Читать книгу The Last Sheriff in Texas - James P. McCollom - Страница 13

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Vail’s wife was called Oncie. She was a Handley and her family was eleven kids and she was number eleven. In Spanish, that’s once. Oncie called me and she said, I want you to do me a favor, and I said, Well what is that. She said, Well, there’s an old boy here in town who wants to write a book about Vail. And I know you and Vail were very close and hunted a lot. Anyway I said, I’ll be glad to talk to him. She called me the next morning and she was pretty rough herself. She said that sonofabitch—everything he’s put in there was somethin real nasty about Vail. Don’t tell him anything. So I didn’t. He come by and I told im I was given instructions not to tell him anything. He was gonna say everything mean . . . and he told me, Well, I’ve got to do that to sell books. The meaner I show him, the more books will sell.

—L. D. Hunter (in 2002)

Every so often someone would come to Beeville with an idea for a book about Vail Ennis. But Vail Ennis already had a biographer. In fact, when Vail took office as sheriff in January of 1945, a writer had come with the job. Camp Ezell became editor of the Beeville Bee-Picayune that same month. In the three years since then, Vail Ennis had provided Camp Ezell with more column inches of newsprint than the county’s previous sheriffs had produced in a century. And good-looking newsprint it was. Most Texas weeklies were inky sheets that used banner headlines to fill space and make trivial items seem important. Something more than three columns was rare for the Beeville newspaper. The front page was blocked out conservatively, artfully, the photographic cuts sharp beneath the Old English masthead:

The Beeville Bee-Picayune

Plaques and testimonials covered the newsroom wall. The Texas Press Association had named the newspaper the best weekly in the state so often that its gentlemanly owner and publisher, George H. Atkins, was reluctant to enter more competitions. The paper’s appearance was the most anticipated event of the week. People began to watch their clocks after lunch on Thursday, counting down to 3:00 p.m., the time that Jimmy Crockett would deliver the first stacks of Bee-Pics to Bagley’s newsstand, across the street from Schulz pharmacy.

It was the main booster of the county’s progress. Stories about new businesses and community events (the Kiwanis Karnival, the Rotary Award) were front page. The development of Halls Acres on the east side of town was a major story in 1945, as was the rumor that the U.S. Navy might reopen Chase Field, the naval air station shut down at the end of the war. The weekly editions provided an easy flow of experience into annals. To record it was to make it so. The proof of the sheriff’s wounds, his recovery, was the Bee-Picayune. The Bee-Picayune had followed Beeville boys in every theater of World War II. The Wade brothers, four of them, reuniting in Europe. Jimmy Dougherty missing in action, finally reported lost. Viggo Gruy’s Silver Star. Cullen Barnett, the quarterback of the 1934 championship football team, and Ed Brown, the star halfback, serving on Omar Bradley’s staff. Mitchell Davis, a B-17 tail gunner, wrote his last letter to the editor of the Bee-Picayune before his flight was lost over the hump in Burma. Freddie Hobrecht’s fighter pilot exploits (shot down behind enemy lines, he captured a German soldier and marched him back to the Allied camp) were national news, but the outlet that engraved them in history was here. Home. But old Beeville was always present. Each issue carried columns headed 25 Years Ago and 50 Years Ago drawn from the newspaper’s archives. They were columns that publisher George Atkins, sixty-four, might write from memory. Born here, he had inherited the newspaper from his father and never left. So he was witness to everything that had happened in Bee County during the twentieth century.

Camp Ezell was a local boy who had gone off to see the world. If Melville made his Harvard from a ship, Camp made his with a linotype machine. When he finished as much schoolwork (eight grades) as the town provided in 1910, he went to work for George H. Atkins at the Bee-Picayune as a printer’s devil. Having mastered the linotype, he sailed away, off to Brownsville, then Memphis, then Philadelphia, patiently work­ing his way toward cities with better symphony orchestras, patiently learning how to write news stories. He was working for the San Francisco Examiner when Mr. Atkins tracked him down in 1944 and offered him the editor’s job. The publisher celebrated his return with a big headline: Camp Ezell Comes Home.

Camp was forty-nine and Vail forty-two when they both began their new jobs in January of 1945. Six months later, Camp covered the shootout at the Rodriguez ranch, and after that Vail’s murder trial in Victoria, and after that, the drawn-out legal maneuverings involved in the ouster suit. Then the bitter election of 1946. And now the shootout at Pettus.

