The Son (2 page)

In the meantime a campaign was launched against my mother, a Castilian of the old line, dark skinned but finely featured, it was claimed by the new settlers that she was octoroon. The plantation gentleman took pride in his eye for such things.

By 1846 we had moved past the line of settlement, to my father’s headright on the Pedernales. It was Comanche hunting grounds. The trees had never heard an ax, and the land and all the animals who lived upon it were fat and slick. Grass up to the chest, the soil deep and black in the bottoms, and even the steepest hillsides overrun with wildflowers. It was not the dry rocky place it is today.

Wild Spanish cattle were easily acquired with a rope—within a year we had a hundred head. Hogs and mustang horses were also for the taking. There were deer, turkey, bear, squirrel, the occasional buffalo, turtles and fish from the river, ducks, plums and mustang grapes, bee trees and persimmons—the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today. The only problem was keeping your scalp attached.

Chapter Two

Jeanne Anne McCullough

March 3, 2012

T
here were murmurs and quiet voices, not enough light. She was in a large room that she first mistook for a church or courthouse and though she was awake, she couldn’t feel anything. It was like floating in a warm bath. There were dim chandeliers, logs smoking in a fireplace, Jacobean chairs and tables and busts of old Greeks. There was a rug that had been a gift from the Shah. She wondered who would find her.

It was a big white house in the Spanish style; nineteen bedrooms, a library, a great room and ballroom. She and her brothers had all been born here but now it was nothing more than a weekend house, a place for family reunions. The maids wouldn’t be back until morning. Her mind was perfectly awake but the rest of her seemed to have been left unplugged and she was fairly certain that someone else was responsible for her condition. She was eighty-six years old, but even if she liked telling others that she couldn’t wait to cross over to the Land of Mañana, it was not exactly true.

The most important thing is a man who does what I tell him.
She had said that to a reporter from
Time
magazine and they’d put her on the cover, forty-one and still sultry, standing on her Cadillac in front of a field of pumpjacks. She was a small, slender woman, though people forgot this soon after meeting her. Her voice carried and her eyes were gray like an old pistol or blue norther; she was striking, though not exactly beautiful. Which the Yankee photographer must have noticed. He had her open her blouse another notch and did her hair like she’d stepped out of an open car. It was not the height of her power—that had come decades later—but it was an important moment. They had begun to take her seriously. Now the man who’d taken the photograph was dead.
No one is going to find you,
she thought.

Of course it was going to happen this way; even as a child she’d been mostly alone. Her family had owned the town. People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating and other peoples’ outfits. There had never been a place for a person like her.

S
HE WAS YOUNG,
eight or ten, sitting on the porch. It was a cool day in spring and the green hills went on as far as she could see, McCullough land, as far as she could see. But something was wrong: there was her Cadillac, parked in the grass, and the old stables, which her brother had not yet burned, were already gone.
I am going to wake up now,
she thought. But then the Colonel—her great-grandfather—was speaking. Her father was there as well. She’d once had a grandfather, Peter McCullough, but he had disappeared and no one had anything good to say about him and she knew she would not have liked him either.

“I was thinking you might make a showing at the church this Sunday,” her father said.

The Colonel thought those things were best left to the Negroes and Mexicans. He was a hundred years old and did not mind telling people they were wrong. His arms were like gunsticks and his face was splotchy as an old rawhide and they said the next time he fell, it would be right into his own grave.

“The thing about preachers,” he was saying, “is if they ain’t sparkin’ your daughters, or eatin’ all the fried chicken and pie in your icebox, they’re cheatin’ your sons on horses.”

Her father was twice the size of the Colonel, but, as the Colonel was always pointing out, he had a strong back and a weak mind. Her brother Clint had bought a horse and saddle off that pastor and there had been a setfast under the blanket nearly the size of a griddle cake.

