The Son (16 page)
A
SIDE FROM THE
Colonel, her grandmother was the only one who paid her any mind. On hot days they would sit in the library while her grandmother sorted, for the thousandth time, the contents of various boxes, pictures and tintypes, here was her first husband, who had died before they had children, here were her two sisters, dead of typhoid, here was Uncle Glenn in his army uniform. There were more pictures of Glendale—who had been shot by the Mexicans but had died fighting the Huns—than there were of Jeannie’s mother. If her grandmother knew a single thing about the woman who’d brought Jeannie into this world, she didn’t share it.
Here is your great-grandfather Cornellius, the most famous lawyer in Dallas, your great-great-grandfather Silas Burns, who owned the biggest plantation in Texas before the Yankees ran the niggers off.
Jeannie did not know much about niggers, except for the few she’d seen working on the trains. They said East Texas was full of them. But she did know something about the old men in the tintypes, their ridiculous collars and mustaches, coats buttoned to their necks, looking like they had sat on a splinter. She did not care what her grandmother said; she was not related to them and never would be.
Invitations to parties, calling cards, gaudy pins. Cheap jewelry only a child would wear. The engagement ring from her first husband, who had died before she met Peter McCullough. Jeannie’s grandfather. The Great Disgrace.
Her grandmother occasionally took her riding; a hand would prepare her horse and sidesaddle, the only one in Dimmit County. She was a fair horsewoman, even on the awkward device. She scolded Jeannie for going bareback and for climbing fences.
You will do things to yourself you will be sorry about later.
What those things were, she wouldn’t say, and sometimes, if Jeannie fell asleep during the stories of her grandmother’s dull girlhood, she would awake to a firm pinch.
Her grandmother and the other grown-ups did not mind being boring; they often went on until Jeannie wished
she
were the dead one, instead of the person in the story, who was always more clever, or handsome, with more style and grace and wit than anyone Jeannie had ever met. If the Colonel had any boring stories, he must have forgotten them. He never said the same thing twice. Here was where to find a hawk’s nest or a pair of bucks who had died with their antlers locked, here was a leaf fossil or old bone or piece of purple flint. They kept a box of things they had found together, the skulls of little mice, squirrels, raccoons, and other animals.
When there were no visitors the Colonel would sit on the gallery making arrowheads or whittling cedar. Once, after whittling a piece into shavings, he told her: “If I wasn’t so old we’d get into the airplane business. We could build ’em here and sell ’em to the government and they would fly ’em at that field near Sanderson.”
He had tried to teach her to make arrowheads, but it had not taken. She had gashed her palm on a piece of sharp flint, at first surprised that a simple rock could cut her so deeply, then fascinated by the free flow of her own blood, then nauseated. The Colonel had come out of his trance and they had hobbled into the kitchen, where he bandaged her up and brought her back to the porch.
“I guess you’re off drinks duty,” he said, and winked. He went to the cart and made her a julep without the whiskey, and, against her father’s rules, let her sip straight from the cold silver shaker, the two of them conspiring against all that was right and good. She sat happily, forgetting the pain in her hand.
“It’s a foolish activity,” he said, taking up the arrowhead she’d begun. “Though if you make a knife, you can do anything. One day I will take all the arrowheads I’ve made and scatter them around the ranch and then maybe in a thousand years, some historian will find them and make up stories that aren’t true.” Then he looked up. “There is a thrush in that granjeno.”
She looked out over the pasture, but she didn’t see anything. The sun was bright but it was early in the year; the grass was still green and the live oaks beginning their springtime shed.
“They have told me there is a German named Hertz,” he said, “who has given his name to, among other things, the way flint breaks when you strike it. It is always the same way.” He held up a chip. “Though of course Hertz did not discover this. In fact the man who did discover it has been dead two million years. Which is how long people have been knocking rocks together to make tools.” He took another flake. “Remember that,” he said. “None of it’s worth a shit until you put your name on it.”
