The Son (20 page)

“I didn’t want to call,” said Van Zandt.

Her father said something she couldn’t hear.

“Folks are saying we ought to be searching for these Blounts.”

“Evan, if we let ten deputies on our land ever’time some greaser disappeared . . .”

“This is a white man and two boys and folks are pretty worked up, even the Mexicans. I haven’t seen anything like it.”

“Well, it is nothing new,” said her father. “There are plenty around here who won’t like me unless I lose money to them in every horse trade.”

Relations between the McCulloughs and the citizenry had been strained for some time. A third of the town was out of work; a few months earlier it had come out that her father had blocked the construction of a new state highway through their lands—the road would have cut thirty miles off the trip between Laredo and Carrizo Springs. The
San Antonio Express
picked up the story. It was the same thing they were saying about the King and Kenedy ranches: Another Walled Kingdom. Common men not welcome.

“It’s this goddamn Roosevelt,” said her father. “You mark my words, that was the last free election we will ever see in this country. We are on the verge of a dictatorship.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
a crowd gathered at the main gate. They stayed there all day. Her father did not go down to talk to them; instead he distributed the ranch’s half-dozen Thompson guns among the hands who knew how to use them.

“Stay off your porch tonight,” he told her. “Stay away from the windows and don’t turn on any lights.”

“What’s going to happen?” she said.

“Nothing. This has gone on plenty of times before.”

She went to bed early, climbing the stairs to the east wing, where the children slept. All the bedrooms had their own sleeping porches and she turned out the light, debated a few seconds, then, disobeying her father’s orders, went out to her porch and got quietly into bed. The stars were bright as always and she lay listening to the crickets, the hoots of owls, lowing of cattle, whippoorwills, a coyote. There was the creaking of the windmill that fed the house cistern, but she barely noticed. The tree frogs were thrumming, which meant rain. She heard a rustling from the next porch—her brother Paul.

“Is that you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What d’you think’s gonna happen?”

“I dunno.”

“It’s nonsense about those Blounts, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Are Jonas and Clint in bed?”

“They’re with Daddy.”

“Can you see down to the gate?”

“Stop asking questions.”

It was quiet and then he added: “I can’t see anything.”

“What’ll happen if they come through?”

“I imagine Daddy will shoot them. I saw them carrying the Lewis gun a few hours ago.”

Her father must have called the governor because the next morning a company of Rangers drove down from San Antonio. The day after that he agreed to let the sheriff search the property, all quarter-million acres. The Blounts were never found, but she knew as well as anyone it would have been like needles in a haystack.

O
F THE FOUR
children, only she and Jonas liked school. Paul and Clint found it boring; their father had no use for it either; the compulsory attendance laws were another sign of the government reaching into his pocket. The school was in McCullough Springs, named after her great-grandfather. After the Blount incident her father set out to mend relations, agreeing to pay for a mural that had long been planned for the school, a pastoral scene showing Americans and Mexicans working together to build the town, but when the mural was finished, it showed skeletal Tejano farm workers stooped in an onion field, eyes bulging, a few ragged crosses in the distance. A
patrón
bearing a passing resemblance to Jeannie’s father sat astride a black horse, keeping watch. The mural was painted over and Jeannie’s father gave up trying to be nice to the townspeople.

The McCulloughs paid most of the school’s expenses, though the Midkiffs and Reynoldses chipped in as well. The children of Mexicans attended free, though never for very long; they came and went throughout the year, a month here, a month there, the truant officer never went after them. There was no point trying to be friends; they would disappear for half the year and when they came back she would have to start all over. The children of the white farmers were better, but when they visited the ranch she could see how they wished they lived there instead of her, and an uncomfortable eagerness would come into their manner. Eventually she had stopped being friends with anyone. The only person she had much in common with was Fannie Midkiff, but she was three years older and crazy for boys. She was bound for a sorry end, they all said, Midkiff or not.

