Mattie said that she could, if he’d let her keep some slices: ‘Because I’m starvin’ for bread, too.’ But when he saw that she was preparing to mix a dough using most of his flour, he protested: ‘No, ma’am! No!’ and he told her that in backwoods Tejas they used half flour, half acorn, and he proceeded to take Yancey with him to gather the latter.
‘No, not that kind,’ Mulrooney said. ‘Them’s red oaks. Very high in tannic acid. Burn your gut.’ What he sought were the fat, beautiful acorns of the live oak, a variety whose nuts were reassuringly deficient in tannin. The numerous but tiny acorns of the post oak he ignored completely: ‘Waste of time. Not enough meat.’
When he and Yancey had a bag full of the rich-looking nuts, he peeled them and asked for a bucket of scalding water, in which he boiled them for three hours: ‘We’re drivin’ out the acid. Now, when that’s done, we boil them again for three hours in very salty water. Sweetens ’em up.’
The two boilings took most of a day, but that night he spread the blanched acorns before the fire so that they might be crushed and pulverized at dawn. When this was done he had a fine white flour almost indistinguishable from the bought variety, and from this mix Mattie made her bread.
‘By God, that’s good!’ Mulrooney exclaimed when his first piece was smeared with honey. ‘You know, Miss Mattie, you and me could make a fortune with this here bread,’ and the Quimpers agreed that it was palatable. It was more than that. ‘It’s damned good,’ Jubal said, and he told Mattie: ‘Remember how he did it. Stay away from them red oaks.’
On a summer day in 1824, as Mattie poled her ferry across the Brazos, she saw well to the west a phenomenon which did not startle her but which did attract her attention. As she explained later: ‘I thought nothin’ of it, at first. Dark clouds along the horizon, but after a while I realized they were darker than any I’d seen before. And they didn’t move like an ordinary storm. Just hung there, like a distant curtain.’
While the darkness intensified without any visible motion, she deposited her passenger on the far shore: ‘Mister, somethin’ strange. I’d watch for cover.’
‘What do you think it is?’ the man asked, and she said: ‘I don’t rightly know, but some place back there is catchin’ rain. And if they’re gettin’ it now, we’ll get it soon.’
When she returned to her own side of the river she called for Jubal, but he was off tracking honey bees, so she spent a few minutes outside, studying the storm: ‘Yancey! Come here and see this cloud.’
When the boy stood with her, she repeated: ‘Somebody upriver’s catchin’ a lot of rain,’ and soon thereafter Jubal came running home with news that the river was rising.
For most of that long summer day the tremendous black clouds remained motionless along the northwestern horizon, depositing enormous quantities of rain, so that as dusk approached, the Brazos showed a sullen rise of nearly a foot. Jubal said: ‘If it starts to rain here, Mattie, that river could really run wild.’
When the first drops did come splattering down, just at nightfall, Mattie told her men: ‘I think I’ll stay with the ferry … in case,’ and by the time she poled it across the river to the more protected anchoring place on the opposite shore, the rain was falling not in drops but in torrents, and she realized that it was bound to lift the river level so drastically that she would have to remain there through the night and away from the turbulent center of the rampaging river. She was drenched. Hair, eyes, clothes, hands, all were soaked in the lashing rain. From time to time as she poled away from the uncontrolled flood she became aware that great trees, uprooted from the northwest, were moving down the current, and these she must avoid.
Will the cabin survive? she asked herself toward dawn when it became apparent that this was to be a historic flood, far in excess of any whose remnants Jubal had pointed out to her on that first day. Pray God it doesn’t reach our hill.
In its outer reaches, of course, the great flood was not a swift-moving body of water; it was a quiet intrusion, sometimes hardly moving at all, but remorselessly it submerged everything; only at the center of the riverbed did the waters form a foaming, rampaging, irresistible torrent. Fifty miles to the south, where the distance between the Brazos and the Colorado narrowed to a corridor, the flood became so tremendous that the back waters from the two rivers actually joined in a great sweeping ocean. At Quimper’s Ferry the flood rose so high, it drove Mattie three miles inland before she managed to tie her craft to the branches of an oak whose trunk was seven feet under water.