Diaries of Peter McCullough
A
UGUST 16, 1915
The shooting could be heard as soon as it got dark. Near midnight about fifty men came to the gate, carrying torches, shouting for us to turn over the Mexicans.
They hesitated there in the road—fifty men or not, it is no small thing to trespass on McCullough land—but after a long period of milling around, one of them put his foot on the bar and began to climb over. At which point we opened fire over their heads. Charles put his automatic Remington to good use, unleashing all fifteen rounds as the crowd broke and fled down the road. We spent a good deal of time afterward stomping out the fires that started when they dropped their torches.
Later Niles Gilbert and two others from the Law and Order League drove up and pleaded with me to kick the Mexicans out, lest the town be burned.
Charles shouted: “So go shoot the assholes who are burning your town. It ain’t like you don’t have enough guns.”
“How many men do you have, Peter?”
“I’ve got enough. And I’ve armed all the Mexicans as well.” Which was not true.
“This isn’t going to turn out well for you,” he said.
C
ONSUELA AND
S
ULLIVAN
had been cooking all night so there was plenty of beef and cabrito. By morning half the families had asked permission to stay at the ranch until the town was safe. The other half loaded up with food and water and began to walk or ride across our pastures, toward the river and Mexico. They are going into a war zone but apparently it is preferable to this.
Naturally they all believe the Colonel is responsible for their salvation—who else could it be but Don Eli? This rankles greatly but I did not bother to correct them. How they will ever get democracy I don’t know—they are very comfortable with the idea that powerful men rule their lives. Or perhaps they are simply more honest about it than we allow ourselves to be.
My father was well behaved, entertaining all the children on the gallery with his Indian stories, showing them how to start a fire with two sticks, giving archery demonstrations as well (he can still draw his old Indian bow, which I can barely pull back myself). He was happy and at ease and laughed a lot—I do not remember seeing him like this since before my mother died. Perhaps he was meant to be a schoolteacher. As we watched the refugees walking and riding toward the river, their belongings piled on mules and carts, he said: “That’ll be the last time we see any of ’em moving south, I’d imagine.”
And yet they love him. They go back to their jacals at night, which are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, while he goes back to our house, a sprawling white monstrosity, a thousand years’ salary for them, or a thousand thousand. Meanwhile their children are stillborn and they bury them near the corrals.
Who are you to say they ain’t happy?
That is what a white man will tell you, looking you straight in the eye as he says it.
A
FTER THE LARGEST
group of Mexicans left, a group of us went door-to-door in town and gave everyone we didn’t recognize five minutes to be on their way. Campbell put up new signs:
ANYONE CARRYING A FIREARM WILL BE SHOT AND/OR ARRESTED.
By six o’clock the streets were deserted. Fourteen houses have been burned. Sergeant Campbell is leaving tomorrow to get medical attention for his wounds. Apparently he has gotten quite a hiding for not going south to protect the big ranches: two hundred sections is considered middling. But, thanks to Guillermo’s sugar remedy, his arm does not appear to be getting any worse.
To help me relax I read the newspapers for the first time in a week. A storm hit Galveston yesterday, killing three hundred. A great victory as the last one killed ten thousand, ending Galveston’s reign as our state’s queen city.
S
ALLY CALLED AT FIVE A.M.
Glenn’s fever appears to have broken.
A
UGUST 18, 1915
Today at the meeting of all the remaining townspeople, I suggested that the train station be named after Bill Hollis (killed at the Garcias’), a motion seconded and carried. Feel extremely poorly for Marjorie Hollis. While Glenn was repeatedly mentioned by name in all the newspaper articles as having been wounded, and Charles singled out for leading the charge on the Garcia compound (each time mentioning he is the grandson of the famous Indian fighter Eli McCullough)—Bill Hollis was only mentioned once, in the local paper.
Afterward I wondered why I did not suggest the station be named after one of the many dead Mexicans.
