“Hop lived in the county awhile. I and him was in the Fox and Wolf Hunters Association. Now that was a bunch of fellers. I had a history of the Association. Plumb interesting. The mother-in-law burned it up.”
He took from the wall a framed panoramic photograph of a group of men in hunting garb and laid it across my lap. The picture was a good three feet long, and there must have been a hundred men standing or kneeling in a field, with a beagle here and about. “Can you find me?”
I tried four or five times. I think it disheartened him that I couldn’t recognize a younger Tyler. “Have I changed that much?” He pointed himself out and then brought a worn copy of a Texas hunting magazine with several photographs of men around campfires. I looked carefully and took a chance.
“Hell, that’s Raymond Mueller. Called him ‘Dipper.’ This one’s me.”
“I see it now. How could I miss it? Got a bad eye.”
“Hooey. That’s before I started fading away. I had an aneurism removed, and I just ain’t the man I was. I can abide that, but take you, you’re a stranger, and all you see is a seventy-six-year-old man. I wasn’t always like this. That’s what hurts—people forget what you been.” He stepped away from the chair again. “Listen to me. I used to cut hair and press suits all day then go out and hunt half the night. Now I just talk a big stick. Only thing that don’t run down is your mouth.”
9. Claud Tyler in Dime Box, Texas
“What’s that about pressing suits?”
“Come here.” I followed him to a small backroom, the striped chaircloth still around my neck, hair half cut. He pointed to an old steam press.
“Sold the dry-cleaning machine, but there’s where I put a million creases in pants. Started in nineteen twenty-five. Feller would come in for a shave, haircut, and suit pressing. All for thirty-five cents. This was as good a shop as any in Texas. And I did a business. Listened to a million stories cutting those old squirrels’ heads. Barber’s the third most lied-to person, you know.”
“Who’s first?”
“Man’s wife is first anywhere in the world. Priest is second.”
We went back to the chair, and he took more snips. “Used to barber across the street. West of Sonny’s. Oughta go see the rattlesnake skins in there.” He motioned south, and for a moment I thought I would have to cross the street with a half-cut head to look at Sonny’s rattlesnakes. “Been in this shop since the forties. Built it myself. How many barbers left that built their own shops?”
“Saw some figures on it. I think it was three—not counting you.”
Tyler smiled. “Come here.” I followed him to the side window where a big cottonwood grew from under the edge of the wooden building. It had started to lift the floor. “Tree’s old as the shop. Cut it down once a year for six years. Finally gave up. I’ll be gone before it turns the place over. Filled in that west side with river sand when I built the shop. Musta took in a seed.” We went back to the chair. “Gotten old watching that tree grow. It’s so cussed fixed on making its way, I’ve thought about pulling the shop down to give it room. Kind of living memorial to shade-tree barbering. Ain’t much need of a barbershop in Dime Box now. People get out to the bigger towns anymore.”
“A lot of small towns are coming back.”
“Could happen to us. They located a big pool of oil here—deep oil. Way down. Feller picked up some land for back taxes, turned around and discovered oil. Now people believe oil’s gonna bring things back like they used to be. I say hoping’s swell, but better be ready for it to go as fast as it comes. Who listens? People thought the railroad wouldn’t ever play out neither. That’s why they moved the town here. We used to say there’d always be the railroad. You could count on it because it don’t depend on weather and weevils don’t eat steel. Well, bub, how’d you like our depot?”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Tore down, that’s why. But Model T’s used to line up all along the road to the depot. Cars, trains, girls in big hats. Dime Box made noise then.”
“Freights still come through, don’t they?”
“Can’t live off a toot and a whistle unless you can eat steam. Hell, it ain’t even steam anymore. We get on now with ranching, farming, people stopping off on the way to the artificial lake.”
“Artificial?” I imagined a giant plastic pond, the height of Disney World fool-the-eye stuff.
“Lake Somerville. One of those dam lakes.” He whisked away the hair with his little white brush. “Before the cattle business got big in here, we used to grow cotton—even had a gin. All gone. When I was a whippersnapper, I used to look at the cotton fields and wonder which boll would end up in my shirt. Now shirts are this polyester made from oil. But I reckon when we go to pumping oil, Dime Box will be back in the shirt business, and they’ll call that progress.”