H
ER FATHER MADE
her go to church anyway, waking up early to make the trip to Carrizo, where they had a Sunday school. She was hungry and could barely keep her eyes open. When she asked the teacher what would happen to the Colonel, who was sitting home that very minute, likely drinking a julep, the teacher said he was going to hell, where he would be tortured by Satan himself.
In that case, I am going with him,
Jeannie said. She was a disgraceful little scamp. She would have been whipped if she were Mexican.

On the ride home, she could not understand why her father sided with the teacher, who had a beak like an eagle and smelled like something inside her had died. The woman was ugly as a tar bucket.
During the war,
her father was saying,
I promised God that if I survived, I would go to church every Sunday. But just before you were born, I stopped going because I was busy. And do you know what happened?
She did—she had always known. But he reminded her anyway:
Your mother died
.

Jonas, her oldest brother, said something about not scaring her. Her father told Jonas to be quiet and Clint pinched her arm and whispered,
When you go to hell, the first thing they do is shove a pitchfork up your ass.

She opened her eyes. Clint had been dead sixty years. Nothing in the dim room had moved.
The papers,
she thought. She had saved them from the fire once and had not gotten around to destroying them. Now they would be found.

Chapter Three

Diaries of Peter McCullough

A
UGUST 10, 1915

My birthday. Today, without the help of any whiskey, I have reached the conclusion: I am no one. Looking back on my forty-five years I see nothing worthwhile—what I had mistaken for a soul appears more like a black abyss—I have allowed others to shape me as they pleased. To ask the Colonel I am the worst son he has ever had—he has always preferred Phineas and even poor Everett.

This journal will be the only true record of this family. In Austin they are planning a celebration for the Colonel’s eightieth birthday, and what will be honestly said about a man who is lionized in capitols, I don’t know. Meanwhile, our bloody summer continues. The telephone lines to Brownsville cannot be kept open—every time they are repaired, the insurgents blow them up. The King Ranch was attacked by forty
sediciosos
last night, there was a three-hour gun battle at Los Tulitos, and the president of the Cameron Law and Order League was shot to death, though whether the latter is a gain or loss, I can’t say.

As for the Mexicans, to see the number of them shot in bar ditches or hung from trees, you would think them as ill a scourge as the panther or wolf. The
San Antonio Express
no longer mentions their deaths—it would take up too much paper—and so the Tejano die unrecorded and are buried, if at all, in shallow graves, or roped and dragged off where they will not bother anyone.

After Longino and Estaban Morales were killed last month (by whom we don’t know, though I suspect Niles Gilbert) the Colonel devised a note for all our vaqueros:
This man is a good Mexican. Please leave him alone. When I am done with him I will kill him myself.
Our men display these notes like badges of honor; they worship the Colonel (along with everyone else),
nuestro patrón.

Unfortunately for the Tejanos, the area cattlemen continue to lose stock. In the west pastures last week Sullivan and I found a section where the wire was cut and by nightfall we’d found only 263 cows and calves, versus the 478 counted during the spring roundup. A twenty-thousand-dollar loss and all evidence, circumstantially at least, pointing to our neighbors, the Garcias. I myself would rather lose the kingdom than lay blood libel against the wrong person. But that is a rare sentiment.

I
HAVE ALWAYS
thought I ought to have been born in the Old States, where, though their soil is even more blood soaked than ours, they no longer need their guns. But of course it is against my disposition. Even Austin I find overwhelming, as if each of its sixty thousand inhabitants were shouting at me at once. I have always found it difficult to clear my head—images and sounds linger with me for years—and so here I remain, in the one place that is truly mine, whether it wants me or not.

As we examined the cut fences, Sullivan pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that the tracks led right into the Garcia lands, which border the river, which, as it has been so dry, can be crossed nearly anywhere.

“I do not mind old Pedro,” he said, “but his sons-in-law are as vile a pack of niggers as I have ever seen.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with the Colonel,” I told him.

“He does
sabe
his Mexicans.”

