The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
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Vonnie Ray and Vonnie Roy Jones haul an average of 32 cords a week for John Junior, using their bobtail truck and their ten-year-old Homelite power saw. They hit the woods about 7:30 a.m., which in December is barely sunlight. Sometimes they build a fire to get warm, then they start cutting. One cuts, one loads. It takes less than two minutes to send a forty-year-old, sixty-foot pine crashing to the forest floor. Vonnie Ray first makes a notch on the side where the tree is going to fall. Then he takes his power saw and saws into the other side of the tree, the sawdust spewing out like blizzard snow, so the blade will emerge just above the bottom of the notch. The trees ceases to resist and cracks along the cut, then—very slowly—it begins its swooshing fall to the ground. To see a previously untouched forest grove after five hours of cutting is to see a desolate landscape, a spectral wasteland littered with tree trunks lying on the earth like jackstraw giants brought down with fifteen cents’ worth of gasoline, their lofty, stiff strength and pride no more. I never got used to it.
The Jones crew will bring a load to John Junior’s yard at noon and another after dusk. For their labors—they work every day except Sunday—they will gross about $760 each week, less a $40 gas bill, $15 saw maintenance, $25 truck care, and other costs, making their take-home pay about $340 each. Most pulpwood haulers average $250 to $300 the weeks they work, but not many own their own truck, saws, and homes like Vonnie Ray and Vonnie Roy.
In 1900, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad’s run from Beaumont to Longview replaced the Sabine River as the way to get logs to paper mills and sawmills. Like John Junior, other timber folk have offices up and down the tracks. Nobody else, however, has an extraordinary one-armed man like Maurice Jones. Maurice (no kin to Vonnie Ray and Vonnie Roy) runs a Big Red loading machine whose hooks and chains wrap around the wood and stack it neatly on railroad cars.
Like his father, Casey Jones, Maurice has always been in the pulpwood business. He was bringing home a load back in 1969 when he met an unloaded bobtail on the Turkey Creek Bridge. The bobtail’s tire hit the bridge wall and the truck bounced over the highway line, severing Maurice’s arm above the elbow. Maurice passed a terrible six months after the accident full of self-pity and doubt, feeling washed up, a one-armed black man in a white man’s county. To support his family he went back to work for John Junior, raking leaves, doing odd jobs, forgetting about going squirrel and coon hunting with a favorite rifle he could no longer aim or shoulder. One day the Big Red loader man got the flu and logs needed stacking. Maurice swung into the cab, fired the engine, practiced a few times, and now when he isn’t working the books or measuring loads, he is operating the Big Red.
Maurice is the third generation of his family in San Augustine County. His grandfather was a slave who settled in the Preemption community, a special spot in the history of San Augustine’s blacks. In 1870, a bit more than fifteen square miles in the northwest portion of the county was set aside for ex-slaves or their descendants. After staying overnight and hanging a piece of kitchen equipment from a tree as a testimony of ownership and intent, single men could apply for 80 acres; married men, 160.
Maurice was born 41 years ago in the Norwood community in mid-county, where his grandfather, John “Two-Hoss” Jones, had moved looking for better farmland. Despite his grandfather working like “two hosses” and his daddy working and all the boys planting cotton and corn and olive-brown field peas and potatoes and watermelon, all of them taking care of a few hogs and coffee-and-gravy cows (“they give just enough milk for coffee and a little gravy”), when the crops were sold they still were always in debt. Maurice, his brother C.J. (still a pulpwood hauler), and his father also worked as a pulpwood crew. Twenty-six years ago they made six dollars each for three loads, eighteen dollars taken home for the daily work of three men.
Maurice finished the eleventh grade, joined the Army, and served nineteen months in Germany before returning home to haul pulpwood. He thought the Army experience was mostly a waste of time, but it is paying for his business courses at Stephen F. Austin University in nearby Nacogdoches. Maurice and his wife, Vera, who works at the big Temple-Eastex plant down at Pineland, are getting by. They don’t have much leisure time, but occasionally a few couples get their fishing gear and spend a long, lazy Sunday down at Sam Rayburn—just a pole in the lake and some fried chicken to eat with friends. Maurice does his squirrel hunting now with an automatic .22 that he wields as well as the Big Red loader, but it’s not the same as his favorite rifle.