He started to dress me down with Lucky Tiger. “Leave it dry if you would.”
“You young fellers take all the fun out of barbering. I’da got run out of town thirty years ago for a haircut like that.”
To me, it was the best haircut I ever got in Dime Box, Texas.
4
THE wooden floor creaked, the bar warped in the middle; the rattlesnake skins nailed to the wall, and the stuffed bobcat, and deer trophy heads, all looked parched. Even the ceiling supports, peeled cedar trunks with lopped branches, had split in the dry Texas air. In Sonny’s Place was a dusty upright piano, dusty because the entertainment at Sonny’s wasn’t music. It was dominoes. Of the six domino tables, each with a complement of worn tiles, only the one nearest the bar had a game that afternoon. A man in a yellow cap that said CAT twice announced he was playing his last round; he said it before the first last game and again before the second last game.
A large old fellow walked in, greeted everyone, sat at the bar, ordered a glass of Pearl, drank it off in two tilts, licked the foam from his upper lip, looked at me, gave a smile that pinned his great jowls to his ears, and said, “Good!” I nodded. He watched me, and I could tell he was getting ready to ask in his own manner for my version of the human saga. As if playing in an old Western, he actually said, “What brings you to Dime Box?”
I told him I was on a long motor tour, but he was a little hard of hearing, and I had to repeat twice to get the right volume. The whole tavern turned to ears; perhaps the old gentleman pretended hearing problems in order to share stories with everyone—after all, a new story was a thing of value in Sonny’s. I felt like a radio, but I got used to the little audience at the domino table.
The man’s name was, as I understood it, Mr. Valca, and he’d been born in Dime Box in the last century. Some voices I’d heard in town carried slight old-world accents, but his was pronounced. All w’s came out as v’s, and his lips had never known the sound of th. His parents had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, and he learned English only after beginning school. He reminisced about his Slavic past.
“In see Great Var against see Germans, you remember vee Americans fight vis see Poles and Roossians against see evil,” he said. “Here vas me, a poor boy from Dime Box, Texas, talking vis see foreign soldiers in sair langvage. See city boys—Chicago and Cleveland—even say vas amazed. Vee Slavs all understand each ozzer. Ohh! Vee haff some good times, me and soze Slavs! Vee play cards, not see dominoes, and vee trink see slivovitz. Sat vas a var!”
Once he had been a clothing merchant. “But I might haff done ozzer sings too.” He drank a second beer, this one more slowly. “Are you pheelosopher?”
“Too dangerous. That’s a hardhat area.”
“Never mind sat. I giff you a simple problem. On see floor, I put down sree sings—rifle, hoe, fishing rod and reel. Take vun and liff only by it for vun year. Alone. Vitch do you take?”
While I thought, a man wearing a Coors T-shirt came in. Everyone said, in turn, “Hello, Father.” He was the priest of Dime Box. Straddling a chair, resting his arms on the back, drinking an orange sodapop, he watched the domino game. The man CAT said it was his last round. The wife
would wonder.
“You take so long to answer, you must be pheelosopher. I tell you sis—you von’t choose see rifle.”
“How do you know?”
“Hunters make decisions fast, like a bullet. Bang!”
“Okay, I’ll take the rod and reel.”
“Now vy is sat?”
“You didn’t say anything about ammunition, and I’d die before crops came up. I can make hooks and line and eat immediately.”
“Ahh. A man’s answer shows him.”
“Which would you take?” It was the question he was waiting for.
“Me! I take see rifle!”
A domino player said, “All you ever shot was the breeze.”
“No? No, you say? Vell, I sink about it for eighty years. And you don’t know about see var. I shot see Germans left and right. Mow sem down like hay.”
Everyone in the bar, some with slight German accents, laughed.
To me, he said, “Say sink I only can sell pants.” To the room he said, “I tell you, see muzzle vas hot like a poker. Except on veekends because sen vee trink see slivovitz.”
