Bud and his people placed a full-page ad for Wachtendorf in the Bee-Picayune—a blowup of a letter from Homer Garrison, the head of the Texas Rangers, saying Wachtendorf had served well. A full-page ad. Nobody could remember anyone ever buying a full-page political ad before.
•
The men at the American Café liked Bud O’Neil. Bud was a good enough man, but he just didn’t understand Texas. He had come here from the north, married a girl from one of the old Beeville families, and had several sons. But for all the time he had lived here, Bud O’Neil was still a Yankee.
Everyone in town was sorry about what happened to Floyd Lawson, the patrolman who was in the wreck. Floyd had been ordered to pick up a prisoner in Edna and asked Vail to go with him. On a pitch-black night in late February, a truck loaded with cedar had stalled just over a rise on the road north of Victoria, its lights off, no reflectors. Neither man saw it until the second before the Hudson ran under it, shearing off the top of the Hornet. Both Vail and Floyd were hospitalized. Vail got out in a couple of weeks. It looked like Floyd would recover, but he died in April. Nobody was sorrier than Vail about Floyd Lawson.
Texans understood that life was violent. Car wrecks were violent. Hunting was violent. Rodeos were violent. Weather was violent.
The 1948 election would decide whether or not Vail Ennis could enter his house justified. The Bee-Picayune noted that the race was “coming down to the wire.”
By seven thirty the street was crowded. Gentry Dugat, the newspaper’s burly oil and gas editor, was trying out the PA microphone with his hefty baritone: “Testing. Testing now. Again now . . .” The Bee-Picayune’s shop foreman, Bernard McWhorter, had climbed the scaffold, chalk in hand, prepared to fill in each precinct vote as it was reported. Inside the newsroom, Camp Ezell was manning the telephone. At seven forty-five, Gentry was ready to announce the first result.
“We have the vote from Precinct 18—the Colony community. Ennis six, Wachtendorf two, Robinson eight.”
But there would be more reports tonight, twenty-one in all, fifteen of them from outlying communities. Mineral, Blanconia, Papalote, Pettus, Skidmore, Clareville, Normanna, Caesar, Pawnee, Tuleta, Candlish, Tynan, Olmos, and Cadiz were still to come. Old-timers could read the history of the county on that blackboard. Mineral had once been Mineral City, a spa where people came for the curative waters; Papalote was known for attracting hell-raisers, cowboys in the 1880s, Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930s; the country dance hall at Olmos was one of the most famous polka palaces in South Texas. Pioneers settling the land around the Medio and Poesta and Blanco Creeks and farther west toward Live Oak County would become ranchers. Those going on down to Skidmore and Tynan, where the land was flat and black, would become farmers. Before the automobile, most of the communities had been self-contained, with their own churches, schools, and general stores. Tynan, just this side of the San Patricio county line, had a bank, lumberyard, two barbershops, and several stores before a highway connection to Skidmore was built in the early 1930s.
Of the many celebrations (parades, rodeos, parties, graduations) of Johnny Barnhart’s boyhood, this election-night gathering meant the most to him. His dad had brought him down to his first election party when he was twelve, and Johnny felt that he himself was a candidate. Because—in a way, in a big way—he was. The Barnhart family had moved to Beeville two years before. In 1938, he won the grade school declamation regionals at Kingsville. At the time, Colonel Ernest Thompson was running for governor of Texas. His campaign recruited the junior declamation champ to give speeches as part of their “Texans of Tomorrow” strategy. His name was in the Bee-Picayune: “Johnny Barnhart, 12, no doubt youngest politician in the campaign, was a big hit at the Ira Heard barbecue for Col. Ernest O. Thompson. Johnny said, ‘I think that Texas will be in better shape in nine years from now when I come of age if Colonel Thompson serves the state as governor for the next four years.’” With a flatbed truck for a platform and a new public address system, the “Texans of Tomorrow” campaign drew crowds on courthouse squares in towns across South Texas. He was inspired by the grand applause, the sense of purpose. It was the most important summer of his life. At twelve years old and four feet ten, the new boy in town won the regional in Kingsville and declaimed for the governor of Texas and would never worry again about being the shortest person in the room. He knew the exact spot where he had stood, back to the Rialto, during that first election party, watching a man he didn’t know writing magic numbers in chalk.
Gentry Dugat’s booming voice:
“Precinct 3—Blanconia. Wachtendorf twenty-three, Robinson nine, Ennis ten.”
Johnny saw dozens of familiar faces in the crowd. The old sheriff, Will Corrigan, stood off by himself, looking up at the board. The old cowboy, Johnny Murphy, was talking with Dick Jones, the bank president. Freddie Hobrecht, the fighter pilot war hero, was there. Miss Orrie Hynes from the bank. During his high school years as a soda jerk, Johnny had brought trays of Cokes and coffee from the Schulz pharmacy soda fountain, making his way through this crowd and listening to old men telling each other stories of past elections. But they didn’t like to talk about the elections between 1922 and 1932, when the community was split. Those were the years of the Ku Klux Klan. When they were over, people preferred to erase them from the county history. The elections of the 1930s were passive by comparison. Friendly. The town was a community again. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the only arguments had to do with the elections for president (Texans didn’t like Roosevelt’s New Deal) and governor (Pappy O’Daniel, Coke Stevenson). And sheriff, of course. Even in Vail’s first run in 1944, he had strong opposition. And the 1946 election had been bitter.
More results:
“Precinct 15, Olmos: Wachtendorf eight, Ennis forty-eight.”
“Precinct 7, Clareville: Wachtendorf one, Robinson one, Ennis sixty.”
Tonight, everyone was watching the count in the Senate race. Box by box, Coke Stevenson came out ahead, as people expected. Johnny remembered at age twelve watching the governor’s totals on this blackboard, knowing that this blackboard wouldn’t decide the winner, but feeling that it would foretell the winner. And it did. It always did. Like the rest of Texas, Bee County would vote for Coke, Lyndon Johnson, and George Peddy, in that order.
A slight Gulf breeze was enough to bring back the night during the summer of 1938 when his dad had brought him here. This was a celebration, one that brought this community together in a way that took his breath away, so filled it was with common understanding, with appreciation of the ways of a people, of Texans, of Americans. Scents. Angles of light. Landmarks. Streetlights. The darkness beyond the buildings. The gathering of huge men, all bigger than his dad. On that night he’d known he wanted to do this the rest of his life.
A murmur in the crowd. The word was that Box 1 had been counted. This was the county’s biggest, the original Beeville, the town laid out in 1860 on lines west and south from Block 1—the cemetery—to the bending Poesta Creek.
“Precinct 1. Wachtendorf sixty-five, Robinson sixty-four, Ennis three hundred seven.”
Johnny saw Vail in the crowd. People were congratulating him. Johnny went over to shake his hand. Vail looked down at him and smiled.
“Thank you, Johnny. Did you vote for me?”
“Yes, I did, Vail.”
In Johnny Barnhart’s memory, in one moment he is watching the crowd thin before the big blackboard, Vail Ennis there with well-wishers, breathing the late Gulf breeze coming easily over the courthouse lawn. In the next—the very next—he is choking in the smoke-smogged bedlam of the Democratic Party Convention in Fort Worth, squeezed into a middle-row seat between two huge men in Stetsons in the Venetian Ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel. The place is a cacophony of the shouts of hundreds of delegates drunk on bourbon or adrenaline, and the party’s Executive Committee is voting to decide whether Coke Stevenson or Lyndon Johnson