The contrast between the two men was too great to qualify. The sheriff was the most violent man in the county. The editor was soft-spoken, so benign that folks in Bee County might have thought him a Buddhist if they had known what that meant. Vail was a man’s man, a hunter. Camp was a lover of classical music and opera. Vail was all action, speeding in a metallic green blur from one end of the county to the other. Camp was reflection. In fact, during his first five years back in Beeville, Camp didn’t own a car. He made the same walk (an even mile) he had made when he was sixteen, from the old Ezell home to the newspaper office. Coming home from San Francisco, it had to be like walking around an old movie set, familiar from dozens of movies he’d had seen before, a redefinition of the precincts of his imagination.

The original town of Beeville had been laid out in 1859 on the curve of the Poesta Creek. Block number one, the Evergreen Cemetery, was situated on a hill on the town’s northeastern corner. The original town site covered roughly a square mile—the same as the original site of Houston. In fact, if you hold the plat of old Houston in one hand and that of old Beeville in another and slap them together, they are very nearly duplicates: fifty-six odd blocks next to bending streams of water. The Buffalo Bayou, bounding Houston to the north, flowed past the city’s western shoulder and meandered toward the northeast. The Poesta Creek formed the western and southern boundaries of Beeville, winding toward the southeast. Old Beeville had six streets running west to east, twelve south to north. Old Houston had seven streets south–north, twelve west–east. Houston had no streets named for a U.S. president (not even Jackson), but Beeville had ten (Monroe, Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Buchanan, Adams, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore), all but one of the north–south streets. Houston honored the Texas heroes Smith, Travis, Austin, and Lamar. Beeville took Crockett and Bowie. Only Ben Milam had a street in both towns. Camp could remember when Beeville was called the “city of homes” because almost all its houses were situated on large and spacious lots with well-tended orange, lemon, date palm, rose palmetto, cape jasmine, and clematis that made its residential section beautiful to see, “with fences well repaired and hedges carefully trimmed, the whole is a constant delight to the eye.” At the turn of the century, the town was famed as “the city of windmills,” a lovely thing to be. Like others born here before 1900, Camp Ezell had the sense of having created the place, piece by piece. He treasured it. He had seen the urban world. It held no more secrets for him. But he did miss the San Francisco Symphony.

Camp had decided that all necessary geography was here, that this was his garden. Evidently, Vail Ennis felt the same, which is one possible basis for the implausible bond that formed between two men who shared not a single personality trait. The other thing they had in common was their work. Each had attained his dream job. Vail had wanted to be sheriff of Bee County since his brawling days of the early 1930s, when he had run up against Alfred Allee. Camp had dreamed of being editor of this newspaper since he was a boy.

While the sheriff was the most visible presence in the county, Camp stayed in the background, seen only in the small photograph that ran with his column, “Glancing Around.” In this small universe, each had a role. It seemed that Vail’s job was to lead the parade. Camp’s job was to watch it go by. And write about it. The sheriff was always good for a news item.

“Vail was always a big shot,” recalled Elias Chapa. “But after the article in Time, he went around with a kind of aura, like a movie star. People would follow him to listen to his stories.”

The sheriff’s favorite stage was the sidewalk in front of the American Café, on Main Street. There he would hold court for groups of men coming in and out of their coffee breaks, talking rapidly, gesturing, reenacting the violent events. At any place, at any time, Vail was the dominant presence. Recalling the scene in front of the American Café, men would comment on the sheriff’s posture, one of readiness, menace. Krueger, later the resident Texas Ranger, saw the sheriff’s arms as being almost apelike, giving an impression of physical strength that made him seem much bigger than he was. Whether he was born with them or acquired them building oil rigs, Vail had unusually broad shoulders and huge hands. All of him—the hawklike nose, the pale eyes, the set mouth that smiled only in friendly company—seemed part of the posture. The Time photograph captured it: Vail in full-length pose, leaning slightly to his left, his gun hand loose on his right hip; the sheriff wore black boots, black pants, and a crisp white shirt with a dark tie, a white Stetson. I am your guardian—or your fate.

He was as pale as a normal white man could be. He was taut and wiry, like spring steel. With boots, he might have been six feet tall. He weighed around 170, not nearly as much as his younger brother, Darwin, who had come with him to the oil fields those many years before.