A
UGUST 20, 1915
Storm giving us a good soaking. Everyone in high spirits. Except me. Can’t sleep—faces of the Garcias have returned—spent most of the morning in a nervous daze, searching for things to do, as if I did not find something to occupy my mind . . . I avoid looking into the shadows, as I know what I’ll find there.
Visited with the Reynolds family, inquired about the surviving girl, who we all now know was María Garcia. Apparently she locked herself in their spare bedroom and then disappeared during the night, stealing an old pair of boots, as she had no shoes.
Ike motioned for me to follow him out to the gallery, where the others couldn’t hear us.
“Pete, don’t take this the wrong way, but if I were that girl, I might believe I was the only living witness to a murder.” He held up his hands. “Not that I’m saying she is, but from her point of view . . .”
“I was against it from the start.”
“I know that.” He scuffed his boot. “Sometimes I wish there was another way to live here.”
Eli/Tiehteti
1850
B
y the time I’d been with them a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche, though they kept a bright eye on me, like some derelict uncle who’d taken the pledge. Dame Nature had made my eyes and hair naturally dark and in winter I kept my skin brown by lying out in the sun on a robe. Most nights I slept as gentle as a dead calf and had no thoughts of going off with the whites. There was nothing back there but shame and if my father had come looking for me, I hadn’t heard about it.
Escuté and N
uu
karu still ignored me so I spent my time with the younger boys; we’d graduated to breaking the band’s horses and soon we would go to hold the remuda during the raids. A steady trickle of unbroken ponies came off the plains: whenever a herd was spotted, the fastest braves would ride out and rope them and the animals whose necks didn’t break would be brought back to camp. Then their nostrils were held shut until they sagged to the ground. They were tied that way and left for us to handle.
There is something in the white man that loves a sorrel but the Indians had no use for them; there were only five horses we cared about: red paints, black paints, Appaloosas, red medicine hats, and black medicine hats. The medicine hats had dark bands around their heads and dark ears and a blaze in the shape of a medieval shield on their chests. There was one type—the
pia tso?nika
or war bonnet—that had black eye patches as well and from a distance looked like a skull or death’s head. Centuries of hard living had made them as frothy as panthers; they had as much in common with a domestic horse as a wolf has with a lapdog and they would stave in your ribs if you gave them half a chance. We loved them.
I
SLEPT WHEN
I wanted and ate when I wanted and did nothing all day that I didn’t feel like doing. The white in me expected any minute that I would be ordered to do chores or some other form of slave labor but it never happened. We rode and hunted and wrestled and made arrows. We slayed every living thing we laid eyes on—prairie chickens and prairie dogs, plovers and pheasants, blacktail deer and antelope; we launched arrows at panther and elk and bears of every size, dumping our kills in camp for the women to clean, then walking off with our chests out like men. Along the river we dug up the bones from giant bison and enormous shells turned to stone and almost too heavy to lift; we found crayfish and shards of pottery and carried it all to the tops of cliffs and smashed it on the rocks below. We arrowed bobcats at night while they stalked ducks in the cane and the weather was warming and the flowers coming out, the yucca had shot their stalks and big white flowers hung ten feet in the air; there were patches of bluebonnet or blanketflower or greenthread that went on for miles, now it was green, now it was blue, now it was red and orange as far as the eye would carry. The snow was gone and fat high clouds hung everywhere, and the sun blinked on and off as they moved across the wind, heading south toward Mexico, where they would burn away forever.
It was considered a sure thing that a few of us would be asked to go raiding. I was the oldest, the only one whose short hair had come in, but I was also deficient; I shot fine from the ground but the other kids could hit pheasants and rabbits from a gallop. Still, when Toshaway came out to the pasture one morning carrying his pistol and a new buffalo-hide shield, it was me he picked out of the crowd. The others made comments but I ignored them.
We walked a good distance and set the shield against a runty cottonwood and he handed me the gun.
“Go ahead.”
“Just like that?”
“Sure.”
I shot and the shield fell over. It was smeared with lead but not dented. He grinned and set it up again and I shot it until the gun was empty.
