The Son (67 page)

Her worry that Ted might be her last lover turned out to be ridiculous. There were other companions, men who could have, and still did have, younger women, but they were companions nonetheless; there were things they could not share with young people, and she suspected, though not a single one had admitted this to her, that decades of being the less attractive partner might take a toll. She wondered what it would be like to look into the mirror and see yourself, white haired, slough skinned, your wilting everything and uncountable skin tags, right next to some perfect young specimen of the human race.

She was not sure. She had not compromised. She had not compromised and in that way, she’d escaped.
I am the last of my kind,
she thought,
the last the last the last
 . . . but even that was a kind of vanity, there could be no last of anything, there were uncountable billions to come.

Milton Bryce became a widower, there had been another chance, she had known him nearly fifty years, and they had talked about it, how the two of them might form a sort of partnership, they had kissed but not otherwise touched, they were both into their seventies, he was a good man, but there was not a drop of fire in him. It was better to be alone. She was not some spinster. There were things she had not done, perhaps she had missed out, but the Colonel had not remarried, either. There was a reason for that.

Maybe if she’d gotten sick she would have felt differently. But even then she would not have wanted a lover taking care of her, even after two decades she had not liked using the toilet in front of Ted, had not liked brushing her teeth in front of him and when she got out of bed she always put on a nightgown, it was not modesty. It was just that without keeping something to yourself, the only thing left was comfort.

S
HE HAD ALWAYS
suspected (
known,
she thought) that she might outlive Thomas. There were people with a will to survive, people who might drag themselves across a desert, but Thomas was not one of them.

At a certain point, she had begun to think he would dodge it, he had been with the same partner (
lover,
she thought,
husband
) for over a decade, then quick as that, his partner was dying and they all knew what that meant for Thomas. It did not make her special. All stories ended that way. And yet it seemed to her that she had willed her son’s fate, that by somehow suspecting it, considering it, she had witched it up out of the future, where a child’s death was supposed to remain.

As for the man Thomas lived with—Richard—she had never cared for him. He was not sure of himself and he compensated. Thomas and Susan both found him hilarious, but he was not and she hated the sight of him at the hospice,
you have killed my son,
that was all she could think. She had to fly back to Midland in the morning. “When will you be here again?” Thomas asked her.
For the funeral,
she thought. Richard hated her even as he was dying; she hated him right back. But there was something in her son’s face.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

She’d been trying to unload some acreage in the Spraberry to Walt and Amos Benson. They wanted to take her out at $16.26; she was looking for $19.00. It was high but things were happening.

“Come out to the ranch,” they said. “We’ll get the quail opener.”

There was nothing she would have liked better; the Bensons were old friends, Walt’s wife had died a year earlier and there had always been some spark . . . but she couldn’t. She had to go back to San Francisco. She did not want to tell them why.

So she had flown back and spent the night in the hospice, staring at the gaunt-faced man in the bed, knowing she would be looking at her own son there soon enough. The man’s parents had not been told. She wondered if she ought to find out who they were and call them. She decided she should, they had a right to know, but then she wasn’t sure, and then she had never been more afraid of anything, she made one bargain after another, her own life, all her money, speaking to God the entire night. None of it meant anything. She would lose her son. In the morning she slept two hours on her Gulfstream and woke up in Midland to meet with the Bensons again. She told them that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait.

“Is that what your price is based on?”

She was too tired to explain.

“Honey,” they said, “what’s wrong?”

She wanted to go to their ranch, she wanted to sit on their patio and drink wine with Walt, she wanted to stop thinking about her son. Instead the driver took her back to the airport.

All of this for money. Money she did not need, money her daughter did not need, money her son did not need. No one she knew needed money. And yet, apparently, she would do anything for it. She would spend her days in Midland and her nights in San Francisco. She was crazy. She agreed to the Bensons’ price.