“Vail told the story about the Pettus gunfight a hunnerd times,” said L. D. Hunter, the sheriff’s hunting partner. “He liked to tell about that big fella, the station attendant. He weighed about three hunnerd pounds and he tried to crawl under the desk when the shootin started. The man said, ‘Vail, I’m shot . . . shot pretty bad.’ ‘Where are you shot?’ ‘In the butt.’ Well, that just tickled old Vail—he told that story all the time. ‘Get your ass in the Green Hornet.’ He wadnt even just barely scratched. I bet he told that story many a time. Ooo did he ever.”

The Pettus event magnified the sheriff’s image, not just his toughness but his many skills. People marveled at them. Vail taught himself photography. He made his own bullets. He was an expert dog trainer. He could hold a stack of silver dollars in one hand and interchange the coins: top to bottom, bottom to top. He was, no doubt, the most skilled driver the county had ever seen. Everyone identified him with the green metallic Hudson Hornet he was known to drive at 120 miles an hour. The car was one of the most important things in his life. The Hornet had an L-head Super Six engine with a 262-cubic-inch displacement and 124 horsepower, the most powerful car on the market. The step-down model had a unibody construction with floorboards below the frame. It hugged the ground, bullet-like, on the highway.

The single, stark anomaly in his larger-than-life presence was his speech: the thin, nasal voice the Time writer called lisping. If not a lisp, it was a high-pitched twang, and he talked so rapidly, never stopping, that it was hard to tell just what it was about that voice that made it so odd.

“He couldn’t say Mexican,” Elias Chapa said. “He wanted to say Meskin, which is what most Anglos said, but he couldn’t say that, either. He said Meckin. That’s how he pronounced it—Meckin. We all started callin each other Meckins.”

Meckins.

Hispanic wasn’t in use at the time. Beeville’s 1931 city directory (published by a company in Missouri) sorted the 5,413 residents this way:

White American: 3,560

English Speaking Mexican: 1,336

Non-English speaking Mexican: 270

Colored: 247

In the South Texas brush country the social order seemed as natural as the weather.

Later generations might wonder how their grandparents had lived through the blistering summers with no air-conditioning. But farm and ranch folks did not question the weather. It came with the place. So did the social weather.

Ethnic was an unknown term. Jewish families might be counted on the fingers of one hand; Saltzmann and Gold were lumped in with “Anglos” along with Jardina, Matocha, Rossi, Malek, Marecek, Rudeloff, Spiekerman, Koester, Gregorcyk—names easily sorted in the Northeast but indistinguishable here. Perhaps a quarter of the Anglos were, in fact, Anglo; as many or more of them were Irish. Bee County’s black community was old enough to be respected and small enough not to be resented. (Family names like Easterling, Canada, and Langley went back nearly as far as Wilson, Fuller, and Pettus.) This meant things came down to two ethnic groups, the Mexicans and the Anglos, and since the Anglos didn’t consider themselves as ethnic, that left one.

The lightning rod in this societal weather was the sheriff himself. There were those who said he was biased against Latinos. It was common knowledge that Vail made more arrests in the bars on the west side than the east side. Such arrests came as often as not with bloody heads. The counterargument was the west-side bars were where the fights took place. It was said—and believed—that a downtown pharmacist stayed open late on Saturday nights to dispense first aid for knife wounds suffered along the Line, a row of bars one block over from Washington Street, the unofficial border between the east and west sides.

For traditional Texans, Vail was a law-and-order sheriff, pure and simple, who treated everyone equally (he would pistol-whip you whatever your race, religion, or politics). Men who knew how Vail roughed up Junior Graham, the rowdiest of the local hell-raisers, shook their heads at the suggestion that the sheriff went easy on Anglo boys. During the ouster hearings, three times as many Anglos as Mexicans were cited among the complainants against the sheriff. That list included more than one U.S. Navy officer but didn’t include Junior Graham, nor Dudley Dougherty, the son of the county’s richest family, also arrested, nor the mayor of Beeville, also arrested (for a traffic violation). Vail’s confrontation with a wealthy farmer was already folklore. A Mexican farmhand walked eight miles into town to tell the sheriff that the farmer overcharged him for supplies and rent then deducted the charges from his wages, leaving him with nothing. This was not illegal. There was no recourse, unless you lived in Bee County. A visit from Vail corrected the situation.

There was little tolerance for crime of any kind, but zero when it came to women.

“Vail protected mistreated wives,” Richard Rudeloff recalled. “And most of them were from the west side. The wife would come to see him, tell him: ‘My husband won’t give any money to his family. He spends it all in the beer joint.’ Vail would know which bar to find him in. ‘How much money you got, Pedro? Show me.’ Vail would take it and give it to the wife.”