They all laughed again. When I left Sonny’s, the game, like a potato cell, had subdivided into two identical ones, and the little tiles fell softly on the old tables, and the man CAT was playing his last game. After all, the wife would wonder.
5
AT Austin, on a hill west of the Colorado River—not the Colorado River, but the one flowing from near the New Mexico line to the Gulf—the desert began. Desert as in dry, rocky, vast. There was nothing gradual about the change—it was sudden and clear. Within a mile or so, the bluebonnets vanished as if evaporated, the soil turned tan and granular, and squatty trees got squattier with each mile as if reluctant to reach too far from their deep, wet taproots. Highway 290, running from rimrock to rimrock of the Edwards Plateau, climbed, dropped a little, climbed again until I was twelve hundred feet higher than Dime Box. From the tops of the tableland, I could watch empty roadway reaching for miles to the scimitar of a horizon visible at every compass point. It was fine to see the curving edge of the old blue ball of a world.
Johnson City was truly a plain town. The “Lyndon B. Johnson Boyhood Home,” pleasantly plain, is here; and commercial buildings on the square were plain and homely. The best piece, the refurbished Johnson City Bank of rough-cut fieldstone, was perhaps the only bank in the country to be restored rather than bulldozed for a French provincial Tudor hacienda time-and-temperature building.
The road went directly into a sunset that could have been a J. M. W. Turner painting. Colors, texture, the horizontal composition were his. I’d never thought Turner a realist. The land, now cattle and peach country, wasn’t so rocky and dry as the great ridges I’d just crossed. West of Stonewall, I saw the last of dusk, and under a big desert night, I drove in the small coziness of my headlamps until Sonny’s beer made me stop. While I stood, an uncommon amount of noise came invisibly through the brush. Whatever it was, I felt vulnerable and tried to hurry. The moonlight wasn’t much, but what I could make out looked like a tiptoeing army helmet. I was moving backwards when I realized it was an armadillo. I stopped, it waddled on, sniffed me out at the last moment, and shifted direction without hurry.
The conquistadors named the armadillo (“little armored one”), but Texans call them “diggers” because of the animal’s penchant for scratching up larvae and worms, especially from soft soil of new graves. In spite of both the belief that armadillos feed on corpses and the animal’s susceptibility to leprosy, poor whites ate them with greens and cornbread during the Depression and called them “Hoover hogs” or “Texas turkeys” (on the Christmas table); even now, poor blacks, calling them just “dillas,” barbecue the soft meat. Ancient Mayas refused to eat them because they believed the carrion vulture did not die but rather shed wings and metamorphosed into an armadillo. But now, for a creature hardly changed from its Cenozoic ancestors, things are a little better. Texas law protects it from commercial exploitation, and that means it’s harder today to buy a lamp or purse made from an armadillo carapace.
When I got back to my rig, the critter was nosing along the highway, looking for bugs popped by cars—that’s why in the warm season so many armadillos get pressed like fossils into the soft asphalt. I honked it back to cover and drove into Fredericksburg, where I parked for the night behind the old Gillespie County Courthouse and went looking for calendars on cafe walls. The only eatery open was a big laminated place called the Hofhaus or Meisterhof or Braumeister—something like that. Having to order by number, I knew I was in for it. I chose number whatever, which proved to be three gray sausage corpses in a nest of sauerkraut that squeaked like rubber bands as I chewed and Bavarian potato salad dissolved into a post-factory slurry. I would have been better off with barbecued Hoover hog.
6
HISTORY has a way of taking the merely curious and turning it into significance. Consider the old Nimitz Hotel in Fredericksburg, for example. Not the rebuilt Nimitz Hotel I saw, but the 1852 version.
