Or at least it seems to go on ever and ever in Texas, under a sky that also seems to go on ever and ever, infinitely blue, with clouds floating in it like puffs of cotton. The tops of the clouds are white, the bottoms slightly gray and absolutely flat, as if they were floating on the surface of some airy, invisible sea. The horizon is not masked by atmospheric pollution, or haze, or dust – it’s as clear and as sharp as if there were a line drawn by a compass, or a pencil on the end of a string. This last weekend, I drove to Abilene, in company with another writer, a lady from Kerrville. We had arranged to share expenses and a table at the West Texas Book and Music Festival – a farther journey than to the Richmond Folklife bash the weekend before. This road-trip went west and north, rather than east, out into the fabled lands that I described in Adelsverein as the Llano country – as one character explains,” You should know there are really three parts to Texas. This part is the first: flat and rich, with many rivers and easy to farm. This is shaped like the palm of a hand, with rivers for fingers, running down through it. Then there is the second part, the hills where those rivers begin. Just north of San Antonio de Bexar, it begins: a line of hills like a palisade, a curving wall. Limestone hills with forests of oak trees – meadows in the spring that are nothing but wildflowers, blue or red, or pink. . . . then behind the hills is the last part … they call it the Llano Estacada. In Spanish it means ‘the Staked Plain’ . . . an empty plain covered with short grass, mostly. It is not quite flat, but it looks as if it would go on to the ends of the world. There is also a sort of bush growing there, with leaves like the points of a spear. It sends up a single flower stem, taller than a man; that is what looks like stakes, for miles and miles. I do not think it would be good farm country. All the land can grow is grass – too harsh, too dry – even if it were not for the Comanche.”
This is the country, running north from Junction, set into a river-valley on the far side of the Hill Country, into which few white men ventured, after the Comanche claimed it for their own. Eventually, after the Civil War – with railways, and the US Army, with little towns clustered around crossroads, and river-crossings, and where the iron rails intersected both – this part of Texas became endless pasturelands for the white man’s cattle, rather than the red man’s buffalo. We did not see many yucca plants growing, as we followed the more or less straight arrow of secondary highway, to Menard, and Paint Rock, Bellinger and Winter, all those little towns set out about every thirty or forty miles, towns where the oldest extant buildings seemed to be from the last quarter of the 19th century, and to huddle close around Route 83, which became the Main Street for a couple of blocks, and then the last sheds and signposts flew by and we were out in the country again, with now and again a cultivated field, or a handful of black, or red, or fawn-colored cattle drifting lazily in a fenced pasture, among the scrub-mesquite and patches of cactus.
We stopped here and there – for it is my considered opinion that if you stop every hour and fifteen minutes or so, and get out of the car and walk around, the trip does not seem nearly as long or tiring. At Menard we stopped out of curiosity at a little place on the outskirts of town called the Country Store, which advertised baked goods, jam and handicrafts of all sorts – true to form, it smelled wonderfully of baking, inside. The proprietors sell cookies, pies both sweet and savory, and home-made frozen casseroles. We bought a bag of so-called “cowboy cookies” – stuffed with oatmeal and coconut flakes, and raisins.
In Paint Rock, we took some pictures of the Concho County courthouse, and a down-town that seemed to be completely deserted on a weekend. I don’t think we saw a single person; the town square, such as it was, looked like an abandoned Western movie set.
Both of us had forgotten to bring a tablecloth, for our book table in the Abilene Convention center exhibition hall; so we thought we might buy an inexpensive one, somewhere along the way. We kept our eyes peeled for a second-hand store – which we never found, but in Ballinger, we spied an antique store in an old hotel building, and thought – well, these sorts of places always have old linens, and why not? It would probably cost less than a new plastic one at Walmart, so what the heck? The shop had an interesting miscellany piled up out front, and seemed to be just two rooms at the front of an old storefront – but the proprietor directed us to go down a long, dim corridor lined with more shelves and bits of furniture – and rooms on either side of it were filled, filled to the brim with tables and cabinets and chairs, with vintage clothing and china and glass – beautifully jewel-colored Depression-era pressed-glass. We decided, after working our way down the rooms on one side, and back up the other, that the building must have been a hotel. It possibly could have been an enterprise slightly less savory – but not on a main street. When we found a suitable tablecloth, we asked the owner about this. She laughed, and said that it was rumored that a good few decades ago, some of the upstairs rooms housed an establishment of negotiable affections.
And so, on to Abilene, and a tiny cabin at the local KOA campground, in a grove of pecan trees out on the northwest of town; probably the only thing that would have ever brought me to Abilene besides the book festival, was Dyess AFB – but since my military job specialty was an overseas imbalance, I would never have had reason to be assigned there.