“I have found just the opposite.”

“In that case, boss, I am hoping you will learn me the various honest explanations for a cut fence leading to Pedro Garcia’s pastures while we are short two hundred head. Time was we would cross and take them back but that is a bit above our bend these days.”

“Old Pedro can’t watch every inch of his land any more than we can watch every inch of ours.”

“You’re a big man,” he said, “and I don’t see why you act like such a small one.”

After that he had no further comment. He considers it a personal affront that a Mexican might own so much land in our day and age. Of course the vaqueros do not help: because of his weight and high voice they call him Don Castrado behind his back.

As for Pedro Garcia, trouble seems to follow him like a lonely dog. Two of his sons-in-law are being pursued by the Mexican authorities for cattle theft, a notable accomplishment given that country’s views on such matters. I attempted to visit him last week, only to be turned back by José and Chico.
Don Pedro no feel good,
they told me, and pretended not to understand my Spanish. I have known Pedro my entire life, knew he would accept me as a visitor, but of course I turned my horse around and said nothing.

Pedro has been shorthanded so long that the brush is overrunning his land, and for the past two years he has only managed to brand half his calves. Each year he makes less money, each year he cannot hire as many men, and thus each year his income decreases yet again.

Still he has retained his good nature. I have always preferred his household to our own. We both enjoyed the old days, when it was a gentler land, with white caliche roads and adobe villages, not a thornbush to be seen and the grass up to your stirrups. Now the brush is relentless and the old stone villages are abandoned. The only houses built are crooked wood-frame monstrosities that grow like mushrooms but begin rotting just as quickly.

In many ways Pedro has been a truer father to me than the Colonel; if he has ever had a harsh word for me, I have not heard it. He had always hoped I might take an interest in one of his daughters, and for a time I was quite infatuated with María, the eldest, but I could sense the Colonel was strongly against it, and, like a coward, I allowed the feeling to pass. María went to Mexico City to pursue her studies; her sisters married Mexicans, all of whom have their eyes on Pedro’s land.

My greatest fear is that Sullivan is right and that Pedro’s sons-in-law are involved with the theft of our stock; they may not understand what the consequences will be; they may not understand that Don Pedro cannot protect them.

A
UGUST 11, 1915

Sally and Dr. Pilkington are driving Glenn, our youngest, to San Antonio. He was shot tonight when we came across some riders in the dark. The wound is high in the shoulder and is certainly not life threatening and had it not been for the Colonel I would have gone to San Antonio with my son.

The Colonel has decided that the shooters were our neighbors. When I protested that it was too dark for any of us to have seen the guilty parties, it was implied that I was a traitor.

“If you’d learned anything I taught you,” he said. “That was Chico and José on those horses.”

“Well, you must have eyes like a catamount to be able to see in the dark past a furlong.”

“As you well know,” he told me, “my vision has always carried farther than that of other men.”

About a quarter of the town (the white quarter) is downstairs. Along with the Rangers, all of our vaqueros, and the Midkiff vaqueros as well. In a few minutes we will ride on the Garcias.

Chapter Four

Eli McCullough

S
pring 1849, the last full moon. We’d been two years on our Pedernales acreocracy, not far from Fredericksburg, when our neighbor had two horses stolen in broad daylight. Syphilis Poe, as my father called him, had come down from the Appalachian Mountains, imagining Texas a lazy man’s paradise where the firewood split itself, the persimmons fell into your lap, and your pipe was always stuffed with jimsonweed. He was the commonest type on the frontier, though there were plenty like my father—intent on getting rich if they could stay alive long enough—and there were the Germans.

Before the Germans came, it was thought impossible to make butter in a southern climate. It was also thought impossible to grow wheat. A slave economy does that to the human mind, but the Germans, who had not been told otherwise, arrived and began churning first-rate butter and raising heavy crops of the noble cereal, which they sold to their dumbfounded neighbors at a high profit.