A German immigrant, Charles H. Nimitz, knowing the value of distinctive architecture, in 1880 built on his hotel, which had long afforded some protection from the Comanches, an addition shaped like a steamboat with a prow thrusting into the bounty of Main Street. The place, with hurricane deck, pilot house, and crow’s nest, was unique, and the food toothsome. Nimitz had a good trade, once including Robert E. Lee, who slept in a spool bed here. Charles Nimitz was the grandfather of the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet in the Second World War, Chester W. Nimitz. The only thing resembling a ship young Nimitz saw on the Texas plains was the steamboat hotel, and all he knew of the sea (not counting the marine fossils in the native limestone) were his grandfather’s stories about the German merchant fleet. No wonder Chester, in his first command at sea, ran his destroyer aground and got court-martialed; that was natural for a boy who grew up steering a hotel across the prairie. Nevertheless, this son of the Great American Desert later directed the victory in the largest naval war ever fought. I didn’t hear anyone in town offer a theory on the role that old Charlie Nimitz’s ship hotel played in determining the outcome of World War II, but somebody will think of it sooner or later.
For all I know, Main Street in Fredericksburg is the widest in the nation. It was so broad, I had to make a point of remembering why I was crossing to keep from forgetting by the time I reached the other side. And it was broad not for a few blocks but for two miles. Settlers from the compacted villages of the Rhine Valley laid Main out to enable ox carts to turn around in it. A shopkeeper explained: “We don’t say somebody’s dumb as an ox anymore because we’ve forgotten how dumb that is. We say a guy’s a ‘dumbass,’ although I doubt we know how dumb that is either. Be that as it may, you can’t teach an ox to back up. You can teach a horse to back up, but forget an ox. Main Street’s wide because an ox is stupid.”
People who think the past lives on in Sturbridge Village or Mystic Seaport haven’t seen Fredericksburg. Things live on here in the only way the past ever lives—by not dying. It wasn’t a town brought back from the edge of history; rather, it was just slow getting there. And most of the old ways were still comparatively unselfconscious.
Item: Otto Kolmeier & Co., a hardware store with an oiled wooden floor and shelves requiring a trolley ladder, where you could buy a cast-iron skillet, or graniteware pots to outfit a chuckwagon, or horseshoes in a half dozen sizes, a coal bucket, a coyote trap, or a brass cuspidor; the tinsmith (no sheetmetal worker this man), whistling off-key, could take his mallet and hammer out a galvanized tin trough or well cover.
Item: a flagstone sidewalk shuffled to the slickness of a marble monument.
Items: nineteenth-century buildings of scabbled and dressed limestone, sunburned to a soft yellow, erected by German settlers as soon as the Comanches left them alone long enough. The rock in building after building was so sharply cut it seemed the chink of hammer and stone chisel still vibrated in the street.
Item: a century plant, its steely spines ceaselessly dragged against a rock foundation by the wind, leaving deep incisions like a bear claw.
Item: a fieldstone building, as simple and direct as the Texas tableland, with a relief carving in white stone of an elephant above the door. Albino elephants were once symbols of hospitality, but it had been years since you could buy a drink at the White Elephant; the tavern was even long gone when the place sold Hudsons and Essexes. Now it was a German import boutique peddling Muenchen beersteins, Bavarian cuckoo clocks, and Teutonic trifles. And so the future came on in Fredericksburg, a little here, a little there.
A popular piece of sociology holds that Americans are losing confidence in the future because they are losing sight of the past. No wonder, when the good places that show the past seem so hard to find. Yet, in Fredericksburg, Texas, a few Americans were beginning to acknowledge the civilizing influence of historical continuity. They had turned the old courthouse into a library and community hall; next to its pioneer grace, the newer courthouse looked like a memorial gymnasium.
7
OUTSIDE of Fredericksburg, a small brown man, unable to bend his right knee, a paper sack under his arm, limped along the road to Hedwig’s Hill. He looked directly at me, smiled, and oddly waved an upright thumb. As I passed, he waved goodbye. That’s when I realized he was hitching. I stopped.
“Gracias,” he said in a soft voice accented in a peculiar way. “I like to go in trucks.”
I didn’t understand everything he said over the next couple of hours, but I did make out he had left Corpus Christi that morning on his way to visit a sick brother in Big Spring. He had traveled about two hundred and fifty miles on only two rides—one with a trucker, the other with a Texas Ranger, and neither noted for picking up hitchers.