“Yeah, well,” James Sebastian said, “we aint thinking to farm it, Mr Watson. Could be we’ll just use it for picnics and such. For going out to look at the birds.”
Watson’s smile was wry. “Every man to his own pleasures, I always say.”
“This a lake?” Blake Cortéz said, putting his finger to a crescent figure near a sharp bend in the river along their property.
“Oxbow,” Watson said. “What around here they call a resaca. That’s a good-sized one.” He pointed to an S-shape and said, “Here’s another, see? Another over here. There’s so many around these parts no map can show them all. This whole tip of Texas is delta country, boys. Low and mostly soggy. River floods over pretty regular and a resaca is what sometimes gets left behind when the river draws back. Others of them get made where the river loops around real tight on itself so there’s a coupla bends close together and then one day the current breaks across from one bend to the other, takes a sort of shortcut, you might say. The cutoff loop left behind pretty soon gets plugged up at both ends with silt and such and presto, you got another resaca.”
The north and south boundaries—a creek and a river, respectively—were as definite as boundaries could be, but Watson didn’t know if the property lines along the west and east side had ever been staked out. Because they were direct north-south lines, they were simple enough to establish on paper, but at the actual site the line could be hard to stake out if there was a lot of brush or trees in the way of it. Like all the company’s agents he was a licensed surveyor, and he proposed to take the brothers out to the property the next day. If the boundaries had not been staked, he would sight and stake them for the standard fee. The twins said that would be just fine.
They went back to Elizabeth Street and had supper in a café near the Miller Hotel. When they came out the city lamplighter was making his rounds from post to post, lifting the glass globes and lighting the kerosene wicks. They had bought a county map like Watson’s and were up late that night, poring over it, until Marina prevailed on them to come to bed.
Watson collected them at the appointed eight o’clock hour in a dual-seat buggy powered by a brace of husky mules. Blake Cortéz sat beside him, Marina and James Sebastian in the rear. Tucked behind the back seat was Watson’s instrument case and a basket lunch Mrs Watson had packed for him and his clients. The twins had tried to dissuade Marina from coming, saying it was likely to be a long day of tracking around in the dirt, but she had insisted on going and said she would not hold them at fault if she got bored. The day promised to be another fine one that would get warm but not hot. Steeple bells pealing. Except for the church-bound, traffic was sparse, and once they were out of town they saw not another soul.
The Boca Chica road was little more than a rugged trail through the same marsh and sand flats and chaparral they’d seen along the rail line. But in the distance to their right, all along the river bottoms, the landscape was thick with trees—ebonies and acacias and cottonwoods, and above all, tall shaggy palm trees, wide groves of them, one after another, sporadically interspersed with stretches of high brush or grassy flats that afforded brief views of the river.
“You’ll find bunches of them palms all the way down the river to the gulf,” Watson said. “It’s how come the first Spanish to land here called it Río de las Palmas. Used to be they grew for miles upriver too, way up past Brownsville. The farmers and ranchers thought they were a nuisance and cleared them out.”
About ten miles from town Watson turned the mules north, the buggy rocking and swaying over the uneven ground, and they soon arrived at the creek and reined up. He unfurled a map and checked the coordinates on the deed once more, then opened up his instrument case and got out the tripod and transit. He was good at his work and it took him but a few minutes to locate the northwest corner of the property and he marked it with a wooden stake. They saw that the western property line would run straight to southward without encountering any trees or heavy brush. “The Spaniard who laid out this boundary sure picked the right spot to do it,” Watson said. “I’ll wager the east line won’t have no more obstruction than this one.”
He took a due-south sighting with one twin holding the marking pole for him about seventy yards away, moving the pole right or left as Watson indicated with an upraised arm while peering through the scope. When the marking pole was in line with the sighting, Watson snapped his hand down at the wrist and the other twin drove a stake in the ground. In this manner did they advance southward on foot, setting a stake every hundred yards. The twins were within twenty yards of the river when they set the last stake but they still couldn’t see the water for the high barrier of carrizo cane along the bank. When they went closer, however, they heard the current’s rush in the reeds.
They returned to the buggy and ate the basket lunch. Marina was uncomplaining but the twins sensed she was wishing she had stayed at the hotel. Blake unfurled the map and he and James studied it as they ate their boiled eggs and beef sandwiches. They intermittently looked up from it and off to southeastward. “Say, Mr Watson, this shading along the river,” James said, running a finger over that part of the map, “is it all palms?”
“That it is,” Watson said. “You fellas got the biggest bunch of em in the county.” His mien was commiserative. “Too bad there aint much you can do with the things. No good for lumber. Makes a poor firewood, so smoky. It’s a job just to make your way through them palms, what with hardwoods and shrub all mixed in with them. I tell you, boys, there’s probly places in there nobody’s ever set foot. Me, I don’t go tracking around in any such jungle, not if I got a choice. Give me streets and sidewalks.”
After lunch they drove eastward along the creek until by Watson’s estimate they were near the corner of the property, and he again found the spot with no difficulty. They repeated the process for staking out the property line—and Watson won the bet with himself that it would be as free of tree obstruction as the west line.
As they headed back to Brownsville the sun was more than halfway down the sky and reddening. Watson looked tired but satisfied with his day’s work. Marina dozed in her seat, the brim of her hat pulled low over her face. The twins kept looking back down the road and grinning at each other. Plan forming.
ROOTS
They were eager to begin exploring the palm groves along the river, an area Watson had estimated at about six square miles. As they had expected, Marina did not want to go with them and slog around in the mud and live in a tent the whole while. But they did not want to leave her alone in the Miller Hotel. Even in the middle of the night it was as loud as they had been warned, and it housed a number of rough men. The twins would not put her at risk of being accosted or harassed in their absence. They spent the next days looking for a house to rent but there were few available and they had to settle for an old weathered clapboard on Adams Street and near the Market Square. Its outhouse was falling apart and the roof needed repair and the house demanded a thorough cleansing, but Marina agreed it was better than the Miller.