The Son

  It was a relief when she heard the cook come in and begin chattering to one of the maids. She was not sure if she had been talking to herself or not, if the maids had heard her. Everyone had been right—Jonas, her father, her grandmother—she did not belong here.

  She saw the first of the vaqueros’ trucks crest a distant hill, trailering the horses from the pastures. Then the second truck, and the third. She felt everything get lighter. It was as simple as that. She would tell them. What would come of the landman, she didn’t care—I don’t, she thought, I really don’t—this was not the North, where you went around accosting people. Even loading the guns had been wrong; she needed a wall of armor around her, of men, like her father had kept.

  Sullivan, the vaqueros, they would all know what to do. She decided to act before any further consideration weakened her; he was probably not such a bad man, she had probably misread the entire thing, she was young and alone (he accosted you, she reminded herself). Yes, that was it. The man would pay some price. Even Jonas would agree with that. He would not be killed, but it would be something unpleasant. She was not sure what. She didn’t care. She reminded herself of the way he had grabbed her and then, before she could change her mind, she was out the front door, ignoring Hugo’s calls about supper, making her way down the path toward the bunkhouse.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Diaries of Peter McCullough

  MARCH 25, 1917

  Drought is back but cattle remain high due to war. Woke up after a night of vivid thoughts, pulled the curtains expecting the green country of my youth and of my dreams. But with the exception of the area immediately around the house, there was nothing but sparse brittle grass, thorny brush, patches of bare caliche. My father is right: it is ruined forever, and in a single generation.

  Meanwhile he has hired promoters to bring in northern farmers. The trains are specially chartered and the Yankees will be shown the best farms (irrigated), the best houses (ours, as it is the most ostentatious), and offered used-up hardpan at five hundred times what the current owners paid for it. I have been ordered to make myself scarce.

  For two months the Colonel has been diverting water from the stock tanks onto our lawn (we now have one, instead of a dirt yard) and the stream that runs below the house, past Everett’s pasture, has been dammed to flood the lowlands one looks over from the gallery. Ike Reynolds came to complain that his water dried up, but the Colonel explained his reasons and Ike left convinced.

  Even the springs at Carrizo are barely flowing; it is said this is a result of the irrigation. The resacas have all gone dry. The entire earth, it seems, is being slowly transformed into a desert; mankind will die off and something new will replace us. There is no reason that there should only be one human race. I was likely born a thousand years too early, or ten thousand. One day those like my father will seem like the Romans who fed Christians to the lions.

  APRIL 6, 1917

  Heard Charlie and Glenn and my father talking this evening, walked into the great room to see what was about, they all three looked at me and went silent. Of course I left. The generations pass, nothing seems to change, the silent understanding between the others and my father, wordless looks that have always excluded me. Wilson declared war on Germany today.

  APRIL 9, 1917

  Charlie and Glenn came to me. They have both decided to join the army. I told them it would be better to wait until the end of the year when it would be easier to find hands to replace them. They were unconvinced. “We have plenty of money to hire people,” said Charlie.

  Sally has been in her room all day, unable to get out of bed.

  They could not have picked a worse war to join. Machine guns and half-ton shells. I had always thought the Europeans returned to the Stone Age when they landed in America, but apparently they never left it. Seven hundred thousand dead at Verdun alone.

  What we need is another great ice to come and sweep us all into the ocean. To give God a second chance.

  APRIL 12, 1917

  The boys took the train today to San Antonio. Sally is packing a bag to stay with her family in Dallas. Told me this is the reason she wished we had daughters. I told her I agreed with her.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  Could not explain to her why I could not survive Dallas.

  AN OMINOUS SIGN: immediately after seeing Glenn and Charlie off, received a call from the postmaster. The Lewis gun has arrived. After several mint juleps with the Colonel, decided to test the gun.

  We took the largest drum—nearly one hundred rounds—and after laboriously loading it and figuring out the winding mechanism, which is much like a pocket watch, we were ready to send some prickly pears to the next world when the most unfortunate group of javelina on earth walked into view.

  They were nearly a quarter mile away but the gun was advertised as effective at three times that distance for “area fire.” The Colonel could barely make them out so he suggested I do the shooting while he looked with field glasses. I was lying on the ground behind the gun while he stood next to me. I saw a shadowy figure waving in the distance.

  We elevated the sight and I fired a quick burst, perhaps five rounds.

  “Son of a bitch, Pete, you missed ’em by near thirty yards.”

  “Must be the wind.” My ears were ringing. I pretended to adjust the sight.

  “All right, they’re back to rooting. You gonna shoot or piss your pants?”

  I aimed into the sounder of pigs—which at that distance looked like a brown patch against the green of the brush—and pulled back the trigger. It was like holding on to a locomotive. One does not aim so much as direct the gun like a fire hose.

  “Left,” he was shouting, “right, right, walk ’em right . . . now left, more left, left left left left!” I did as he asked, seeing the bullets kick up dirt among the running brown shapes.

