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.
In the pasture below the house were more stone walls and rubble, the remnants of a church and other important buildings, the purposes of which were now a mystery. Many of the old corrales de leña still stood and the Garcias’ spring still flowed, but someone had knocked out the dam so the water no longer reached the spillway. The casa mayor had gone dry like everything else. The stream now flowed in its original bed, down past the old church, where occasionally, especially after a hard rain, it would dislodge interesting things. Small bits of tin whose purpose she could not identify, uncountable shards of colored glazed ceramics, broken cups the Colonel said were for drinking chocolate. Antler buttons, brass screws, various coins and fragments of bone.
Only the children had interest in the casa mayor. The Mexican hands, if forced to fetch cattle from the pastures nearby, always crossed themselves. They could not help being ignorant Catholics. And the Garcias had not been able to help being lazy, cattle-stealing greasers and she felt sorry for them, even if they had shot her uncle Glenn.
Occasionally, it seemed strange to her that lazy greasers would construct elaborate stone houses, complete with cisterns, bathing pools, and various gardens, but on the few occasions those thoughts rose to the surface of her mind, she reminded herself that people often did strange, unaccountable things, like the Brenners, whose two sons had been shot robbing a bank in San Antonio, or the Morales family, who had worked for the McCulloughs three generations until their daughter ran off to become a prostitute. So Clint told her. He had scratched his name into the soft caliche walls of the casa mayor, C-L-I-N-T, in letters as tall as he was.
ONE SCALDING-HOT DAY during the summer, when there was no school, and she was bored with swimming in the stock tank, she and Clint and Paul rode up to the hacienda.
They took a meandering route, passing along the way a spring none of them had ever seen before, not as large as the one by the casa mayor, but a spring nonetheless, which flowed into a stream lined with persimmons, grapes, and oaks. They rode to the edge of a swimming hole—where it was clear you might gig as many frogs as you wanted—noting the place so they could return to it later. There were streambeds all over the ranch, but they were mostly dry, filled with sand, their courses marked with the skeletons of dead trees. Irrigation, the Colonel said. It had dried everything up. Which was another thing about the old Garcia place—all the springs there still ran, it was the best-watered section of the entire ranch.
Jonas, her oldest brother, was not with them. He was about to go away to college in the east, and as punishment, their father did not let him take a single day off the whole summer. Paul and Clint, the middle children, had decided not to work in the heat. Years earlier, she had asked Clint if he thought their father should get another wife, so they would have a real mother, and Clint had said we already had a mother, except you killed her. By being born, he added.
The only satisfaction she got was hearing Clint whipped for a very long time. Still she knew it was true. Their mother had died giving birth to her. God’s will, her father said. Though another time he said it was because he hadn’t gone to church.
She imagined if she had a mother, what that would be like. They would go burying things and digging them back up. Once, in school, she had buried a thick silver ring the Colonel had given her, as deep in the sandbox as she could put it. When she came back a little while later, Perry Midkiff was digging it up. Their teacher was standing there.
“That’s mine,” said Jeanne Anne, pointing at the silver ring.
“No,” the teacher said, “he found it fair and square.”
“But I put it there.”
“Why would you put a ring in the sandbox?” said the teacher. She was young and fat and had no chin to speak of—she would die an old maid, everyone said.
“I wanted to discover it,” Jeannie told them, but even as the words came out, she knew they made no sense. She had lost the ring forever.
THERE WAS PLENTY to dig for at the casa mayor, in the dirt inside the walls, or out in the yard, or down around the old church and the fallen-down jacals of the dead vaqueros. It was rare that some piece of treasure was not unearthed. There was a crumbling Spanish breastplate that her brothers broke into pieces trying to dig out. Plenty of old weapons, so rusted they were barely identifiable: a rapier, a lance head, hatchet and knife blades, a single-shot pistol with the lock broken off.
That particular day, walking along the streambed by the church, they came to a fresh cutbank where the earth had caved. There was a flat piece of wood lying just under the dirt, and Clint, sensing treasure, dug it out and flung it away before leaping back suddenly. Looking up at them, with the bright sun striking it directly, was a human skeleton draped with tattered cloth. Clint reached in and plucked up the skull. It was small—smaller than a muskmelon—and colored a deep yellow. She had thought all bones were white. There was a gold necklace that Clint removed as well. “It’s a girl!” he exclaimed.