B
EFORE THE
C
OLONEL
died, so long as he had the energy, she was allowed to sit with him and do her studying. The Colonel spent his mornings on the west gallery, out of the sun, and his evenings on the east gallery, also out of the sun. The visitors never stopped: a man from the government (a Jew, they said) came with a recording machine and the Colonel would talk into it for hours. There were daybeds on the galleries so he might sleep whenever he wanted; he slept and slept, that was what he did mostly;
One day I will sleep forever,
that is what he told her.

He never slept for very long, though. He was always up in time to shoot a snake trying to get across the wide dirt yard, hoping to reach the cool under the porch.
Someday we will live in a house that doesn’t have a damned dirt yard,
said her grandmother.
That will be the day we get snakebit,
said the Colonel.

If Jeannie happened to be nearby when the Colonel woke up, he would send her for ice. Or mint; he had planted a patch around one of the stock tanks. He seemed to live off juleps. She would crush the mint at the bottom of the glass and add three spoons of sugar and fill the glass with ice. Sometimes, before he added the whiskey, he would let her suck on the sweet minty ice.

When it was not too hot, she and the Colonel would go on walks, shuffling through the tall grass under the bright sky, stopping to rest in an oak mott, or a copse of cedar elms, or along the streams if they were running. She was always missing things: deer, a fox, the movement of a bird or mouse, a flower blooming out of season, a snake den. Though she could see twice as far as he could, she felt blind around him—she noticed practically nothing except the sun and grass. She often wondered if he were making things up, but every time they went walking, he recovered some keepsake—the bleached skull of a possum, a shed antler, a bright wingfeather off a yellowhammer woodpecker. He walked very slowly and often had to stop and lean on her for support. If it were not too dry when they came on a snake den, he would send her back for a jug of kerosene to pour down the hole, but it was dry most of the time. Sometimes when they stopped to rest he would ask her to dig a thorn out of his hard yellow foot. He didn’t wear boots; he could no longer keep his balance in them. He wore only Indian moccasins. Indians—the real Indians from the reservation in Oklahoma—would give him things like that, and when they left, he got a sad look and would be short with her father or anyone else who bothered him. Jeannie was his favorite, it was plain to everyone, and her father pretended not to care, though she knew he did.

If the Colonel was busy and she did not have schoolwork, her job was to gather the milch cows from the pasture and milk them, smelling their sweet breath and listening to the sound of the pail, tinny at first, then soft as it filled with milk. Her brothers hated the job—it was not proper work for a vaquero, being swished in the face by the cow’s dungy tail—but there was a satisfaction at seeing the animal’s relief, the sounds she could make with the streams of milk, playing them against the sides of the pail. It was not a song, but it was something like one. The milk was taken to the kitchen, strained, and either put into the icebox or left out for the cream to rise and be skimmed off. The domestic staff were allowed to have all the skimmed milk they wanted, but everything else was for the family. They always had more milk than they needed and often entire buckets would clabber and one of her brothers would carry it out to the bunkhouse for the vaqueros. It was something she missed later in life, clabbered milk with brown sugar and fruit. When pasteurization came along, they said clabber wasn’t safe, though she’d been eating it all her life.

When she was not gathering the milch cows she was looking after the dogies; technically this was her brothers’ job as well, but they rarely attended to it. When a calf was orphaned, the hands would drive it to the pens near the house. Jeannie would tie a cow to the fence, then splash the cow’s milk on the dogie’s head. She allowed the cow to smell her own milk on the orphan, then brought the dogie to the cow’s udder. Usually the cow would kick the strange calf away, and Jeannie would have to wait a while before repeating the process. Sometimes the cow gave in immediately and allowed the dogie to suckle; other times it took days. Clint and Paul were always buying horses with their dogie money; no one knew what Jonas did with his. She gave hers to her father to hold, and when she was twelve she opened an account in San Antonio, depositing nearly ten thousand dollars.

W
HEN SHE COULD
not sit on the porch with the Colonel, her other favorite place was the old Garcia house, which, though the Garcias were long dead, was still called the casa mayor. She had known from a young age what happened to them.

