Indigo Dying

Chapter OneIndigo, Texas, was founded in 1872 by Shelton Dobbs and named in honor of his daughter, Indigo Dobbs Crockett. The prairie around Indigo, about fifty miles east of Austin, was suited to the growing of cotton, and the town soon became a banking, ginning, and shipping center for area growers. But commerce began to decline when the boll weevil destroyed the cotton, and the stores started closing during the Depression. As highways bypassed the community, its death warrant was sealed. The most recent census shows that the population has dwindled to 27 hardy souls, all of whom swear that they would rather die in Indigo than live anywhere else. "Notes on Some Notable Texas Towns," The Enterprise, Pecan Springs, Texas The man died fast and hard and in true Texas style, stepping into a shotgun blast that lifted his feet off the ground and slammed him backward through the door he'd just opened, into the powdery dust of the street. Nobody actually saw him die, but the report of his passing was loud enough to be heard by the amateur players in a makeshift theater across the alley, just at the end of the Friday night performance of Indigo's Blue, or Hard Times on the Blackland Prairie. The cast and most of the audience rushed out into the October night to see what had happened, followed by the San Antonio television crew that had come to shoot the performance. That's why, on the following evening's TV newscast, you might have seen a dead man staring blankly up at the night sky, surrounded by a crowd of wide-eyed, open-mouthed women in the long skirts and puff-sleeved shirtwaists of the 1890s, a gaudy whore in red, white, and blue spangles, and a country doctor in a frock coat and top hat, groping inexpertly for a pulse. But from the gaping hole in the victim's chest and the amount of real blood that had soaked into the dust around the body, it was clear to the assembled crowd--which included Mike McQuaid, Ruby Wilcox, and me, China Bayles--that we might as well skip EMS and phone the sheriff. But I'm getting ahead of the story, which begins (for me, anyway) several days before the man opened that fatal door and ended up dead in Indigo. So I'll start when I first learned about the problem, on a sunny Monday afternoon in early October, as I was giving Allison Selby and Ruby Wilcox the two-bit tour of my backyard garden. That's when Allie told me about her uncle Casey and his plan to see the town of Indigo dead and buried. I live in the Texas Hill Country, in a big Victorian house on Limekiln Road with my husband, McQuaid, and our thirteen-year-old son, Brian. To get to our place, you drive south on Brazos Street past the elementary school, where you turn right onto Limekiln Road and head west about twelve miles. Slow down when you see an old shed on the right, half-smothered under a mound of enthusiastic honeysuckle, a wilding planted by a passing bird. Just past the shed, you'll see a wooden sign that says MEADOW BROOK, decorated with faded bluebonnets. Turn left, and drive down the gravel lane about a quarter of a mile until it dead-ends at a two-story white Victorian with a green roof, a wrap-around porch, and a windowed turret. The house is surrounded by pecan and live oak trees and a couple of acres of grass that always needs either watering or mowing, depending on whether it's rained lately. September had been much wetter than usual and Brian (who is the chief lawn-mower in our family) had spent the last couple of weekends with his mother. The grass was ankle-high, lush, and generously decorated with dandelions. "Chiggers?" Ruby inquired dubiously, as we stood on the back porch, surveying the yard. "You bet," I said. "Ferocious ones. I eat a lot of garlic, though, so they leave me alone." I reached for a small bottle of the herbal bug repellent that I sell at the shop. "Chiggers hate this stAlbert, Susan Wittig is the author of 'Indigo Dying' with ISBN 9780425188286 and ISBN 0425188280.