The timber business is so pervasive it turns up in the unlikeliest places. Sheriff Nathan Tindall’s jail sits on the east side of the courthouse, a concrete box of a building across from Gladys’ Café, home of the midmorning coffee break and the substantial home-cooked lunch buffet, during which gossip is elevated to social history. Inside the concrete box I met Nathan Tindall, who at the time was talking on the telephone, telling an old boy that he had a warrant for his arrest because of those worthless checks, but if he would kindly come by, maybe they could work something out that would get the money repaid and keep him out of jail. That would make everybody happy and save the state and county some money.
Nathan Tindall stands a foot shorter than most small-town sheriffs, but still has the obligatory ample paunch spilling over his belt buckle like over-leavened bread. His small, narrow-set eyes miss nothing. He stood by the dispatcher’s telephone, talking in loud flamethrower bursts with no malice in his voice, asking questions, settling arguments, giving advice. I had seen a sheriff operate like this before, Bill Decker of Dallas County, a legendary lawman who arrested killers by calling them on the phone and telling them to come on in. Like the late Dallas sheriff, Nathan Tindall is a man who knows how the wind blows in his county.
He grew up in west San Augustine County near the Attoyac Bayou. As a kid he hauled pulpwood, then joined the Navy, and later came back to San Augustine. In 1950, Tindall was elected sheriff of the county, the youngest in Texas at age 21. Except for a four-year dropout in the fifties and a recent stint as the city police chief, and he has been the county sheriff ever since. Tindall has left the county overnight only once since becoming sheriff 28 years ago, and that was to carry evidence to Austin. His yellow, blackwalled Ford LTD is as permanent a fixture outside the courthouse as the statue of former Governor James Pinckney Henderson, which forever stares north into Mathew’s Dry Goods Store.
Tindall married his second wife, Willie Earl, a librarian at SFA, while talking on the dispatcher’s telephone. He took off two hours for their honeymoon, driving over to Hemphill, 28 miles southeast. The total cost of the newlyweds’ trip was sixty cents—for two quarts of oil and a Coke.
I asked Tindall if he’d ever been to Dallas to see the Cowboys or to the Astrodome or to see Willie Nelson. “Naw, I might miss something.” Isn’t he curious about those things, I wanted to know? “Sure,” said the sheriff, “But you know, it will be just as exciting here tomorrow as the first day I started. There ain’t nothing else I want to do. Now, come on by Saturday afternoon and I’ll show you my crews.”
Crews?
Tindall may be the wealthiest sheriff in Texas. His crews work for his sideline, N.L. Tindall Logging and Pulpwood Company, which happened to gross $1 million last year—a nice addition to the $516 a month he pulls down as sheriff. On our Saturday trip, Sheriff Tindall pointed out landmarks like his beautiful ranch and the color codes that timber companies tag their property with: light blue bands around a tree trunk marked Temple-Eastex’s land; the U.S. government’s color was blood red; Kirby-Lumber, orange-red; International Paper, yellow. Light blue and blood red were the most prominent. He took me down the sandy road south of Broaddus where Elmer Wayne Henley had helped bury the bodies of four sodomized and strangled young boys from Houston. We skirted the upper reaches of Sam Rayburn Reservoir, and the sheriff talked about his drowning chart.
He had pulled 31 victims out of the lake and knew, according to the water temperature, how long bodies stayed under. In the winter they didn’t emerge for 35 to 40 days. In the summer they bobbed up much sooner. They always seemed to surface at sunrise or sunset.
Nathan Tindall has two black deputies helping him keep the peace in San Augustine County. Richard Carl Davis is the younger, fiery one who lost one eye in a gun battle alongside the sheriff. The older, smoother Willie Dade is a six-footer who wears a cowboy hat, shades, and a neatly clipped moustache, a big man who’s always calm. I heard however, that you don’t want to make Willie Dade mad. Judge Parks also helps Tindall out. Judge is a black pulpwood hauler who has worked for the sheriff since 1947. he says the sheriff might steal the courthouse, but if you need it, he’ll bring it right back. Nobody else can joke the sheriff like Judge Parks. Logging and pulpwood hauling are all the Judge knows. The only day of work he’s missed these 31 years was when his father died. A consistent hard worker is rare in the timber business.
The youngest doctor in San Augustine is Curtis Haley, 51, and he was the man I picked to cure an ear infection. Dr. Haley, a native of San Augustine, Mrs. Haley, and their eight children live in a beautiful house on a 750-acre estate east of town. Haley’s father had also been a town doctor. Haley’s offices are in the old bus station, a flagstone building one block east of downtown near the city’s municipal offices. I entered the front door, gave my name to the receptionist, and sat down to wait with the other patients, mostly youngsters and the elderly.
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