“Let’s get into the air,” I said.
We walked toward the edge of town.
“You know he went after you, don’t you? He was always worrying if you knew that. They got as far as the Llano before they lost the trail.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Oh, he went after you all right.”
We reached the water and stood there and there was not much to say. A few boatmen were poling supplies for the settlers upriver. I took out my piece of thick and offered it and he cut off a chunk and put it in his lip.
“Your daddy was somethin’ else,” he said. “He could smell the Indians better than a wolf.”
“What happened to him?”
He was looking over the water. “I remember you could stand on Congress and hear billiards in one ear and whoopin’ aborgoins out the other. There was thirty, forty houses, maybe. And now look at it.” He looked behind us at the town, where there were now thousands of people. Down on the riverbank, the ferryman was doing a brisk business.
“What happened to him?” I said again. He was quiet and I thought of my father coming back to his house and wife and daughter and then I thought of him riding out after us. I watched the water. I could feel my fear drifting away from me.
The man just stood there. He never answered.
Chapter Forty-one
J.A. McCullough
She knew she was not alone, there was someone in the room, the person responsible for her condition. I’m living through my own death, she thought, and let herself drift. A cold place. An old pond. But the mind, she thought, the mind will survive, that was the great discovery, it was all connected, it was roots beneath the earth. You had only to reach it. The great hive.
She was not sure of herself; she felt like a child. The mind was just . . . it was the soul, they had always said it. The body shrank, it shrank and shrank while the soul grew and grew until the body could no longer hold it. You could build a pyramid or vault but it did not matter, the body shrank and stooped, they were right, she thought, they had been right all along, it was an error, the worst of her life. You have to wake up.
She opened her eyes but she was not in the room, there were colors, a landscape, a green plain going on as far as she could see and in front of her, an immense canyon drifting among clouds in a bright sky. This is not my memory, she thought, this belongs to someone else. She could see a coyote padding in a bar ditch, scents sounds it was taking in everything; she thought of a lock, a gate, a man shooting a gun.
She opened her eyes, latched on to the room, counting the chairs tables drawings, embers on the hearth, she was back in the house in River Oaks. Hank was by the window. He was angry about the children. Or something else: the television. The president had been shot and his wife was climbing over the seat.
“H.L. fucking Hunt,” Hank was saying, “we just killed the president.”
There was a voice, hers: “They say Oswald was working for the Russians.”
This is not real either, she thought. Hank had died before JFK. She was mixing things up.
But Hank did not appear to notice. “Hunt has a thousand people waiting for him at the airport with signs saying TRAITOR and YANKEE GO HOME. A few hours later, they shoot him.”
“It’s a little obvious,” she said.
There was the fireplace burning. Hank was looking out the window, but what he saw she couldn’t say. “When God dumps a lot of money in your lap, you start thinking you are closer to him than other people.”
Then he was kissing her. It went on, he didn’t notice that she was old, that she had lost her teeth. Then they were making love. She winked out, then came back again.
They were standing by the bar.
“Are we in on anything with Hunt?”
“No,” she said.
“That is a relief.” He sipped his whiskey. “If he weren’t such a hick, he’d be dangerous.”
“You’re a hick, darling.”
“I’m a hick with an art collection. A hundred years from now, we’ll be the Rockefellers.”
Of course it was not the Rockefellers he meant. It was the Astors. Or the Whitneys. As for their collection, half of what they’d first bought was fake and it had taken her the rest of her life to replace them with the originals.
AS FOR JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians. The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it. On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom, and while Jesus was walking to Calvary the Mogollon people were bashing each other with stone axes. When the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudos . . . but whether they had wiped out the Mogollons or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apaches. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanches. Who were finally wiped out by the Americans.
A man, a life—it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.
Chapter Forty-two
Diaries of Peter McCullough
JULY 13, 1917
Four days since we returned from Piedras Negras. Of course they noticed our absence—my Chandler was gone overnight—but nothing was said. María believes we were missed in the bustle.
Landmen have flooded the town; strangers appear at our door at all times of the day and lights burn at my father’s house all night. Both the Midkiffs and Reynoldses have been selling leases, but my father has turned down every offer that has come our way. I went over to his house to talk to him and found him sitting naked in the pool by his spring. His eyes were closed. In the water he looked like a small pale imp.
“I dunno why this heat never got to me before,” he said.
“You are getting old,” I told him.
“So are you.”
“We ought to sell some leases and forget about this.”
“That girl still in the house?”
I didn’t answer.
“You know, if I hadn’t kept your mother locked up I would swear you got made by an Indian.”
“You wouldn’t have been home to notice if I had,” I said.
He considered that, then changed the subject.
“Let them find some more oil and then we’ll consider selling leases.”
I sat down on the rocks.
“It’s all right, son. You’re a good cattleman. But you don’t know a goddamn thing about making money. And that’s why you got me.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Do some figuring on what our minerals are worth at a hundred an acre, which is where Reynolds and Midkiffs are selling.”
“Tens of millions,” I said.
“Then figure what they’ll be worth at a thousand an acre. Or five thousand.”
“Why do you even care?” I said.
