.)
    Jim Lemmon said: “Listen at her whustle.”
    Davis Birdsong finished kicking a bureau drawer to pieces, shoved them into the stove, and said: “Give me that jar.”
    Someone passed it and he drank. They hunched about the stove, more conscious of their comfort than they would have been with ducted heat and deep carpets, though none of them, probably, had ever experienced either of those things.They were of that place; a wet norther and a shack and a stove went together, and they had grown up in houses a little tighter and more rectangular than that one, but not much. The hills are not rich country, not since the old ones cottoned out the flat places and grazed out the slopes, and the topsoil went on down the Brazos, and the cedar moved in thick and sullen, letting nothing grow beneath it. That happened so long ago that a whole, spare, organic