Walt invited her to the ranch again. They looked at each other a long time, here was her chance, she’d rejected him years earlier, he would not try again. Instead she went back to San Francisco, got a room at the Fairmont, and stayed two months helping Thomas clean out his condo, agonizing over Richard’s awful paintings. And Thomas had lived. He had gone on the drugs and they had saved him. He went back to calling her Mother; he called her Jeannie only when he was mad.

She knew that other people felt sorry for her. She knew that her life looked empty, but it was the opposite. You could not live for yourself while also living for others. Even lying here she was free. She was not in some hospital where they kept you alive when they shouldn’t, where you had no say over your own end.

She was back in the enormous room. The light was blinding now, the sun was shining directly through the roof, the furniture askew, everything in shambles, but she did not mind it.

There was a scent in the air, soothing and oversweet and she recognized it: balm of Gilead. Cottonwood buds. Were they blooming? She couldn’t remember. She could not remember the day or year. She and Hank had planted a row of saplings around the stock tank, they were now enormous, a grove of cottonwoods. She had left things better than she found them. She remembered the Colonel rubbing the sap into her fingers, she remembered how the smell lingered all day, every time you lifted your hands to your face, every sip of water, you drank in that smell. The Colonel had showed her and she had showed it to Hank. Now they were waiting for her. She could feel it.

Chapter Sixty-five

Ulises Garcia

H
e had heard and then seen her jet land yesterday; it was quite a sight, a plane that looked as if it might carry thirty or more people, landing to discharge a single person. It was a Gulfstream. The same one the
narcotraficantes
preferred. A car picked her up from the runway.

Even watching her from a distance gave him a nervous feeling. He had worked all day, but had not been able to eat lunch.

Later he saw her being driven around the ranch, sitting in the back of her Cadillac. Her chin held high, surveying all she owned. Near dinnertime he had made a point of passing by the house, just to get a glimpse of her, when he noticed an old person sitting by herself on the vast porch, looking at some papers.

He rode up and tipped his hat. “Good evening. I am Ulises Garcia.”

She looked at him. She was annoyed at being interrupted. But he smiled at her and finally she couldn’t help herself. She smiled back and said: “Hello, Mr. Garcia.”

He couldn’t think of anything more to say, so he wished her a good night and rode off cursing himself.

T
HE NEXT DAY
the plane was still there. The sun was going down and he was heading back to the bunkhouse. He supposed it was now or never. Of course if she rejected him, he would have to leave. It was a good job, Bryan Colms liked him, the other hands liked him, even if they thought he was a showoff.

Of course he was a coward if he didn’t try. After dinner, he changed into his good shirt and packed his papers into a small leather bag his grandfather had given him.

Chapter Sixty-six

Diaries of Peter McCullough

O
CTOBER 13, 1917

Received two telegrams from Guadalajara asking me to come down, but neither is the real María. Today a letter arrived. Very short.

“Received your note. Good memories but see no way of continuing.”

I wait until I am certain Sally is out of the house, then call Ab Jefferson and tell him what happened.

“We could bring her up here easy,” he says.

“How would you do that?”

“It has been done, Mr. McCullough.”

Then I understand. “No,” I tell him. “Absolutely not.”

I
T IS NOT
much of a plan. Composed a letter to Charlie and Glenn explaining as best I could. Do not expect they will forgive me—especially Charlie. He is the Colonel’s son as much as mine. Tomorrow is a Sunday so I will have to wait.

O
CTOBER 14, 1917

Woke up this morning with a happiness I have not felt since she left, replaced slowly by the old feeling. Did not know I had so much fear in me.

If she consents to see me it will not be the same, she was a refugee then—we will be like old friends who no longer have anything in common. Our bonds revealed as illusion. Better not to see it. Better to hold on to something I know is good.

O
CTOBER 15, 1917

Did not sleep last night. Packed three changes of clothes and my revolver. In a few minutes I will pass through the gates of the McCullough ranch for the last time. One way or the other.