After all, it was in response to the pleas of a tearful mother desperate to find her two small children that Vail had gone to the Rodriguez ranch on that unfortunate day in July of 1945.

Since the earliest days of cattle ranching, the difference in Anglo and Spanish styles—mien, manners, religion, foods—had invited misunderstanding. But World War II had produced a hero who felt he could harmonize the peculiar culture. He was Hector P. Garcia, recently a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. In June of 1948, he came to Beeville to give a talk at the county courthouse. All seats in the main courtroom gallery were taken. Camp Ezell counted the attendance at 130 (about two-thirds Latino, one-third Anglo).

Everybody in the main courtroom was aware of the celebrity of the speaker.

Among war heroes, Hector Garcia was singular. He was both warrior and healer. Early in the war, he had commanded an infantry company and won battle stars for courage and resourcefulness. He then transferred to the medical corps, where he won battle stars as a combat surgeon. During forty-four months in the African and European theaters, Dr. Garcia was known to work twenty-hour days to save the lives of wounded soldiers. He was a son of Texas, and Texas was proud of him, as it was proud of Audie Murphy, the war’s most decorated hero. Audie was a North Texas boy, Hector Garcia a South Texas boy. Well over a hundred of the town’s leaders had responded to the invitation of the Alta Vista Lions Club. Dr. Garcia was thirty-two, a serious, fine-looking man. He spoke in English. His subject was school integration: “We are against segregation at any time or place in Texas. We not only are against it; we are fed up on it, for, as a minority group, we do not enjoy the privileges that are accorded the majority group, yet we pay taxes . . .” At points, his voice was more intense: “We do not want equal facilities; we want the same facilities. We served on the battlefields fighting the socialist systems. I would ask you now, what did we fight for?”

What Hector Garcia said about Latinos serving on the battlefields was true. It just hadn’t been true before World War II. Among the several periods of cultural uncertainty in Texas, the years leading up to World War I were the worst. Americans were unsure whether Mexico and Mexicans stood with the United States or with Germany. In January of 1915, American intelligence exposed the infamous “Plan of San Diego,” drafted in the seat of Duval County, a political manifesto calling for Mexicans in the United States to revolt and take over Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado. In 1917, British intelligence revealed the Zimmermann Telegram—a direct appeal by Germany for an alliance with Mexico against the United States. This validated the most extreme of the anti-Mexican publics. Texas newspapers in 1917 and 1918 carried daily and weekly stories of Latinos going south across the Rio Grande to avoid service in the U.S. military. The World War II generation—Hector Garcia’s generation—had resolved the questions of nationality. Virtually half the GIs reporting from South Texas were Mexican American. In Beeville, more than three dozen Mexican American boys left A. C. Jones High School early in 1942 to join up, among them the Longoria brothers, the Chapa brothers, and all five brothers in the Rojas family. Four of them—Benjamin, Daniel Jr., Mito, and Gute—saw action at Normandy. Chico Rojas served in the navy in the Pacific, as did Elias and Frank Chapa and Balde Longoria. During World War I, one of thirteen Bee County boys killed in action was Mexican American; during World War II, it was thirteen of forty-six.

Hector Garcia was part Bolívar, part Sam Houston, on this day in June of 1948. Speaking in English, he argued that the solution to the area’s cultural fragmentation was obvious: language. “Corpus Christi is an example of the elimination of segregation—an English test is given to first grade students; those who cannot pass are placed with teachers who instruct them how to speak English. But they remain in the same building, the same playground . . .”

Camp Ezell’s reporting of the diversity of the attendees showed the greater significance of the event for Beeville. School integration was no longer in debate in Texas. Anglo and Latino high school students had been in class together since before the war, and even as Hector Garcia spoke, a federal judge ruled to complete integration at all levels. But the integration of this audience was big news. For the first time, the civic leaders of Beeville, those from the east side and the west, had sat down together in common purpose. When Major Garcia concluded, he shook hands with Carlos Reyes, the dean of the Latino community, and with Judge Joe Wade, and with Sheriff Vail Ennis.

Such was the social weather that summer when Hector Garcia made his speech in Beeville and began his long career of social activism. But in 1948, the problems of this peculiar culture were remote from America’s primary concern, and he acknowledged this in closing:

“We Latin Americans fought for the four freedoms, but we do not enjoy them. We have returned home, and are getting ready to fight Communism. We served faithfully. When are we going to get our rights? I’ve lived in many parts of the world, but the U.S. is the greatest country of them all. However, I warn you against the encroachment of Communism. The Communist system of government is the greatest menace the world has ever known.”

