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.
8
No gringo placed a greater value on the vote than Johnny Barnhart. His November 29 birthday had caused him to miss the 1946 election by a month. Now twenty-two, almost twenty-three, he was voting for the first time. He was finally part of the process, and he felt he owned it. Being in Austin, in and out of the Capitol, he had access to all the inside dope on the rough Senate campaign. The Austin pros thought that Coke Stevenson would win the primary but not outright. Coke would face a runoff with either George Peddy, the anticommie, or Lyndon Johnson, the Washington insider who was making his last run for political office. Johnson had lost to Pappy O’Daniel and the Texas Doughboys in a run for the Senate in 1941 but managed to hold on to his seat in Congress. This time, if he lost, he would have to give it up.
Everyone knew this Senate race was going to be historic. But so was the sheriff’s race in Bee County. Vail Ennis would be running for the first time since the Pettus shootout and the Time magazine article. The county would decide whether his wounds at Pettus had redeemed him of his violent past. Johnny planned to go to Beeville for the primary and to Fort Worth for the Texas Democratic Convention in September, where—barring some huge political surprise—Coke Stevenson would be confirmed as the new U.S. senator from Texas.
On primary election day, Johnny voted at Precinct 21 in Beeville. When the polls closed at seven, he went downtown to the election party. Main was blocked off between Bowie and Corpus Christi streets. A large blackboard listing precincts and candidates was mounted on a scaffold in front of the Bee-Picayune office. The blackboard showed three names for sheriff: Ennis, Robinson, and Wachtendorf. G. M. Robinson had entered the race at the last minute. Nobody knew why. He was well-known in the northern part of the county but not otherwise.
Vail’s serious challenger was H. D. Wachtendorf, a Texas Ranger who had almost beat him in the previous election. In 1946, Wachtendorf carried almost half the precincts and won a 70 percent vote on the west side. The issue hadn’t been decided until the following morning, when votes from the city precincts had been counted and recounted. Precinct 1, all Anglos, decided for Vail.
Wachtendorf was a burly fellow who favored cowboy gear. He campaigned hard in 1946 and now again in 1948. During the month of July you couldn’t walk a block in downtown Beeville without seeing H. D. Wachtendorf—all business, the picture of a lawman, stocky, jaw set, eyes narrowed, watching for felons. H. D. Wachtendorf let folks know that he wasn’t impressed one bit by Vail Ennis’s reputation. He and Vail went back a long way. Both had been deputies (Wachtendorf the chief deputy) under Sheriff Will Corrigan in the early 1940s. If Wachtendorf had stayed in Beeville instead of going off to join the Rangers, Vail would never have been sheriff. Backing up Wachtendorf was Bud O’Neil, the county’s only real politician, the man who had organized the failed 1946 ouster movement. O’Neil’s group had money, and they printed a ton of Wachtendorf posters, papering the west-side bars and the downtown telephone poles.
The tone reflected the language of the ouster campaign (“unfit by temperament . . . to hold the office”). The issue was violence. The sheriff’s wounds at Pettus didn’t change the fact that two more men were dead, that there were now seven notches on his gun. Death followed this man wherever he went. Mere weeks after Pettus he had wrecked his Hudson, killing a highway patrolman who was riding with him. Violence—excessive violence . . .
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,
