The Son (28 page)

In October the older men of the tribe decided we ought to move south, into familiar territory, as winter would be much worse here, and food more scarce. Despite the fact the raiders had not yet returned, which was beginning to worry everyone, we packed the camp and left detailed instructions, in the form of hieroglyphs carved into a tree, about where we were headed.

We set up close to our old campsite, ten miles north of the Canadian, expecting it to be occupied, as it was close to several well-known Indian trails, but it was empty and the grass was tall. It had been a wet year and there was plenty of forage to get our horse herd through the winter, which was a good sign, but no other horses had been grazing there, which was a bad sign, and the tribe went further into a depression, the consensus being that an enormous number of Comanches must have been destroyed, not just the Penateka, for a campsite this good to have gone unoccupied since we had left it.

W
HEN THE RAIDING
party finally returned in December, the only good news was that Toshaway, Escuté, and N
uu
karu were still alive. They were all so pale and had all lost so much weight that when they first rode up, everyone thought they were spirits. Toshaway had nearly lost a foot to frostbite. Escuté had taken a ball through the shoulder early in the raiding and spent three months riding with it broken. He could barely raise his bow arm.

In June, they had captured eight hundred horses but there had been an ambush—the army and the Mexicans were working together now, instead of killing each other as they had always done—and nearly half the Kotsoteka warriors were killed or scattered. The army, along with several Ranger companies, had chased the remaining warriors deep into New Mexico.

While this was happening, the women’s camp, which had been waiting for the warriors to return from Mexico, had been attacked by Mescalero Apaches, and either wiped out entirely or carried away as captives. The remaining bodies were so scattered by animals it was impossible to count them. Toshaway’s daughter was among the lost, and of the three hundred Kotsoteka who’d ridden out, less than forty had returned, and, while no one would mention it in the same conversation, nearly a thousand horses had been lost as well, which meant that we had no surplus to trade and the winter would be even worse than expected. From that day until early spring, all the other noises were drowned out by crying and wailing, and half the women in camp had cuts on their faces and arms, many of them clipping off whole fingers to honor their dead family members.

Prairie Flower stopped seeing me for a while, as Charges the Enemy was known to have been killed, but had fallen behind the enemy lines so quickly that his body had not been recovered and was presumed to have been scalped and desecrated. She barely ate or left her tipi, but as they were not married, she could not even mourn in public, or tell anyone she had known when it happened, that she had witnessed his death just as clearly as if she had been there to see it.

Chapter Twenty

Jeannie McCullough

1942

P
hineas called her to Austin a week after she finished high school. It was May and already hot, one hundred in McCullough, ninety in Austin, it would be nice to make a trip to Barton Springs, to lie in the grass and watch the people swimming—flirting couples, young men and their footballs—to spend the day by herself in a place she was not known. She wouldn’t, of course. There were people you could never figure—her great-grandfather for instance—but that was not her.
I am boring,
she thought.
Predictable. But brave in my own way, brave despite
. . . she did not like to think of the North, she did not like to think of her time there. She had been miserable and she had left. She did not mind taking risks when she wanted something, though no one else understood this. When she wanted something, she was truly brave. And yet no one else knew. So it didn’t matter.

The train made its way to Austin. There were more cars on the highway, double or triple what she had seen in her childhood, most Texans now lived in cities, they said. You would not have known it in Dimmit County. She watched a truck with a half-dozen Mexicans in the back, their knees scrunched around a pile of scrap iron, the driver weaving and changing lanes, one miscalculation and they would all be spilled to the pavement. She wondered why they allowed themselves to be treated that way. They’re animals, is what her father said. On Election Day he would take her down to the south end of McCullough, dusty streets, tin shacks, wreaths of chilies and goat meat hanging with the flies buzzing everywhere. Her father would hand out slabs of beef from an ice chest in the back of his truck, cases of warm beer; he would pay their poll taxes and show them how to mark the ballot.
Gracias, patrón. Gracias.
They were more gracious than niggers—that was another thing he always said.

