Centennial (150 page)

I
’ve
never understood why so many Americans are so committed to loneliness. I know it runs in my family. When Alexander McKeag, who could be called an ancestor because he held Pasquinel
’s
family together, spent the winter of 1827 alone in a cave, speaking to no one, he was succumbing to our sickness.

And when my other ancestor, Levi Zendt, turned his back on Beaver Creek and chose the dreadful isolation of Chalk Cliff, he was behaving like a typical American.

Sheepmen like Amos Calendar elected to live by themselves. Like their prototype Daniel Boone, they preferred living alone “rather than with all them people.”

Only the white Americans did this. The Arapaho always combined in large communal societies. Chinese railroad workers lived in colonies, and so did Chicano beet workers. The Japanese clung to their communities and so did the Russians. It took the American to build his ranch far from everything, his farm where no one else could see him. Why?

Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one’s own cottage.

It had been the same with all subsequent frontiers. If a man was inwardly afraid of loneliness, he had small chance of adjusting to the terrible isolation of the Kentucky forest. A predisposition for living alone became almost a requirement for survival in America, and even now, Garrett thought, the world held few places so lonely as the average American city.

The prairie had intensified the challenge, for there the emptiness was inescapable; even the sheltering tree was absent. A family moving west could anticipate fifty days of travel without encountering a sign of human habitation, and the wife whose husband decided to settle in Wyoming had to face an endless expanse of nothingness.

And there had been that ultimate in isolation, the snowbound mountain men passing the winters in some forgotten spot, allowing the drifts to cover him, during the silent months, reading nothing, conversing not even with animals, who were also in hibernation. This was a form of exile difficult to comprehend, but there were always men who sought it.

The only heroes I had as a boy were loners. The isolated defenders of the Alamo. Nathan Hale operating alone and taking his punishment solo. The pioneer mother defending the Conestoga wagon after her man was slain. The Pony Express rider pointing the nose of his horse west and going it alone. These were my symbols.

This had an effect on every aspect of American life. One courageous man building a solitary log cabin and calling it home. Any self-respecting family must live apart ... by itself ... in its own little cabin, and any unfortunate who failed to achieve this alone-ness was either pitied or ridiculed. The unmarried elder sister became the focus of pity because she had
to live with others. Any son-in-law who had to live with his wife
’s
parents was an object of ridicule.

When the west was opened, people did not live in communities. One ranch was thirty miles from the next. During the period of Indian raids no one gave the remote settler hell for trying to make it alone. He was cheered for being brave enough to face the Indians on his own.

As a consequence of all this, Americans became the loneliest people on the face of the earth. We
’re
even lonelier than the Eskimos, who live in close units. We
’re
much lonelier than the Mexicans, who occupy the same type of land to the south, for Mexicans retain the extended family in which people of all ages live together in reasonable harmony.

There were compensations, Garrett had to admit. Living alone meant that men had to be more ingenious, which led to inventiveness. Old patterns had to be surrendered, so revolutionary new ones could be more easily accepted. Forward-seeking led to the development of the brash, resolute, outgoing man. The world needed him, but he evolved at a terrible price in loneliness.

For Garrett was also aware of the heavy social cost. Americans were both wasteful and cruel with their old people, especially their older women. Three factors conspired to produce a plethora of elderly women. First, as in all nations, females tended to live about five years longer than males. Second, custom encouraged a man to marry a woman somewhat younger than he. Third, American tradition required the man to work himself to death to support his woman, so that many men died prematurely. Adding these data, the average wife could look forward to about fifteen years of widowhood.

Other civilizations had grappled with this phenomenon. The American Indian who used to live at Rattlesnake Buttes solved it by depriving the widow of everything, even shelter, and encouraging her to starve to death. Asian Indians adopted a crueler solution: the widow was expected to climb the funeral pyre of her husband and burn to death. Arab nations developed the sensible device of multiple wives. In America, Garrett saw, the survivors were condemned to infirmity and loneliness.

Men fared only slightly better. Some of the loneliest men Garrett had ever known were the heads of corporations, trusting no one, confiding in no one, living out their lives in quiet despair, each wealthy man immured within his own castle.

What the hell am I doing living in a castle? he asked himself as he returned to ranch headquarters. Since the death of his wife he had been terribly lonely, felt himself no better off than the widows and the tycoons he had been pitying. He had a fine ranch, a profession he loved and now a responsible job with the government, but these did not compensate for his increasing sense of isolation.

About three o’clock that afternoon he took a shower, shaved and climbed into his car. When he left the ranch he could not have said where he was heading. Vaguely he wanted to hear Cisco Calendar sing some good western songs, for Cisco was the best in the business and was home again from his television show in Chicago. He also wanted to assure Cisco that his testimony against Floyd indicated no grudge.

But Cisco was not the main reason for the trip to town. What he really needed was to see Flor Marquez, to make up his mind about that long-legged, dark-haired divorcee. She had first caught his eye during his visits to her father’s restaurant for some good Chicano food. It could not be said that he watched her grow up, for he was too preoccupied with other things to notice a Chicano girl, but he was aware that she had married a dashing fellow from Los Angeles, and of course it was a general scandal when she returned home after two weeks with a scar along her left cheek.

She had referred to her marriage only once: “How can a girl tell that a guy is a total creep?”

