The front of the old store was merchandise,
the back was home.
Built of large adobe bricks
on this arid edge of the Chihuahuan Desert,
it seemed indestructible.
But in July of 2010
over fifteen inches of rain fell
in Langtry, rains that
had all the folks of town scurrying
for pans and buckets to catch drips
from holes that may
have been there for decades –
who would have known?
All Fall Down
When I first saw the old store,
the roof had fallen but not
all the way down. The rafters slanted
from the top of the high adobe
walls to the dirt floor – at midmorning
drawing a maze of shadows over
etchings made by spiders
lizards and snakes.
Yet the front of the building stood tall,
J. P. TORRES, DRY GOODS &
GROCERY fading above the old door
permanently ajar.
The Torres Store was built in late
eighteen hundreds on Torres Street,
the main street of Langtry, Texas,
which sits on a northern hump of the Rio Grande
west of Del Rio.
Termed “ghost town” in most books,
Langtry is in fact home for
about twenty people – though numbers
matter not at all to its essence.
The Torres Store is one of about
a dozen old buildings – some
inhabited, some uninhabitable,
most somewhere in between,
empty but not gone.
Early on, the Torres men had bargained
with the Galveston, Harrisburg and
San Antonio Railway to make a
loop through town (mirroring
the Rio Grande’s loop north), in trade
for water pumped far up from Osman
Canyon, ever after, in these parts,
called “Pump Canyon.”
Still standing are two of the Torres
sheep pens – one a roofless
labyrinthine rock shelter and, even more
impressive, massive rock fences built in
a cut into Eagle Nest Canyon,
testimony to the labors of
Cesario, Bernardo and Juan,
and their mother and wives
unnamed.
And on Torres Street, what might
have lasted for centuries more,
did not last the week.
One resident heard a big
boom and rushed outside
to see what had happened.
expecting a car smash-up,
rare but not unheard of on the three
streets of Langtry.
She saw nothing. Later she learned
the startling sound had been the back room
of the Torres House crashing down.
Long hidden by mesquite
and cacti, the room could not have been
seen accidentally and now
not even by intention.
A few days later,
soundlessly, the front wall and its proud
J. P. TORRES fell across
Torres Street. Adobe returning to dust,
taking with it the Texas Historical Marker,
leaving its old door poking out
from the top of the heap like parts of skeleton,
which it was.
Langtry men cleared the rubble off the street
and rescued the sign for repair –
repair and perhaps rewording:
“here stands” becomes “here once stood,”
like the Hall House across the street,
the Ice House down the block,
the cemetery, the barber shop,
the old Cantu place.
But in the concrete, in the adobe,
in Langtry, the falling of the Torres House
breaks our hearts.
Here of all places. Here where we have
found ten-thousand-year-old mammoth bones,
can still see on shelter walls
four-thousand-year-old paintings,
trip over stone tools and fires
of ancient hunter-gatherers.
Here we know nothing if we
do not know time and change.
Yet the fall of the Torres Store is
hard to take.
Old as it was, we took it for granted,
monument to our history,
declaring who we have been
and who we are –
and, oh, so much more –
communal and intensely personal.
We grieve as we grieve
for ourselves, our families and the
artifacts that hold our story:
here we lived, worked, raised families,
suffered our daily vicissitudes,
here we prayed, watched for rain,
looked out for each other.
These things matter, are of essence.
Though they do not last, they count.
Vitality gone to dust,
breath gone to wind,
that’s what makes our hearts ache.
But we are not inconsolable,
our pain strangely enlivening.
Our bodies and souls are
at peace with
here and gone,
time and beyond time.
Mary Locke Crofts
Things fall, we all know that,
they wear away, they break down.
In the abstract, “things change”
seems obvious, trite.
We are told that the Appalachian
mountains were once as tall
as the Alps. In Monument Valley,
thin red towers show the cores of
mountains. Floods create new
riverbeds and rivers dry up to become
rocky bush-filled arroyos.
We muse about time and finitude.
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2011
23