“Pedro Garcia didn’t have any sons to work the ranch,” her father said, “and his daughters all married bad men who ran Pedro into debt. The bad men started stealing our cattle and then they shot your uncle Glendale.”

“So we went and shot them back.”

“No, the Texas Rangers went to their house and tried to talk to them, and we went along with the Rangers. But the Garcias started shooting at the Rangers.”

There was nothing higher in her mind than a Texas Ranger. “I am glad they are dead,” she said about the Garcias.

“They were good people who had bad luck,” he said. Then he added: “Bad things can happen to good people.”

Daughters—that was one bad thing that could happen to you. Once she had overheard her father telling a reporter, who was visiting for the occasion of the Colonel’s hundredth birthday, saying: “First you pray for sons, second you pray for oil. You look at the Millers over in Carrizo, they used to own eighty sections, but they had nothing but she-stuff to pass it to.”

She went right up to her room and at supper she pretended to be sick. After that she had not minded when the Colonel talked bad about her father.

T
HE
G
ARCIA HOUSE
had been built in the 1760s, one of the first settlements in the area; it sat on a rise over the Nueces River valley where, even with the rest of the land dried up, a spring still flowed from the rocks. The house, which resembled a small castle, was built of heavy stone blocks. There was an observation tower, nearly forty feet high, for keeping watch over hostile territory, and the casa mayor’s windows were tall slits, too narrow to climb through. There were plenty of gun ports as well, which she imagined had spit death at heathen Indians.

The roof was long collapsed and inside the casa mayor, mesquite and huisache grew up among the debris, along with a few oaks and hackberries that were already higher than the walls. From the outside, the casa mayor now looked like a walled garden, a safe and inviting place, though it was not. The floor was dirt and there were rusty nails and springs and bits of jagged wood, not to mention the thorns of the huisache. She was not allowed inside but she went anyway, picking her way carefully to the tower. After clambering over more half-burned beams and thorny brush, she could reach the stone staircase that wound around the inside of the tower, all the way to the top, though there was no longer any platform. She would stand on the narrow top stair, in the sun, looking out over the country as it descended to the Nueces River, then back toward her own house, and beyond that McCullough Springs, with its two- and three-story buildings and big stone bank. When the Colonel first moved here he had lived in a jacal, and then a house made from timber. That house had burned after the Colonel’s wife died and he’d built another one from stone.

She had to squint to ignore the farmers and laborers like ants in the fields near the river, and she would avoid looking toward her own house and the town, and try to see the land as it had once been. A poor man’s paradise—that was how the Colonel described it. But she preferred to imagine herself a princess, courted by all the sons of hacendados; there would be seven and she would have no interest in a single one and would lock herself in the tower and refuse to eat, until the poorest and ugliest of the seven revealed himself to be a prince in disguise, whereupon they would sail away to Spain, where it was cool and the servants would feed her plums.

Other times she pretended to be Mrs. Rosalie Evans, the Englishwoman her father always talked about who, just a few years back, had barricaded herself in a tower just like this one, and, in the name of democracy, had shot it out to the death with the Mexican communists who had come to take her land.

When she got too tired standing in the tower (there were only the narrow steps, a four-story plunge just beyond) or her eyes hurt from the glare, she would strip off all her clothes and sit in the spring, the best on the McCullough property. The vaqueros gave the casa mayor a wide berth and she knew she would never be discovered.

Mostly the spring ran down over the rocks toward the river, but it had once been dammed, and off to one side was a stone spillway that carried water to a cistern under the house. She could hang her head through the opening and smell the damp. From the cistern another stone trough carried the overflow to a bathing pool below the house and from there a third spillway diverted to a sink for washing clothes or pots, and from there the water would flow to a large earthen terrace, now overgrown with mesquite and persimmon, which had once been the kitchen garden. It was like the Roman ruins they showed in schoolbooks, but here she could walk along the edge of the old bathing pool, imagining it full of cool water, and sit in the shade of live oaks. In the distance were rolling hills and oak motts and buffalo, she imagined, grazing along the river. Though of course there would be danger; she would want a pistol for Indians. She could not imagine a more perfect life.