That ended here.
Forever.
Strangers or family or it doesn’t really matter stand together under a tall swaying sprawling regal pecan tree, bigger around than five full grown men where its trunk meets the too-cold Eastland County sanded black dirt. Leaves fall flutter float into the sad sand muted muddy soil.
The posted letter we received back east was scrawled but specific. That letter kept secret more than it told. “Little Luther’s sick, not good, not good at all. The doctor, he rode two days and one night, out from over near to the Stephensville road.” Doc Evans, or another. We don’t remember. Can’t remember. Not from here. Listen and wait but can’t call the man’s name, riding hard as his horse would travel across that far long ago.
God bless him, whoever he was.
“Please to come to our aid. Our neighbors’ children too sick for them to help. Church closed till whatever this is passes from our community. Fear lives here, sleeping in our cabins, though sleep escapes all but a few. Please to the Lord save our little baby, so sick, crying, come quick, sad we are, our little boy, nothing to do but pray, though Lord forgive me, that didn’t work for the Blackwell’s babe, one place south, one place west. They lost him just before dawn, yesterday morning.”
The letter trails off to nothing, but gets posted. It takes too long, a century till we’re all gathered around the place. Uncomfortable. After all that late frontier family must of gone through, riding down, circling round, trying to figure it all out, what else could we have done? Will they be there when we arrive?
The day before we rode out for Texas, a second scribbled note joined the first. One line, scratched hard into the tattered scrap of paper:
“Little Luther’s gone.”
No signature.
The longest letter I’ve ever read.
This Texas frontier’s scattered with hundreds maybe thousands of lost and forgotten graves. Stories that led into stories that birthed later tales that nurtured and struggled and survived and finally became people or places you yourself probably know about. But we that still walk these woods, pass these places every day, not knowing, not hearing the triumphs and tragedies that came before. Healing us, the silence, or God knows we couldn’t take much more.
Baby Luther Davenport was born then shortly died back in 1901, his family’s log cabin or box-framed home yards from a towering now-invisible native Texas pecan that shades where his family laid their baby to his final rest. One still-here man’s grandmother told Luther’s tale within this man’s hearing when he was a boy, decades ago, and that boy, now that man, never forgot. Though I guess it was Luther’s parents’ tale just as much, back then.
We five, more than five, did indeed go looking for Luther, found him, the family gone, he too quiet but still out there. We did get a posse rounded up and out there finally in person and in spirit, marked his grave, thought deeply of Luther, of the lives of our hard-wrought Texas ancestors lived. We left quietly a little richer, Luther having been born and died beneath this sprawling witness hard-shell pecan. His short story so powerful, so emblematic of where Texas came from.
Leonard and Florence had seven more kids, several of which made it to adulthood then parenthood then into lives out past that brave pecan and out beyond that hard rocky place in that family’s trail to their future. They left their shaking signature in Eastland County, beneath that lonely pecan tree. Then moved north. By the time we finally got to the pasture, they were gone, the old house was gone, the cistern or well or tank or however they got their water was gone. The wind blew, the pecan swayed. Only Luther’s story remained.
Winter clouds gathered.
Luther’s daddy was 33 when the baby died. Luther’s momma 26 when their boy succumbed to the Spanish influenza or smallpox or pneumonia or one from the hundred other diseased predators out running hunting through the woods back then. Leonard and Florence stayed together, but had to have left behind more than most can believe or retrieve from their own life’s story.
All we know for sure is that Luther’s gone. And we’re still here. Though that too is a mystery.
There’s beautiful new carved granite marking Luther’s story now, beneath his pecan, that carved rock the same rich red-pink color as gilds our Texan’s state capital farther south down Austin way. I hope he likes it.
We remember Luther. And hardship. And Texas. How we got here. Pray that we all get past it. This country is still hard. Pray and hope that our children will get to their Promised Land, someday, somehow, walking tall across this hallowed state and hard work and memory and whatever lies beyond.
Luther Davenport
Eastland County, Texas
1901-1901
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