  “Put on that other drum, there are some still kicking.”

  I attached the second drum.

  “Son of a whore,” he was saying, “I wonder is that really four hundred yards . . .”

  I drowned out his talking with the noise of the gun.

  WHEN WE WENT to pack our things, my mare, who is used to me shooting deer, quail, and turkey from her back, was bug-eyed. She knew something unnatural was afoot. My father’s horse was nowhere in sight and it took nearly half an hour to find him.

  Before heading home, we rode out to inspect the damage. The javelina were spread over a large flat section of caliche, splayed in all manner of disassembly. It looked as if someone had put dynamite inside them.

  “Good,” my father said, surveying the damage. He rode around nodding. Then he said: “You think the Germans have these?”

  “They have thousands,” I told him.

  The Lewis had cooled enough to strap it to my saddle. Of course the Germans have machine guns. But it is not my father’s nature to look to that side of things. We began to ride back to the house.

  “I remember when a five-shot Colt was a weapon of mass destruction. Then you had maybe twenty years and there was the Henry rifle, load it on Sunday and shoot all week. Eighteen shots, I think.”

  “Life gets better and better,” I said.

  “You know I always thought those books would take you somewhere. I was sad when they didn’t.”

  “They have,” I said.

  “I mean away from here. You think I don’t sabe but I do. My brother was exactly like you. It runs in the family.”

  I shrugged.

  “Wrong place, wrong time . . . wrong something.”

  “I like this family and I like this place,” I told him, because for some reason, at that moment, it seemed true.

  He started to say something, then didn’t. As we rode back through the sun and the dust, toward our great white house on its hill, he seemed to relax, to settle into his saddle; I could tell his mind was wandering, doubtless over the many things he has done for which the entire world admires him.

  I began to think of
how often he was home during my childhood (never), my mother making excuses for him. Did she forgive him that day, at the very end? I do not. She was always reading to us, trying to distract us; she gave us very little time to get bored, or to notice he was gone. Some children’s version of the Odyssey, my father being like Odysseus. Him versus the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens. Everett, being much older, off reading by himself. Later I found his journals, detailed drawings of brown-skinned girls without dresses . . . My assumption, as my mother told us that my father was like Odysseus, was that I was Telemachus . . . now it seems more likely I will turn out a Telegonus or some other lost child whose deeds were never recorded. And of course there are other flaws in the story as well.

  APRIL 13, 1917

  This morning, Sally found me in my office, where I had slept. She had brought a tray of coffee and kolaches. I presumed she wanted something. She has not yet left for Dallas.

  “How was your new gun?” she said.

  “I guess the Colonel is quite fond of it.”

  “Is it the one we use or the one the Huns use?”

  “Ours, of course.”

  “But the Huns have them too.”

  “Of course,” I said again.

  “Well, I hope you had a good time with it.” She shook her head. “The whole time I was listening to that gun I could only think about Glenn and Charlie.”

  “I know.”

  She stood there, and I noticed the lines around her eyes, deeper every year, like my own. She looked like my mother in that light, her pale hair and skin . . . but unlike my mother, there is always a wheel turning somewhere in her mind. Though today she looked tired of thinking. I went forward and held her.

  “I’m not sure I can stay here anymore.”

  “You’ve been saying that.”

  “I really mean it.”

  I shrugged and released my grip, but she pulled me tighter.

  “We have to stick together,” she said. Then she added, “You haven’t touched me in weeks.”

  “You haven’t touched me either.”

  “I have. You just haven’t noticed.”

  “Our children will be fine.”

  “Pete,” she said, “is there anyone you ever have honest conversations with?”

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “There isn’t anyone else.”

  “So start with me,” she said. “Tell me exactly what you’re thinking. Not what you think I want to hear, but the truth.”

  “You are talking crazy.”

  She looked at me. “I know I don’t do much for you. I know I never have.”

  What would I tell her? That I have always known I belonged here? That one day some action will be required that will prove my life’s value? A forty-six-year-old man, waiting for fate to take over . . . it likely already has.

  “You promised me a place in the city when the children left.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I still have a few years I could salvage. A few men still find me attractive. If you want me to move to San Antonio by myself, tell me. Otherwise I am willing to split our time between here and someplace civilized, if you will just come with me some of the time.”

  “This place will fall apart without me,” I said. “And the Colonel cannot be left alone.”

  “You are worried about your father.”

  “He is eighty-one years old.”

  She shook her head. She looked out the window for a long time.

  “Is that your final decision?”

  APRIL 15, 1917

  Sally departed for the train station. We have made love four times in the past two days, more than the past year in total. Deep depression when I dropped her off, pointlessness of living alone . . . several times allowed the car to wander without my hands on the wheel . . . but that was not it, either. Somehow this was required. The greater plan. Strange tingling along my scalp, as before we rode on the Garcias, as on various days in my younger life, such as when Phineas stepped forward to take the halter of that black horse. My father had wanted me to do it, but in front of all those people, I could not touch it.

