Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

2. John Graves, “Kindred Spirits” from From a Limestone Ledge

31 Chapter 2 John Graves Kindred Spirits John Graves lives near Glen Rose, Texas, on his four-hundred-acre farm. He is the author of several books; among them are Goodbye to a River (1960), Hardscrabble (1974), From a Limestone Ledge (1977), and his recent memoir Myself and Strangers (2004). “Kindred Spirits” is taken from From a Limestone Ledge. I have what started out as a canvas-covered wooden canoe, though with the years it has taken on some aluminum in the form of splinting along three or four fractured ribs, and this past spring I replaced its rotting cloth rind with resin-impregnated fiberglass. It is thus no longer the purely organic piece of handicraft that emerged from a workshop in Maine some decades back. Nor do I use it more than occasionally these days,to run a day’s stretch of pretty river or just to get where fish may be. Nevertheless I retain much fondness for it as a relic of a younger, looser, less settled time of life. While readying its hull for the fiberglass I had to go over it inch by inch as it sat on sawhorses in the barn—removing the mahogany outwales and stripping off the old canvas, locating unevennesses in the surface of the thin cedar planking, sanding and filling and sanding again so that protuberances and pits would not mar the new shell or lessen its adhesion, and finally taking out the seats and thwarts and readying the interior for fresh varnish. The process took up a good bit of my spare time for weeks, and during it I got to know a couple of Indians fairly well. At least I thought of them as Indians,for the canoe company which takes its name from the 32 John Graves Old Town of the Penobscots used to employ many of that tribe’s members as workers, and for all I know still does. There was the Good Indian, as I came to call him, who had stood on the left side of the craft while it was being built (“port”and“starboard”will not serve, for the thing had lain sometimes rightside up on its trestle or table or whatever had held it, and sometimes upside down), selecting and trimming his planks with care and affixing them to the ribs so that their edges and butts fitted tightly and the tracks were driven precisely flush, drilling his screw and bolt holes true. And across from him on the right side had labored his confrere Slovenly Pete, a brooder and a swigger of strong waters during the long Maine winter nights, who with reddened eye and palsied hand had messed up everything he could without getting fired from his job. Their ghosts were with me, and I spoke to them as I went over their work and did my own. The Good Indian was a friend, a taciturn perfectionist in sympathy with my resolve to get things right. But somehow I took more interest in his shiftless mate, a sour and gabby type who responded to my gibes about hammer marks and ill-matched planks and protruding tackheads with irrelevant rhetoric on white men’s viperish ways,or biting queries as to what business a Texan had fretting over a canoe in the first place.“Your God damn rivers,”he said at one point,“ain’t got no God damn water in them most of the God damn time.” I’vebeeninthissortof touchwithmanyartisansandlaborersoverthe years,for I am both a putterer and a countryman,categories of humanity that frequently busy themselves in refurbishing and repairing things that other human beings have made or refurbished or repaired in times gone by, leaving personal imprints on them.An old Ford tractor, for example, whose hydraulic pump was replaced by a previous owner with a second one from another model, by dint of much ingenious grinding and shimming and drilling, can cause one to ponder and blaspheme for days over the question of why the costly new pump he has driven fifty miles to 33 Kindred Spirits buy at a dealership can’t be seated.And if, when starting casually to pull out a decayed forty-year-old cornerpost set four feet deep,in order to put a new one in its place, you discover that whoever installed it was such a fence nut that he filled the hole around it with angular crushed...