There she remained for two cold days until she saw that the waters were beginning to recede, whereupon she poled across fields to where the ferry was customarily tied, and as the waters swiftly dropped, she crossed the Brazos and brought her craft home. ‘We thought you was dead,’ her husband said matter-of-factly as she climbed up to her rain-soaked cabin, and she told him: ‘I thought I was, too, but God helped with the pole.’ She looked at their undamaged home, then kissed her husband: ‘Thank God, Jubal, you made us build up here.’
Yancey broke in: ‘When the flood came three feet up the wall we thought we was done. But The Kronk led Pop and me to that grove of oaks and tied ourself in a tree.’ Jubal hushed him: ‘We was all lucky. And for that we can thank God. I wish Father Clooney was here to lead us in prayer.’ And for the next hundred years people along the Brazos would remember it as ‘the year the Brazos ran wild’ or ‘the year the rivers joined.’ Mattie recalled it as ‘the year I lost my corn.’
The Quimpers were less lucky with another event caused by the flood, and this too would be remembered. The excessive waters disturbed many animals, causing them to venture into new areas and adopt new habits, and one of those most seriously displaced was a huge rattlesnake eight feet three inches long from the tip of his rattle and as big around as a small tree. He was really a monstrous creature, with a head as big as a soup plate and fangs so huge and powerful, they could discharge a dreadful injection. Veteran of many struggles, master of the sudden ambush, he had subdued baby pigs and fawns and rabbits and a multitude of rats and mice. His traditional home had been sixteen miles up the Brazos in a rocky ledge that gave him excellent protection and a steady supply of victims, but the floods had dislodged him and sent him tumbling down the river along with deer and alligators and javelinas. During the height of the flood each animal was so preoccupied with its own salvation that it ignored friends and enemies alike, but as the waters receded, each resumed its habits, and the snake found itself far downstream, lodged in unfamiliar rocks and with a most uncertain food supply.
The rattler now had to be more venturesome than usual, and began foraging far from its crevice. Sometimes it went down close to the river, exploring the rocks there, and on other days it slithered inland, watching always to be sure that it had adequate cover to protect it from the blazing sun whose unimpeded heat would kill it. Mice, rabbits, squirrels, birds—the great reptile devoured them all, stunning them first with sharp jabs of its fangs, then swallowing them slowly and constricting its belly muscles to break down the bones and digest the food.
The rattler was a fearsome beast, made more so by frontier legend, most of it spurious: ‘It cain’t strike at you elsen it’s coiled. Needs the springin’ power of its coils. Then it can reach out twice its length.’ Coiled, it could strike with remarkable accuracy; uncoiled, less so, and never more than half its length. This monster could strike four feet, a menacing distance.
‘The snake, he cain’t never strike you elsen he warns you first with a shake of his rattles. “God’s recompense,” we call it.’ Most of the time when hunting small animals it struck with no warning, but often at the approach of a man or a large animal, it activated its rattles furiously to scare away the intruder.
‘A rattler is thrifty, carries just enough venom to kill a man.’ Later experts would demonstrate that whereas twenty-five milligrams would kill a child, and one hundred a man, a grown rattler could deliver two hundred fifty milligrams, enough to kill two men, while
a really big snake could inject a thousand milligrams in one shot.
‘One drop of rattlesnake venom in yore bloodstream, you’re dead.’ Many frontiersmen had been struck by medium-sized rattlers and survived, but to be injected with a full charge of venom by a snake as large as this one would be fatal.
‘No man ain’t never been struck by a full-sized rattler and lived.’ A rattler carried only a limited supply of venom in its sacs, and if it had recently discharged this in killing some animal, it could strike its next victim with the full force of its fangs and inflict only a small wound that would quickly heal. Certain boastful men had survived as a result of this phenomenon.