  When I got home it was dark and the house was also dark, quiet, and empty. Added another item to the list I began in Austin, originally titled “The Seven Types of Loneliness” (a man and woman sitting close, boy holding his mother’s leg, a cold rain, the sound of crows, a girl’s laughter down a stone street, four policemen walking, a thought of my father); of course the list has reached several hundred now. I ought to have burned it years ago, but instead I add another item: “A quiet house.”

  Tomorrow will release all the staff except Consuela and one or two of the maids. They should have no trouble finding work—men are being drafted left and right—I will give them three months’ pay.

  I tried to fall asleep but after a few hours I got up and walked around turning all the lights on. I could hear the wind rattling windows on the other side of the house. Finally I couldn’t stand it and walked out to see if my father was still awake.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Eli/Tiehteti

  Fall 1851

  Pizon and the others, driving the thousand stolen horses, had reached camp a week before us, and stragglers continued to trickle in. We had lost eleven members of the band but the raid was quietly considered a success. Though we knew that if we continued to have these sorts of successes, there would be no Indians left to ride the horses.

  Smaller raids continued all summer, mostly put on by young men who needed horses and scalps, both for marriage and because otherwise they had no status. The army had nearly finished a second line of forts—from Belknap to Abilene to Mason—but many settlers had already leapfrogged this second line. To the old-timers, the most ominous sign was the bee trees, which seemed to precede the line of settlement by a hundred miles or so and now reached nearly to the edge of the Llano. We were happy for so much honey, but we all knew what it meant.

  The Comancheros had figured out we were prosperous again, and I convinced Toshaway to double the price of the horses we traded. Previously, a good horse might be traded for a handful of glass beads or a few yards of calico, but now we wanted more ammunition and gun parts, more steel arrowheads, and more food. I stayed in camp and hunted and broke horses, but mostly I spent time with Prairie Flower, who was no longer embarrassed to be seen in public with me, as my stature was now equal to Nuukaru’s or even Escuté’s, even if my abilities were not.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT event of late summer was the capture of a young buffalo hunter, who, along with the rest of his party, had misjudged the degree to which the army and Rangers could protect him. We caught them in the lower reaches of the Palo Duro and after a brief fight his companions were all killed. He crawled out from under their wagon with his hands raised and, knowing what would happen to him, I immediately nocked an arrow, but Pizon shoved me and it went wide.

  The hunter was in his late twenties, with blond hair and beard and blue eyes and an innocent sort of look. I was happy to get his rifled Springfield and Minie ball molds, but the real prize was the man himself. Because he was alive and uninjured and so close to our camp, it was decided to bring him in to be tortured.

  This caused great excitement and all work was stopped for the day. It was as if the circus had come to town, or a public hanging called among the whites. He must have seen what was going to happen because he begged me to help him but there was nothing I could do, and a few of the newer captives, whose position was less secure, stomped on his face to show their loyalty.

  The torture of a captive was considered a high honor for the women of the village and all the female elders were gathered along with the younger ones. Prairie Flower was upset that she had not been selected. After stripping him naked, tying his hands and feet to stakes, spread-eagled so he was just barely suspended in the air, they poked fun at his pale hair and his privates, which were shrunken with fear; one woman sat on top of him and pretended she was going to rut him, much to the delight of everyo
ne. Most of the village was gathered, with children sitting or standing on shoulders, the same as would witness a hanging in town. The women built four very small fires, one each at his hands and feet. Fuel was added carefully, keeping the flames to a minimum, only building them hotter when he stopped shouting, which indicated the nerves had died. They would increase the heat by adding one very small stick, at which point he would begin to sing again.

  He shrieked himself hoarse and the children mimicked him with great joy. By late afternoon he was barely making a sound and I wondered if he’d ruptured his vocal cords. At supper he was given broth and water, which his body accepted gladly, though he must have known why we were giving it to him. Later they fed him again. I walked by, thinking he was in a stupor, but he recognized me and begged me to kill him—one Christian to another. I stood there thinking, knowing what I would want done for me, and then Toshaway caught me as I was returning to the tipi.

  “I know what you are thinking, Tiehteti. Everyone will know and the penalties will be severe. More than you think, probably.”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “He’s killing our buffalo.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right, Tiehteti.”

  PRAIRIE FLOWER WAS on fire that night. I did my best but after the second time I was less interested. She was rubbing herself against me and finally I stopped her.

  “Usually I can’t get rid of Nuukaru and Escuté,” she said. They were out on a raid, so we had the tipi to ourselves. “But now the one time I could use them . . . ”

  “I’m sure others are still awake, if that’s what you really want.”

  “You know I don’t.” She cuddled against me. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s the white man, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” she said. “I apologize for my horniness.”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. But I couldn’t.