John Graves - From a Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas

Also by JOHN GRAVES

Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship (2004)

A John Graves Reader (1996)

Hard Scrabble (1974)

Goodbye to a River (1960)

John Graves

FROM A LIMESTONE LEDGE

Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas

Foreword by Bill Wittliff
Illustrations by Glenn Wolff

University of Texas Press
Austin

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by John Graves.

Foreword copyright 2004 by Bill Wittliff

Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a divison of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved

First University of Texas Press edition, 2016

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

Most of this book has been previously published in Texas Monthly.

The Library of Congress catalogued a previous edition of this book as follows:

Graves, John, 19202013

From a limestone ledge : some essays and other ruminations about country life in Texas / John Graves ; new foreword by Bill Wittliff ; illustrations by Glenn Wolff.

p. cm.

1. Graves, John, 19202013Homes and hauntsTexas. 2. Authors, AmericanHomes and hauntsTexas 3. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 4. TexasSocial life and customs. 5. Country lifeTexas. I. Title.

PS3557.R2867Z466 2004

813'54dc22

2004045376

978-1-4773-0936-0 (pbk.)

978-1-4773-0961-2 (library e-book)
978-1-4773-0962-9 (individual e-book)

This one belongs to Jane for many reasons, not least because without her I might never have stopped in one place long enough to recognize the profundity of such archetypal metaphors as chickens and fences and chewing tobacco.

Nor holds the world a better thing,

Though one should search it round,

Than thus to live ones own sole king,

Upon ones own sole ground.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Old Squire

Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

Conversing as I may,

I sit upon this old gray stone,

And dream my time away.

William Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply

Foreword

The first time Sally and I and the kids went to Hard Scrabble I had to ask directions from a thorny old gentleman sitting out in front of his house on the side of the farm-to-market road. John Graves. Yeah, thats that fella writes those books. I said it was. Hell, he said, if I was to write a book, wouldnt be a marriage left in Somervell County.

A mile or so later we turned left onto a dirt road as directed, drove through a low water creek, then past a neighbors pig yard where grunting mud-caked hogs lounged in old pock-marked porcelain bathtubs and urinals half-buried in the dirt. We opened and closed the Hard Scrabble gate, then drove on down the road a little way to a small rock house and a barn, both built by John. There was a canvas-covered canoe turned upside down on the barn rafters (not the canoe from the journey that became Goodbye to a River; that one had been given to a friend years before and wrecked in some mishap).

At the end of the barn was a little room where John wrote on an old upright typewriter, usually smoking or chewing tobacco. And of course there were books on the shelves and a long row of neatly labeled notebooks wherein John kept his farm records and notes on variousand mostly countryinterests: cows and fences and honeybees and grapes and the like. Eventually these notes would be expanded into a number of articles written for Texas Monthly and later gathered and reworked for this book.

Outside, below the house, was a garden and an apiary and a compost so ripe you could warm your hands by it. There was a woodpile out back where one day I happened to find one of the two paddles John had used on his Goodbye trip. A cow had stepped on it, broken it in several places, and John had simply tossed it away, a tool no longer useful. (Its back in one piece now, and in the Graves archive at the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos.)

And of course there were the animals: Blue the dog, Doorbell the Nubian nanny goat and her big brown randy billy goat son William, the ponies Lady Bird and Penny, chickens, Spanish goats, and a small herd of cattle.

There was White Bluff Creek where the Graves girls Helen and Sally would take our son Reid and daughter Allison to skip rocks and wadeand where Helen and Sally now take their own children on visits from homes far away.

All in all Hard Scrabble wasand iswhat local country folk might admiringly call a good place.

In the evenings wed have supper out on the screen porch, then talk for hours, long after Jane and Sally had sent the kids off to bed. (I teased John for oversleeping after one such evening. Well, damn women, anyway, John said. Keep you up all night talking, then dont get you up in the morning.) If it happened to be a Saturday night and the wind was blowing just right, we might hear ghostly whiffs of fiddle music coming from the little dance hall the neighbor with the pig yard had built out in his pasture just for the pleasure of his extended family. And if we stayed up long enoughand we usually didwed sometimes hear the foxhunters running their hounds through the creek bottom and blowing on their cow horn bugles just as their kin had done down through the generations before them.

The Graveses always had several projects going and usually within an hour or two of arrival wed just naturally get folded into them. On one trip we kibitzed as Jane designed Christmas china for Neiman Marcus; another trip she was designing playing cards and candles. One weekend John and I repaired a water gap that had washed out during a flood. Another week-end we slaughtered a goat to make sausage, then made a mess of it with too much salt. This was somewhat correctedbut not entirelyby remixing it with several pounds of pork. On one trip John sent me up a tree to cut off a limb on which one of his hives had clustered after swarming. I did as instructed, and John, down below, caught the swarm in a cardboard box. Over the years thereve been many trips, many projects; I cant go out there without thinking of what old Mister Charlie Goodnight said of the pull of his own varied pursuits: Ill be damned if I could ever find time to lie in the shade....

Hard Scrabble and John. Its where for more than thirty years now Ive gone for good conversation, for inspiration, for friendshipand in times of crisis for advice. Its where I go when I need to be reminded that lifeand the principles by which one lives that lifematter and matter hugely. This is not something John preaches. John doesnt preach. You just sort of get it by osmosis.

Im not alone in this. Several generations of writersand readershave been drawn to John and his books for the same nourishments.

It would be impossible, I think, to overestimate Johns continuing influence on his fellow writers. He has been the master for half a century now. His writing is the mark by which the rest of us scribblers measure our own.

Every culture, it seems to me, gets a handful of writers each generation or so who have the talent and ability to reach beneath the surface of things into those deeper currents that run through us all as fellow members of the human tribe. That is why great writing can be universalwhy all great art in any field can be universal. It touches the commonality in all of us. It links us one to another. It links one generation to the next and to the next and to the next. It can link one mans experience of a river or a patch of land to all rivers and all patches of land in the world. Thats what John did in