The bank in Carrizo will not have what I need so I am going to San Antonio. Ronald Derry has known me twenty years—he will not question me. Unless he does. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars for oil leases.
Oil leases,
I will say,
you know these farmers, they all want to see cash
.

Then I will cross the border. Of course the money is not mine. If they decide to call my father . . .

I
HAVE NO
illusion about my chance of reaching Guadalajara alive. I am of sound mind and body. This is my testament.

Chapter Sixty-seven

Eli McCullough

W
ith the surrender of the Comanches, an area as big as the Old States opened to settlement and every easterner who owned a whaling ship or hotel began to fancy himself a cattle baron. There were Frenchmen and Scots, counts and dukes in scissortail coats, peacocked Yankees with their faces shining like new mirrors. They overpaid for range, overpaid for stock, overpaid for horses, they were trying to catch up to the rest of us. Meanwhile the southern grasslands were already run-down; the smart stockmen drove their herds to Montana to get fat on what grass remained.

Half the cowhands were Harvard men in lisle thread socks, with mail-order pistols and silver-decked tack bought straight from a leathershop drummer. They’d come west to grow up with the country. Meaning see the end of it.

I said I would sell out by ’80. The part of me that was still alive hated the sight of cowbrutes, hated chewing every waking minute on how I would profit or lose by them. The rest of me couldn’t think of anything else. How to protect them, how to get the best price for them, and, when the money had gone out of them, how I might make it another way. I was caught in the thorns of my own undertaking, unmaking, I considered the beasts more than my own wife and children, I was no different from Ellen Wilbarger with her laudanum. She had not needed it until she tried it, but soon saw no other way.

M
ADELINE THOUGHT
I was interfering with some senorita. She gave me too much credit. The problem was much bigger than any girl.

B
Y THEN
I had moved them to San Antonio, but I still spent my time in the
brasada
or along some dusty waterhole and Madeline was not any happier. She told me to get a proper house built on the Nueces or else. I told her I had only a few years left—I could feel it doing something to me.

“Like what?” she said.

I started to tell her, but couldn’t. Old Nicky himself had pinched my jaw shut.

She paced the living room. She’d fallen in with some other grass widows and had taken to wearing paint; just a touch but I noticed it. The servants were off being servants and the boys were in the yard.

“I hate this house,” she said.

“It’s a hell of a nice house,” I said. It was a big white one in the Spanish style, big as the one she’d grown up in, with a good view of the river. It was two years’ wages and a sizable note to match.

“I would rather be living in a hut.”

“We’ll be out soon enough,” I said.

“Why not now?”

“Because.”

“We do not have to live in the biggest house. Now or ever. I believe you have confused me with my sister.”

She smiled but I wanted to keep it serious. “Three years,” I told her. “Come hell or high water I swear I will not touch a cow after that.”

“That is the same as never.”

“There is no school.”

“We will build one. Or hire a teacher. Or we keep this place and go back and forth and hire a teacher half the time.” She threw up her hands. “There are any number of ways,” she said. “We are not exactly building a railroad.”

“Well, it’s a waste of money to build a place and leave it.”

“The fool who buys the land will also buy the house. Meanwhile I am here with your children, who spend all their time pretending they
are
you when they don’t really know you.”

“It’s not the right place,” I said. “I am sure of it.”

But she was already not listening. I could see her thinking. “The representative is going back to Washington,” she said. The representative was her mother’s new husband. “There is a nice house for sale next door to theirs. Which is where I am taking the children unless you convince me otherwise.”

I walked away from her and stood by the window. The best part of me knew I ought to let her go but I could not get the words to my mouth. Outside, Everett was wearing my old buckskin shirt. He had a feather in his hair and he was stalking the other boys. I had been promising to show him how to make a bow for so long that I realized he had stopped asking me. Pete and Phineas were digging at something in the yard—they didn’t have the fire of a firstborn. I had also promised Everett I would let him ride with me a few days during roundup. In truth I liked that the boys were in school. I had not wanted to start them on the outdoor life; soon it would be fit only for hobbyists and outcasts.