Major Garcia’s concerns were shared by the three candidates for the state’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. George Peddy had come to Beeville in May and proclaimed, “If Russia wants to fight us, we might as well have the fight now. We must issue an ultimatum for our planes in Berlin.” Peddy’s anticommunist view was the strongest, and it got him the endorsement of the Houston Post. Coke Stevenson also came later in May and made a short speech on the courthouse steps. Peddy’s views on communism were respected, and he had been met with strong applause. Coke Stevenson, the former governor, was Mr. Texas, a cattleman among cattlemen, and he was greeted by the people of Beeville as one of their own.

The third candidate came in July, a month to the day after Hector Garcia’s visit. The peace of the early afternoon was interrupted by the whir and clatter of the Johnson City Windmill, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign helicopter, which circled the courthouse and hovered over downtown Beeville before veering off to the Fair Grounds, where a crowd of Democrats awaited. There, the thirty-nine-year-old politician threw his hat out of the helicopter into the crowd below, landed, and gave an energetic eighteen-minute speech. Camp Ezell timed the speech and counted the crowd (180). In his story, Camp made note that this was Lyndon’s seventh speech of the day in South Texas, with seven more to go. From Beeville he was going on to Duval County, sixty miles south, below the Nueces River, the old border with Mexico.

Lyndon Johnson had a special purpose in going to Duval County.

But Hector Garcia had no purpose there. For one thing, Duval schools were fully integrated. There was no language problem. In a county that was 90 percent Latino, everybody spoke Spanish.

For another, he wouldn’t have found 130 civic leaders. Duval had only one civic leader, a patrón, and he was the cultural, political, and spiritual leader as well. In South Texas, everyone knew about George B. Parr, the Duke of Duval.

The Parrs were not the first political bosses in South Texas, but they were the masters. Early in the century, when men still traveled on horses, Archer Parr had gone against the interests of fellow Anglo ranch owners and embraced the Mexican side of a Tex-Mex political argument in the county seat and forever aligned his family with the majority. With the artful use of personal favors, patronage, and stern discipline, Archer parlayed that move into a deep relationship with the political majority. He taught George that the key to the Spanish psyche was fatalism. For Spaniards, life was being. For the gringos, it was doing. The gringo, with his arid soul, felt he controlled his own fate. The Latino did not so presume: The English phrase was “I’ll see you tomorrow,” the Spanish was “Hasta mañana—si Dios quiere.” (See you tomorrow—if God wills.) George learned to speak Spanish before he learned English. He knew most of the men of San Diego, the county seat, by name, and each of them knew he could go to George for help—a medical bill, a county job, a small loan. The Parrs solved personal problems.

By 1948, George had total political control in Duval, effective control in Starr and Brooks counties, and strong influence in the district’s biggest, Jim Wells, a geographical area of 4,835 square miles, four times the size of the King Ranch. The Duke’s corruption was flagrant, prodigious, and colorful. He would go so far for a kickback as to buy the semitropical county a snowplow. (When reminded that it had never snowed in Duval, he said, “Well, if it ever does, we’re ready.”) He levied his own private tax (five cents a bottle) on beer. He lifted $250,000 from district school funds to buy the 57,000-acre Dobie ranch. (This, however, he had to give back.) But within his fiefdom he was regarded with affection and greatly admired. So the mansion, the racetrack, and the swimming pool built in the vicinity of the shacks of San Diego were viewed with pride by the population. George was lo nuestro.

If the two counties were the poles of South Texas culture, the core difference seemed to be the value the gringo placed on the vote. As most gringo attitudes, this was concerned more with ideas than with people. The notion of “a nation of laws, not men” made little sense to the heirs of Spanish sociability to whom the patrón asks this question:

Que es mejor: tener razon, o ser feliz?

(What is better: to be right or to be happy?)

One vote was a small price to pay for the feeling of family, the comfort of raza.

George B. Parr provided both. In return, he personally saw to the county’s ballot boxes.

To Hector Garcia, the Duke of Duval was the other half of the cultural dilemma that blocked the way to justice for his people.

But to Lyndon B. Johnson, he was four thousand votes. The congressman needed every one of them. He had already lost one run for the Senate—against Pappy O’Daniel in 1941—but had managed to keep his seat in Congress. If he lost this time, he wouldn’t be going back to Washington anytime soon, if at all.