The morning sun backlit the new leaves of the elm and oak trees along the stream, and they glowed with an emerald fire to rival that of some fat bishop’s jewels. The church’s marble spire stood against the skyline. A skinny boy in ragged overalls belly crawled through a tangle of fox grape and cat briar to the edge of a sandy cut bank and surveyed the scene below him. A score of the king’s deer stood in the shallow water drinking. A massive stag lifted its head and tested the breeze. The water streamed from its mouth back to the streams surface. It tossed its broad rack of horns and bugled its resistance to the greenwood shadows. The barefoot boy rose to one knee and with one fluid motion notched an arrow to the string of his longbow and sent it flying to the heart of the stag. The bells pealed at the church and a flock of doves rose and banked into the sun.
I would be hard put to explain the fevered restlessness that overtook me when spring thundered through the creek bottoms with frog song and redbud and the wild plums’ hominy-like fragrance. The fact was I was worthless in school. I was distracted and constantly daydreaming. More interested in clowning: an outlaw at heart. I don’t recall now the fifth grade infraction that resulted in my long-term internment in library study hall, but Mrs. Green thought idle hands were the devil’s tools. She set me to shelving books.
One day I was waylaid by Howard Pyle’s “Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.” Here was a fascinating new world to me. Living in the woods, shooting bows, hunting and fishing! I was hooked. The TV series came along about this time and my brothers and I never missed it. We acted out all the scenes. There grew a weed in our yard we called sword weed and with a single motion we could strip all the leaves back to its base and “En Garde!” Our quarter staffs were just like the real thing and many’s the time we recreated Robin meeting Little John on a log bridge right down to the skinned knuckles.
I devoured these tales of the wily outlaw outsmarting the wicked sheriff at every encounter. But his feats with the longbow impressed me most. No stranger to the twang of a bow string, I’d been a fan of the American Indian for most of my brief years and had made dozens of crude bows. I knew that the local Indians made serviceable bows of oak and cedar and Osage orange and arrows of dogwood. Robin Hood’s longbow was fashioned of yew which didn’t grow in the red Texas clay.
I had grown up with stories of local outlaws. Mama told me about Pretty Boy Floyd and how some folks thought he had the right idea during the great depression of redistributing the bank’s money. Clyde Barrow’s folks had a farm nearby and the house still stood in the scrubby cedars. The Sheriff of Parker County paid a visit to my own daddy because he had brandished a rifle in a property line dispute. I could see some things hadn’t changed in a thousand years.
Beneath circling turkey buzzards and a brassy Texas sun, I launched volleys of arrows at the hirelings of the Sheriff of Nottingham and then faded into the black jack oak and hackberry shade of Sherwood Forest. I blithely mixed my heroic metaphors and swung to safety on mustang grape vines while I beat my chest and yodeled like Tarzan. I also sported a fur cap à la Davy Crockett that I made from the skins of skunks I had trapped.
I stalked the royal deer on the multi-thousand acre Muir Ranch. It was fenced with three strands of taut barbed wire and posted with metal signs at regular intervals against trespassing, a serious crime in Texas in those days. I knew people who were shot at for walking in the king’s forest. In a hunting bag my mother had sewed from mattress ticking I carried my lunch of fried potatoes and biscuit, and water in a pint mason jar, fish hooks and line, matches, knife, sketchbook and pencil. Concealed behind clumped prickly pear I’d watch the white ranch truck pass.
The pigeons circled the hay barn in a swirling vortex. Cowbells ringing, water splashing, the black and white Holsteins scrambled up the sandy bank and spread through their pasture.
I guess I’m still trespassing and poaching the king’s deer.
