ceiling and artworks, carpets and drapes and air-conditioning. Texas, starring Glenn Ford and William Holden, was playing at the Rialto. The Rex was showing Eddie Dean in Arizona Trail and John Wayne in The Star Packer (Son of the Guardian Chapter 3) at the Saturday matinee.
At the Beeville hospital, there were flowers everywhere, so many that the nurses had nowhere to put them. Mrs. Ennis pleaded for people to stop sending flowers. Flowers kept coming. A telegram from the Carthage, Texas, sheriff’s department, verged on haiku:
Hold your head up.
We are with you.
A thug is a thug.
Place them one by one.
The twentieth century was nearing its midpoint. The Old West was long past, but Americans were not ready to let it go. Time magazine’s story about Vail Ennis, the hell-bent sheriff of Bee County, had proved that Texas was still Texas.
Time:
In Beeville’s Thomas Memorial Hospital, hothouse blooms banked all about his big room. Vail Ennis lay gravely wounded, his intestines riddled, a hip and arm ripped by bullets. But he was still alive.
Said a Beeville resident: “They might as well have gone out and hanged themselves as to pull a gun on Vail.”
7
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,