This great beast at Quimper’s Ferry, longer than any hitherto seen along the Brazos, did not seek contact with human beings; it did its best to avoid them, but if any threatened the quiet of its domain, it could strike with terrifying force. It would not have come into contact with the Quimpers had not Yancey gone probing along the farther bank, not doing any serious work or accomplishing much, but merely poking into holes with a stick to see what might be happening. As he approached where the snake lay hidden, he heard but did not recognize the warning rattle. Thinking it to be a bird or some noisy insect, he probed further, and found himself staring at the huge coiled snake not ten feet away.
‘Mom!’ he screamed, and Mattie, working at the ferry, grabbed the gun she kept aboard for protection against wandering Karankawa, and ran to help, but when she reached Yancey she found him immobilized, pointing at the coiled snake whose rattles echoed. ‘Do something!’ he pleaded.
Infuriated by his craven behavior and terrified of the snake, she pushed her son aside, and with her heart beating at a rate which must soon cause her to faint, she raised the gun. Not firing blindly, because she knew she had only one chance, she took aim as the snake prepared for its deadly thrust, and pulled the trigger. She felt the shock against her shoulder; she felt the snake brush against her knee; and she fainted.
Yancey, seeing only that the rattler had struck at his mother and that she had fallen, concluded that the snake had killed her, despite the gun blast, and ran screaming up the river to the ferry landing: ‘Pop! A big rattler killed Mom.’
Jubal and The Kronk waded and swam across the Brazos and ran trembling to where Mattie still lay beside the dreadful snake, and when they saw her they supposed that each had killed the other: ‘Snake hit her just as she pulled the trigger. Oh Jesus!’ But then the Indian saw her right hand twitch, and when he stepped gingerly past the snake and lifted her head, he saw that she was still breathing. Inspecting her throat and face, he called: ‘No dead. Scared. Scared.’
Jubal and Yancey, taking over from the Indian, satisfied themselves that Mattie was indeed alive, and with a love they had not shown before, they carried her upriver to the ferry, where they placed her tenderly aboard, but before they pushed off, The Kronk ran up carrying the enormous snake, whose head had been blown apart. ‘We keep,’ he said, and the men knew that he intended eating at least part of the fearful enemy out of respect and envy for the courage it had shown.
When Jubal tanned the skin he stretched it to maximum length, extending the accordionlike scales until he had an awesome object that climbed the entire wall of the cabin and back four feet along the ceiling, ten feet, five inches in majestic length. Recovering the skull from The Kronk, he attached it so that it appeared to be striking at the diners seated below, and strangers seeing it for the first time said: ‘They warn’t never a snake that big,’ but Jubal said proudly: ‘Finger them rattlers yourself. They’re real, and my little wife’s the one who killed it.’
Whenever Mattie looked at the fearful object she thought not of her own heroism in battling the monster but of her son’s behavior. She never spoke of this to the boy’s father, and certainly not to the boy himself, but she did often recall her own father’s stern admonition to his children when they were living in a Tennessee hovel and subsisting on beans with an occasional slab of pork: ‘You don’t have to fight the world, and you don’t have to be the bravest in the village, but by God, if you’re my kids, you got to do what’s right when you face danger. I don’t care if the other man is twice your size. Go at his throat.’ Mattie had gone at the great serpent’s throat; her son had not.
Mattie kept her small collection of coins gained from running the ferry in the canvas bag which had once protected her corn, and one morning when she felt satisfied that she had saved enough, she asked a farmer who was heading downriver to the rude store at Austin’s headquarters at San Felipe to perform a commission for her; and two months later a man on horseback arrived bearing a small keg of nails and a long package. It was a pit saw with two big handles, and when it was assembled she told her husband: ‘We’ll rip us some planks and build us a real house. I’ll live underground no more.’
The Kronk was essential to her plans, for she needed his strength to dig a pit deep enough for a man to stand in: ‘And now cut the tallest, thickest tree trunk you can move to the pit.’ And when it was hauled across the pit, she climbed down with instructions to her men: ‘I’ll do the dirty work. You do the strong.’