Clint made a show of looking at the skull for a while, then tossed it away into the grass. She wanted to touch it but could not. Paul put the skull back in its proper place, put back the coffin lid, and kicked dirt and rocks overtop.
“The animals will just dig it up again, jackass.”
“There’s nothing to eat in there,” said Paul. “We’re the only ones who care.”
Back in the shade of the spring they stripped, though they were all too old now to remove their underclothes. They sat in the cool water, looking out over the pastures and the low crumbled walls of the old church, the Nueces far beyond.
“How old was she?”
“Half-grown,” said Paul.
“Around your age,” said Clint.
After a time they got cold; the temperature of the water never changed, no matter how hot the weather. They ate lunch and sat on the warm flat stones. Not far from the church, a group of cows had been standing in the shade, watching them,
and now a bull came into the lower pasture, sniffing the air and following a particular cow. They watched the cow run, stop and look over her shoulder, then run again. Jeannie had a terrible premonition that the animals would step into the coffin, but they did not go anywhere near it.
“They are all like that, aren’t they?” Clint was saying. “They run away but really they are begging for it. Soon he will get what he is after. And she as well.”
Jeannie laughed nervously and squeezed her legs closed. Underneath the hair there were awkward flaps of skin and underneath those, a tiny opening that she knew a man was supposed to fit into, though she could not understand how or why she would ever let that happen, except by some strange agreement, the way she had once allowed Paul to borrow her horse.
“See,” said Clint. He nodded at her. “She knows what I am talking about.”
The cow had run partway up the hill toward them, then seen them and stopped. The bull caught up to her and she had not run and he quickly jumped on top of her.
“Look at that fuckin’ hammer,” said Clint.
They could not see well but it was clear the bull had put something into the cow and was moving it in and out. Finally he slid off her and stood panting and blowing.
“One of these days some big bull is gonna be doing that to you.”
“Leave her be,” Paul said.
Clint punched him but Paul just sat there. Poor gentle Paul. A few years later she would put his death notice on the dresser of his room, where his bed was still neatly done, his bookshelf still full of dime westerns, his school picture still dusted every week by the maids. Small-arms fire, Ardennes Forest. January and the snow waist-deep, and Paul, who had grown up in the Wild Horse Desert, had not even had a proper coat.
Clint had died first, but in Italy. Her brothers had both traveled a long way to die, but that evening, years before either of them had left the ranch forever, Clint had come to her and, without saying anything, had handed her the necklace from the young girl’s grave.
Clint the Cruel. That was her name for him, though she knew it would have hurt him. He made a hobby of trapping birds and small animals, skinning and stuffing them until they did not resemble animals, they were like small lumpy pillows; he had them all over his room. At fourteen, he was an excellent hand, but her father cared only for Jonas. He was the oldest. Clint was a better rider, a better roper; he threw like the old Mexicans—overhand or under, no windup, no extra movement—and he rarely wasted a loop. He could pluck a calf from the herd before it even knew he was there. He was always first to tail a big bull or climb on a gut-twister; she had seen horses sunfishing, trying to turn themselves inside out; they could not get Clint off their backs.
It didn’t matter. Jonas was the oldest and her father paid more attention to Jonas’s various failings—too numerous to list—than to Clint’s triumphs. One day the ranch would belong to her father, and after that it would belong to Jonas. Everyone knew it, including Clint, who had spent two days sick in bed after drinking a bottle of their grandmother’s blackberry cordial.
But Jonas was leaving at the end of the summer and had told her, privately, that he was not coming back. Though she had not believed him at the time.
TECHNICALLY JEANNIE HAD another family, another set of grandparents from her mother’s side. But the other grandmother had died long before Jeannie was born; she might as well have never existed. Her other grandfather died when Jeannie was eight. He was a farmer who had come down from Illinois to buy land the Colonel was selling on promotion. Maybe if his daughter—Jeannie’s mother—hadn’t passed Jeannie might have known him better, but the few times he had visited, he had been so quiet and deferential that he had seemed no different than a stranger. He had not tried to make any claim on her or any of her brothers, and once, after he left the house, her father called him a man who knew his place.