The windows in the train were open and her face was cool in the breeze but she was sweating under her dress, under her arms. It was the time of the year the heat became its own entity, a creeping misery. No. It was like a sledgehammer on the head of a steer. It would only get worse until September. From the other side of the car, three soldiers were stealing glances, one of them was much older, the other two were Mexican, barely her age, afraid to look. Most draft boards had not yet begun to call up whites, though some, like her brothers, had volunteered.

She studied her reflection, imposed as it was on the dry rushing landscape beyond the window.
I am pretty,
she thought. There were prettier, but she was well above average.
Phineas will offer me a job
. A sort of special adviser, a confidante. But that was not possible, either. She was not even qualified to be a secretary; you needed shorthand for that. There was nothing she really knew how to do, nothing she did well, she was a dabbler. Pointless. If she vanished from the earth that instant, it would not have made a lick of a difference to anyone.

Maudlin, maudlin.
She leaned her head against the glass and felt the shaking of the train.
That’s not even your word,
she thought,
that’s from Jonas.
She could see the hills to the north, the Llano uplift. The Colonel had known those things: this rock is ten million years old, this other two hundred, here is a fern contained in stone. The soldiers were staring at her openly now. When she was young, a year or two ago, she would have turned and stared them down, but now she let them drink her up, have their fantasies, or so she imagined. In a few months they would be off to war, and many would not come back, their final rest in a foreign place. Perhaps all three of them, their lines come to an end. She wondered who would survive, she guessed the bigger one, though you could not tell. It was not like the old days, it was a falling bomb and a hundred dead at once, all mothers’ sons. An emotion came over her, and she wondered if she might give them something, cigarettes or a soda pop, but those were just tokens, money would not help them. There was only one thing and she allowed herself to think about this for a while, shifted her legs and adjusted her dress, it was just a thought, out of the question, she had never given herself to anyone. But what did it matter, truly? There were times she was desperate, absolutely desperate to be shed of her virginity, but no, she thought, impossible, it could not be some pimple-faced soldier, or that older, more scary one with the patch of razor burn along his neck as if chafed by a rope. He will be the one to die. She felt it instantly. It excited her. It was all very dramatic.

Then she felt guilty. She thought of her brothers, who were still in America, training in Georgia. Clint would do something to show off and be killed. Paul would be more careful, though easily convinced to do something risky, especially if a friend were in trouble. She prayed he would have no friends. Otherwise he would surely be killed. It was Jonas: he was the only one among her brothers who acted like a rich man’s son. He would not take any risk if someone else might do it instead. And he was an officer.

Outside, the grass was already brown from the heat. To the south, the flat Texas plain stretched down to Mexico; to the north the escarpment began. A yellow tint of summer haze. A mule pulling a plow. She did not know why, it was plain to see there would be no rain for weeks, the dryness made you wonder if it would ever rain again.

Her uncle Phineas was a powerful man, head of the Railroad Commission, more powerful than the governor, they said. He was not really her uncle, but great-uncle, and he determined how much oil could be pumped in all of Texas. Somehow that controlled the price. She supposed it was like cattle. In a drought everyone had to sell quickly so the price went down, though when beef got scarce the price went up again. Except the packers were now interrupting this—buying cheap from distressed ranchers while raising the price on the other end—telling the city buyers, who did not know better, that a drought meant scarcity. The packers were where the money had gone; it was no longer made on grass, but in cement buildings. Armour and Swift. Her father hated them. Meanwhile Texas made more oil than anyplace on the earth. You did not hear people who made oil complaining very much.

S
HE OPENED HER
eyes. She was on the floor of the great room, watching the fire. Her arm, the skin old and so thin the light seemed to pass right through it, the watch askew on her wrist. Perhaps she might inch just one finger? No. Her eyes moved around the room and settled on a globe next to the divan. It was no older than she was, but many of the countries had already ceased to exist. No hope for a single person. She could see that the mortar had begun to crumble in the fireplace; the stones would soon come apart.
When did that happen?
she wondered, and then she thought:
I did not expect to live this long myself
. Except that was lie. She had always known it was the others who wouldn’t make it.