She was in the restaurant when Garrett arrived. “Let’s go see if Cisco will sing tonight,” he suggested, and she was eager for an excuse to leave the restaurant. They walked west on Mountain, then down Prairie and along the railroad tracks to where Cisco lived in an old clapboard house. He was sitting on the porch, as he usually did in the afternoon, just watching things go past. Like his older brother, he was tall and lean, with the face of a man long accustomed to outdoor work.

“Hiya, folks,” he said amiably, without getting up.

“Came by to tell you I’m sorry about the run-in with Floyd ... in court, that is.”

“He’s a mean one. Anything you said was probably true.”

“I only testified about the turkeys.”

“How they doin’?”

“Checked them this morning. There they were, fat and sassy.”

“Come on over tonight,” Flor said. “Give us some songs.”

“I just may do that,” Cisco said.

They knew it was unnecessary to say anything more. If he felt like it, he would stop by Flor de Méjico around ten and entertain his neighbors. Flor knew that in places like Cleveland and Birmingham he could command thousands of dollars for a night’s performance, but when at home he liked to associate with the people from whom he had learned his songs, the Chicanos and the cowboys.

Garrett and Flor walked back to the Railway Arms, where they stopped for a couple of beers. They were aware that townspeople were watching them, and that there had been a good deal of talk. Gossips claimed that Flor was his mistress, but a waitress who knew her said, “That hot tamale ain’t gonna let no man in her bed without a license.”

She was wrong. In various rooms in various towns Flor Marquez and Paul Garrett had been lovers for some time now, each wary of the other, each uncertain of what the future could be. On this afternoon, when each was feeling desolate with loneliness, they separated at the hotel, then found their way by back paths to a motel, where they stayed through the early evening.

About nine they slipped away, at different times and by different paths, to join me at the restaurant. Flor arrived first and made a desultory effort at helping her father serve the dinner crowd, and after a while Garrett drifted in, as he often did, to play the juke box.

At ten there was a commotion. “Cisco’s coming!” a boy at the door shouted, and in came the lanky singer with his guitar. Nodding to various friends, he made his way to where Garrett and I were sitting, then invited Flor to join us. He drank beer for about an hour, answering the questions of well-wishers who wanted to know about Nashville and Hollywood, and finally he took up his guitar, plucking a few notes.

Without warning he struck a series of swift chords, then placed the guitar on the table. “What would you like to hear, Paul?”

It really didn’t matter, for whatever Cisco Calendar sang evoked the west. If he sang of buffalo skinners, he called forth images of his own grandfather during the big kill of 1873, with his Sharps .50 firing until it was too hot to handle. If he sang of the dust bowl, he reminded listeners of his own father, Jake, who had gone broke in 1936 after watching his farm blow away; when his wife wouldn’t stop nagging him, he blazed away at her with a shotgun and spent a year in jail.

And if Cisco sang of cowboys, people could hear in his high, nasal complaint the rush of the tumbleweed or the harsh dissonance of a rattler coiled in a sandy path. He could sing of the hawk and the eagle and the Indian’s pinto and make the listener see these creatures, for he had in his manner a terrible reality, the art of a man who had absorbed a culture and found its essence.

“I’d like to hear ‘Malagueña Salerosa,’ ” Garrett said, and Cisco looked at him.

“That’s a tough one to start with.”

“I didn’t say it was easy.”

Cisco lifted the guitar and played the unique chords which framed this love song, perhaps the finest written in North America in the past fifty years. It was difficult to sing, requiring a command of Spanish-type falsetto, but Cisco respected it as the best of his Chicano repertoire:

“
What beautiful eyes she has

Beneath those dark brows
...

Beneath those dark brows
...

What lovely eyes ..
.
”

The Chicanos in the restaurant applauded as he sang a passage in high falsetto. After finishing the song, he placed the guitar on the table and bowed to the applauders. “I am singing this song for my good friend Paul Garrett and my better friend Flor Marquez, who are in love.” Recovering the guitar, he played a long passage based on the theme of the song, then sang tenderly the exquisite conclusion:

“
I offer you only my heart ...

I offer you my heart

In exchange for my poverty ...

She is pretty and bewitching

Like the innocence of a rose
.
.
.
”

With the last word he strummed the guitar softly and bowed again. He avoided the popular pitfalls like “Cool Water” or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” or “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” apologizing, “Those songs are for the boys with strong voices. I’m after somethin’ different, altogether different.”

As he unraveled bits and pieces of the songs he really loved, he built a portrait of a west that no longer existed but which men wanted to remember. Single phrases often evoked a whole era: “Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly.” Or “On a ten-dollar horse and forty-dollar saddle, I’m off to punch them Texas cattle.” Or “His wife, she died in a poolroom fight.” Or “Clouds in the west, it looks like rain. Derned old slicker’s in the wagon again.”

He sang for several hours—the last of the real cowboys, the last of the buffalo men. He had enjoyed great popularity in Europe as well as in the eastern cities, but he felt most at ease in the restaurant of Manolo Marquez, who had fed him free during the bad years. Here he had learned most of the good Chicano songs he sang, like his very popular translation of “The Ballad of Pancho Villa,” which American audiences appreciated for its outrageous nationalism.

But the highlight of any Cisco Calendar performance always came late at night, as it did now. Nodding to Garrett and Flor, he played the famous opening chords of the song they waited for. The words were as taut as Homer’s and strove for the same effect: the beginning of a memorable saga:

“
’
Twas in the t
own of Jacksboro in the year of ’
73,
©