Much later, it had occurred to her that, scientifically anyway, she was a closer relation to this quiet farmer than she was to the Colonel, but she quickly put the thought from her mind. When he died, it was the last she heard of her mother’s side of the family. She did not see much point to them; even the poorest vaquero was higher than a farmer. She was more interested in her uncle Glenn. He had still been a boy when he was first shot, and she imagined she would have done the same thing herself, bravely alerting her father of the Mexicans to their rear, then clutching her heart and dying painlessly. Of course, Glenn had not died. But she would have. They would have named the school after her, and put up a statue, and her teacher would be sorry for letting Perry Midkiff steal the Colonel’s silver ring.
AFTER THE COLONEL passed, her grandmother moved to Dallas, returning to the ranch a few times a year to make sure things were still in order. Jeannie had not expected to miss her. Her grandmother insisted that she wash and dress for supper—which her brothers did not have to do—scrubbing the dirt off Jeannie’s hands, cleaning under her nails with a steel pick. Though she also threatened Jeannie’s brothers with a quirt if they treated her improperly or said something a lady wasn’t supposed to hear. But her grandmother was not home very often.
And so, as the only woman in the house, she was entirely unprepared for what happened when she was twelve, which had sent her running for her father and nearly stepping on a snake. He understood the situation so quickly, before the words had even come out, that she realized he must have known something like this would happen. He began ringing frantically for a maid. The two of them stood in silence. Her father, she saw, was more embarrassed than she was and she knew she was lucky this had not happened in front of her brothers, or in school, or in church; in fact it could not have happened at a better time, walking by herself, examining the tracks by the stock tank.
“Gramammy didn’t say anything about this?” He called again for help. “Where is everyone?”
She didn’t know.
“Well, from a scientific point of view you are a female. And your body is preparing itself so that eventually, many years from now, as a grown woman, you can get married.”
She knew he did not mean married. As she looked at him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his white shirt stained with sweat, it occurred to her that she could no longer entirely trust him. The Colonel had been right; the only one you could depend on was yourself. She had always known it on some level or another and at this realization all the shame faded away from her; she was embarrassed only for her father, who despite his height and big hands was completely helpless. She excused herself and went into Jonas’s old room and took an undershirt from his dresser, which she cut up to line her shorts.
When she went back downstairs a maid was waiting and, after inspecting Jeannie’s handiwork and judging it suitable, explained as best as she was able, half in Spanish, half in a coded Catholic English, exactly what was happening, no, it would not stop, and then the two of them went to town to get supplies.
Chapter Fifteen
Diaries of Peter McCullough
SEPTEMBER 5, 1915
Glendale has been home two weeks, but he is pale, weak, and still fighting off some infection. Tomorrow they will take him back to San Antonio. Charlie’s arm is better, though not entirely, and there is an image clinging to my mind, which is both of my sons laid out together in one casket.
AFTER A LONG absence, the dark figure has returned. I see him in the shadows of my office; he follows me around the house, though he has not yet begun to call to me (I once saw him rise from the middle of the flooded Red, his arms open for me like Christ). I have unloaded all my pistols. No longer the energy to be angry at Pedro and my father. Visited the graves of my mother and Everett and Pete Junior (snakebite, which I cannot blame on the Colonel, and yet I do).
Of course he senses something wrong. Appears to not know what. A few times he has found me reading in the great room and stopped as if waiting for me to speak. When I did not—where would I even begin?—he shuffled on.
A MAN OF Pedro’s intelligence could not have
overlooked it. So my father’s voice—the one inside my head—tells me. The same voice says Pedro had no choice—his daughters had married those men, they had become his family, fathered his grandchildren. And if Pedro had no choice, then we didn’t either. That is my father’s logic—there is never any choice.
Meanwhile my old acts of cowardice continue to haunt. Had I married María (for whom I briefly harbored feelings), instead of Sally (my proper match) . . . who was thirty-two and twice jilted, who loved her life in Dallas, whose bitterness was apparent from the moment she stepped from the train, who came because her father and my father and her own biology gave her no choice. I was so lonely when I met Peter, that is the story she tells of our courtship. Our fathers arranging the breeding as if we were heifer and bull. Perharps I am dramatic; in truth our first years were quite pleasant, but then Sally must have realized that, just as I always said, I really had no intention of leaving this land. Many families of our stature, she rightly pointed out, maintain more than one residence. But we are not like other families.
THERE ARE MOMENTS I see José and Chico and (impossibly) Pedro himself on the other side of the river, shooting at us. Other moments I remember the event as it truly happened, a half-dozen riders in the dark, dodging into the brush, hundreds of yards away. Perhaps Mexican because of the cut of their clothing, perhaps not.