Read Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) for Free Online Page A

then, with blackness attacking a low gray sky. It takes time for the habit of people to wear off of you, especially at evening. I sat and listened to the rapids, and thought for no good reason about Jesse Veale, who rode to Ioni with two of his brothers and a friend from Palo Pinto town a few miles away, to fish and to hunt turkeys and to camp and, probably, to stick cockleburs under one another’s saddles and tie knots in one another’s bed rolls and laugh the kind of laughter you laugh with friends out that way, young.
    In ’73 there was not much reason to expect Indians in that neighborhood—in fact, Jesse Veale was the last man killed in that county by them. The fighting had gone on hot and heavy all during the War and afterward, in the bitter Reconstruction years, when the Northern whites at the Oklahoma agencies had not only tolerated but sometimes abetted the raids down across the Red, with the full moon. But by ’73 it was last-ditch and sporadic, and its center had moved out north and west of the Brazos country.…
    Inheritors of the old sharp-edgedness, though, Jesse Vealeand his companions likely went around hoping for trouble, any kind. If so, they got it. One afternoon, setting fishlines near the Garland Bend, they ran across some Indian ponies staked out in the cedar, and some saddles, and took them. (The assumption with Indian ponies was always that they had been stolen, or if not that others had been.) The next morning Jesse Veale and Joe Corbin crossed Ioni a half-mile above its mouth, on their way back to camp from checking some hooks at the river. At the crossing, in a race to see who’d come second and get splashed, they hit the water hard at about the same time and sprayed each other mightily and raced on through, yelling. On the other side Joe Corbin pulled up and knuckled water out of an eye and unholstered his old cap-and-ball Colt.
    “You scutter,” he said. “You done wet my loads.”
    “You ain’t gonna shoot nothin’ nohow,” Jesse Veale said.
    Joe Corbin said: “Jesse.”
    “What?”
    “Jesse,” Joe Corbin said, “they’s two Indians a-lookin’ at us from on top of that bank. They’s more than two.…”
    Afoot, likely because it had been their ponies the boys had taken upriver, the Comanches began to shoot, and an arrow hit Jesse Veale in the knee, and his horse went to bucking off to one side. Joe Corbin yelled: “What the hell we gonna do?”
    Jesse yelled something back. To Joe Corbin it sounded like: “Run it out!” He did, snapping his useless pistol at an Indian who tried to grab his reins and ducked aside from the misfire, lashing his pony on up the bank’s rise.… When he last looked back (how many times did he see it again, the rest of his life, how many times did he wonder ifwhat Jesse Veale had said was: “Fight it out”?), Jesse was on the ground shooting and clubbing with his pistol, and they were all over him. And when Joe Corbin came back with help from a ranch not far away, they found Jesse Veale sitting dead but unscalped against a double-elm tree, his pistol gone, Comanche blood on the ground around him. Though the Indians were gabbling over their wounded in a ravine near at hand, and someone’s dog went there and bayed at them, the whites were only three and did not follow them, then.…
    Some of the lines they had been checking must have been set where I was camped just then, a good fish hole still.
    Sometimes you take country for itself, for what shows merely, and sometimes it forces its ghosts too upon you, the smell of people who have lived and died there. They do not have to be individual ghosts like Jesse Veale’s; often they’re only the feel that a time past has for you, the odor of an era.… And they don’t have to smell good.
    My canteen was empty of its sweet city water. I filled it at the river, propped it in the coals with dry sticks around it, and sat watching its contents boil to purity if not to palatability. They say Old Man John