Death the common companion; it was not like the settled places of the North. Jonas sensed it and saved himself.
You did not know better.
Or did and thought you could escape it
. She watched the ember on the hearth. She wondered if she had really known that about Paul and Clint, or if it was another trick of the mind, the memory recording something that had never been true, like a magnetic tape that had been tampered with.

P
HINEAS HAD BEEN
good to her. It was hard to imagine the power he’d had: as OPEC would years later, the Railroad Commission controlled the price of oil in the entire world. Phineas had become enormously wealthy. He could make or break any oilman in the state, any politician—you might drill all the wells you wanted, but you could not pump a drop without his say-so.

The commission’s offices were in a drab state office building; the only thing giving it away were the cars—Packards, a Cadillac Sixteen, Lincoln Zeyphrs, and Continentals. Phineas had a corner office, the walls lined with his trophies, the Colonel’s Yellowboy Winchester, a brace of Colt Peacemakers, plaques from the Southwest Cattle Raisers and the Old Trail Driver’s Association. There were pictures with elephants and lions and antlered game of every description, he had hunted on five continents. There were pictures with Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, Phineas smiling broadly, more sure of himself than the old man.

He was seventy-five now and, when seated, still gave off an impression of power. He looked nothing like the Colonel: a tall man with thick white hair, expensive suits, beautiful secretaries. He did not wear cowboy boots or a bolo tie—those were affectations of a later generation—he was more like an eastern banker.

But his health was failing. His legs were swollen, his heart unsteady. He would never live to see his father’s age, that was plain.

Jeannie watched the secretary as she left coffee and a tray of kolaches. A brunette with violet eyes, high cheekbones, a perfect figure—she would never be pretty enough. Phineas asked about the news from Paul and Clint, congratulated her on finishing school. Did she have plans? Not really. She settled into a chair overlooking the capitol and downtown Austin. She was only five hours from the ranch but it was a different country entirely.

When the secretary had closed the door, something in Phineas’s manner changed and she knew he meant to talk business.

“I suspect it is obvious to both of us that the ranch is losing money.”

She nodded, though it had not been obvious: beef had been climbing steadily since the war began.

“I lived on that land before it was settled,” he continued. “I buried my mother and father and brother there. And now my nephew—your father—is running it into the ground. He is content to burn through our money as if a fresh supply will come up like grass in the springtime. Why the old man left him majority holder, I have no idea.” He leaned back in his chair. “Have you seen the books?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Of course not.” He beckoned her around to his side of the desk, where a ledger was sitting open. He pointed to a number: a little over four hundred thousand dollars. “Last year’s cattle sales. It seems like a large number, and it is, because your father sells a lot of cattle. But the next thirty-seven pages are debits.” He skipped forward, first a page at a time, then two or three at a time, until he reached the end. He pointed to another number, just under eight hundred thousand dollars. “The ranch’s expenses are nearly double its income.”

There is some mistake
, she thought, but she kept quiet. Instead she asked: “How long has it been like that?”

“Oh, twenty years, at least. The only thing keeping us in the black is the oil and gas, but the wells are old and shallow and the Colonel, quite wisely, leased only a few thousand acres, trusting that we would lease the rest at higher prices. Which we have not yet done.”

He paused again.

“For reasons I do not quite understand, our state has a club of wealthy children who like to play at being cattlemen. As if the term can even exist today. Bob Kleberg has put it in your father’s ear that with technology, better bulls, and a few bump gates, he can make money selling beef, which is a feat Kleberg has not even managed on his own land. As you may or may not know, the King Ranch, all million acres of it, was on the verge of bankruptcy until Humble Oil loaned them three million dollars. Which was a pity, because I had made Alice King a very generous offer. And I have always liked the coast.”