No Resting Place Read Free Page A

one of their thorns.
    He had gone hunting in Red River Bottom. That was the roses’ territory; however, this was not their season. They would not bloom for yet another month. But it was impossible for my father ever to find himself in those woods at any time of year and not think of the roses, of the story of which they were so much a part, of which they were the sole surviving reminder, and it was this, of course, this old association in his mind, that made him imagine now that he smelled them. As real as real the scent was—and just as bitter. Such a sweet smell to everybody else—of all roses, one of the most fragrant; to him all the more bitter for their seeming sweetness. He had gone there to get away from all that saddened and disgusted him in the town: the preparations for the San Jacinto Day ceremonies—the bunting and the buncombe: all the more reason to imagine now that he smelled their bittersweet, their accusatory smell.
    It was not solitude and silence that my father went to those woods in search of. To him they were populous, with a presence behind every tree trunk, and murmurous with a multitude of voices speaking in a Babel of tongues. The wind sighing in the tall pines: that was not the wind, that was the concerted, ceaseless sigh of a people persecuted, dispossessed, pursued, all but exterminated, forgotten. Quiet as a graveyard now, the woods had once echoed with a steady stream of humanity, most, but not all, of them on a one-way journey. The history books taught that the first American immigrants to Texas came in 1821. These were those Missourians, victims of the Panic of 1819, in search of a fresh start, for whom permission to found a colony had been won from the newly independent Mexican government by a former St. Louis banker, Moses Austin, who, however, died soon thereafter, bequeathing the completion of his mission to his son, Stephen F. But the Austin colonists were not pioneers, not the first immigrants. They entered and rode south through Texas over a well-traveled road, one that began where Texan began, on Red River—not a game trail but a man-made road, surely the first one in all the New World to be landscaped, beautified, a road bordered with roses that bloomed white streaked with red and by their fragrance fulfilled the colonists’ dream of entering a new Eden.
    Everybody now thought they were wild roses. My father was one of the few people who knew they were not wild, not even native to Texas, but descendants of imported roses carefully, lovingly set along the margins of the state’s first highway, the one over which had come those founders, heroes and martyrs whom his son was being taught about in school, and, as that son was not being taught, over which had fled those who traced and blazed and cleared and decorated it—the ones who survived their massacre, that is. The roses had been in bloom then, and if the scent of them was bitter to my father now, when it was not even real but only in his mind, a product of the power of association, he could imagine how it must have seemed during that week when they were hounded out, hunted like wild animals the length of their own road, to those who had set them there.
    The road lay so near to where my father stood that he could have sworn he smelled the roses although they could not possibly be in bloom yet. Lured by the promise of a new life in a new country, people had ridden over it coming from the states, from England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, people of every station and stripe, political refugees, utopians, cultists, speculators, failures, felons, soldiers of fortune, bankers and bankrupts, plain farmers, riffraff—the ordinary, the less than ordinary and the extraordinary. That very tree, that towering red oak now leafing out for yet another spring, had stood there when Davy Crockett, seeking a new life, had passed through here on his way to death at the Alamo, and Sam Houston, not yet two days ride from