Grasping the lower handle, she pushed the saw up, while one of the men standing astride the log topside pulled it into cutting position. Then the men bore down while Mattie pulled, and in this laborious way, with sawdust in her face day after day, she supervised the cutting of the planks needed for her house. She never complained, for she kept before her the vision of the home that was to be, and when she felt she had enough planks, she climbed out of her pit, dragooned two travelers to stay as helpers, and started building her house.
At various places in Texas she had seen the type of house she wanted; it had come west from South Carolina and Georgia and provided an excellent device for surviving in a hot or humid climate. ‘It’s called a dog-run,’ Mattie explained to The Kronk, who did much of the heavy work. ‘We build a little square house here. Leave seventeen feet open space, then build another, same size, over here.’
‘Why here, here?’ the Indian asked, and she said: ‘One house sleeping. One house living,’ and he said: ‘Work too damn much.’
Then she explained that the two squares would not remain separated: ‘Up there, one long roof over everything. Down here, one long porch, end to end.’
‘In between, what?’ The Kronk asked, and she said: ‘Place for cool breezes. Place for dogs to run in the day, sleep at night.’ He then wanted to know what the porch was for, and she said: ‘Work done, we watch sunset. Travelers come, they sleep on porch,’ and he said approvingly: ‘Damn good.’
When it was completed, with liberal use of improvised wattle-and-vine walls that would serve until more planks could be cut, Mattie waited till Reverend Harrison came by on his way to Stephen Austin’s headquarters: ‘Will you bless this house, Reverend?’ He did, praying that the Quimpers would enjoy years of happiness and prosperity in it, but some weeks later, when Harrison was returning from his talk with Austin, he appeared at the door of the house unannounced, to find Jubal and two travelers playing cards and swigging from a jug of muscadine wine. Mattie saw the flare of disgust that crossed his face as he said: ‘Do you allow gaming in a house I dedicated to the Lord?’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Jesus drank wine.’
Coming close to pronouncing anathema upon her, he cried: ‘You and your husband and all of them stand in danger of being rejected of God. Gaming and drinking, they’ll be the ruin of Texas.’
Jubal had always known it was bound to happen, and now it was upon him: Reverend Harrison and Father Clooney had arrived at the same time, and some kind of ugly confrontation seemed inescapable.
The Protestant clergyman came first, on a surreptitious round of Methodist prayer meetings at which he delivered agitating news about events in Mexico City, the capital of the country: ‘They threw out the Spanish, as we know. But before long they invited that fool Iturbide to make himself emperor, and what American would want to live under the dictates of an emperor
?’
A man who had traveled in Mexico said dryly: ‘They shot him last year,’ but this did not alter Harrison’s diatribe: ‘Each day men like Iturbide remain in control, the yoke of Rome is fastened ever more tightly about our necks. Each day we do not resist, we become more surely the vassals of the Pope, and I can feel in my bones the constant loss of freedom we’re undergoing. We’re in peril, and we must bind ourselves ever closer or we shall lose our freedom, our church and our understanding of God.’
Night after night he conducted his frenzied meetings, until he had many of the farmers almost prepared to take up arms to defend their rights, and he was equally persuasive with women, for he spoke eloquently of what would happen if their children never learned the beneficent lessons of Protestantism: ‘Do you want your daughters to become nuns, locked away in some convent, the prey of priests, never to know the blessings of a true Christian home?’ He also frightened them with graphic descriptions of what it meant to worship regularly in the Catholic mode, and he nailed down his preaching with a plea which came from the heart: ‘The Protestant church is the true church of Jesus Christ. He called it forth. He ordained us to do His great work on earth. And we must remain faithful to His precepts.’
He was effective because his listeners, hungry for moral guidance, always knew where he stood. He was for the New Testament, morality and Methodism; he was against Rome, alcohol, sexual indulgence, dancing and any kind of irreverence. But in this summer of 1825 he added a bold new dimension to his preaching: ‘I cannot believe that the good Christians who came to Texas from Kentucky and Tennessee will long continue under the tyranny of Mexico and Rome.’ And once he said this, he realized its implications: ‘When that joyous day comes, we’ll join the United States.’ He justified this treasonous behavior as ‘faith plus patriotism.’