“This is what is going to happen. A couple dozen drillers and oilmen are going to spend the next year or two proving our leases. That is when we will sell.”
I want to believe he is wrong. Unfortunately, I know better.
“What’s happening with that girl?” he said, but I was already walking away.
WHAT IS HAPPENING with María is that we have both been sore for days. The first night after Piedras Negras I slipped quietly from her room, but within an hour I’d returned and since then we have not spent more than a few minutes apart.
This morning I woke just after sunrise. I lay there, listening to her breath, taking in the odor of her hair and skin, dozing, then waking up to look at her again, washed over in the light and the pleasant feeling of being near her.
It occurs to
me that I have not seen the shadow in several days; I have not thought about Pedro’s ruined face or Aná’s scream. In a moment of sheer perversity, I try to call the images back to mind, but I cannot.
I HAVE ALWAYS known I am not the sort of person other people are inclined to love. They are blind to what I see in myself; with a glance they decide that my judgment ought not to be trusted. My singular luck, so far as they are concerned, was to be born into this great family; elsewise I would be some scrivener, renting a dim room in a filthy city.
It occurs to me that María may wake up one morning and see me as the others do, that her love may prove deciduous, though so far it is nearly the opposite; I see my own childish gaze reflected in hers, I catch her looking at me when my back is turned, I wake up and she is leaning on an elbow, watching me. We are drunk on each other. As for my so-called ailment—which I had presumed was a symptom of age, and Sally had presumed was yet another symptom of my unmanfulness—there has been not a single sign. If anything, the opposite: my body is possessed by an unending desire to be connected with her (just the thought . . . ); we never separate after making love and she will often roll on top of me and fall asleep while we are still attached.
This morning she read to me from the Song of Solomon; I read the second of the Heloise and Abelard letters to her; when we are together it seems our mere existence is a transcendence of all that is wrong with the world, but as I sit now I wonder if there is some darker element, a man having relations with someone who is not his equal, though of course she is, in every way except in power, which means she is not. She is free to go and yet not free, as, aside from our room here, she has no place to call her own.
“WHERE DID YOU go?” she says, when I return.
“To my office.”
“You were gone so long.”
“I’ll never do it again.”
“Do you ever write about me?”
“You are most of what I write about,” I say. “What else would I write about?”
“Since when?”
“Since the first day.”
“But then you were unhappy. Perhaps you should destroy those pages.”
“I was confused,” I say.
“I’ve been thinking about the story of your father and the dead men . . .”
I hesitate for a moment; this could be nearly any story of my father. Then I realize what she is talking about.
“ . . . and there is one I’d like to tell you. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind getting your journal?”
“I have a strong memory.”
“But a lazy body.”
“No, it’s true. My memory is my curse.”
She runs her fingers through my hair. I get up and get my journal, just for her sake. On the way to my office I pass Consuela straightening up my bedroom, where I have not slept in five days. She doesn’t look up.
HE WAS A Coahuiltecan, the last living one on earth. His people were older than the Greeks and Romans; they’d been living here five thousand years by the time the pyramids were built, and to them, all the other races of the earth were like scurrying ants, who appear in the first warm days but die off in the first frost.
But finally their own winter arrived. The Spanish appeared and then the Apaches, who continued the work of the Spanish, and then the Comanches, who continued the work of the Apaches, until, by this day in the spring of 1836, this man was the only survivor.
On that day my great-uncle Arturo Garcia saw the Coahuiltecan kneeling in his pasture, looking for something, and as the Indian was nearly blind, Arturo went to help him. After several hours in the buffalo grass and nopales he found the missing item, a marble of black obsidian, which Arturo presumed had mystical properties. Arturo had been born on this land, as had his father, and he knew that no rocks of that nature are found in the area.
Arturo was a wealthy young man, with a remuda of blooded horses, a beautiful wife, and a sixty-league grant from the king of Spain himself. His house was full of silver, pieces of art, and the weapons of his family, who had been knights in the olden times. Every morning he woke before the sunrise and watched the light come in, illuminating his land and his works and all he would leave for his sons.
Arturo had blood, and was known to cut out the hearts of his enemies, but he was also the sort of man who—despite having one hundred men working for him, a small town to look after, a beautiful wife and four children—would help an old Indian look for a marble.
Of course he didn’t believe in seers or oracles; he was not a stupid peasant. He and his brother had both attended the Pontifical University, his ancestors had founded the University of Sevilla, he had grown up fluent in French and English and Spanish. But that day he was not feeling so intelligent. The Anglos had, against all odds, won the battle against his people at San Jacinto, and he was worried for his family.
The victory made no sense. On one side was a professional army, a powerful and ancient empire on which the sun never set, and the other a pack of ignorant barbarians, condemned criminals and land speculators. Though Texas had briefly been open to the Anglos, the borders had been closed since 1830, and yet they continued to illegally sneak into the state to take advantage of the free land, free services, loose laws. It was not unlike what happened on the fringes of the Roman Empire, when the Visigoths overran the imperial army. Perhaps God curses the proud.
Arturo asked the seer if he could put a question to him, and the seer said of course, but there was no guarantee of any answer.
Arturo said: “Will I lose my land?”
The seer said: “Go away, do not disturb me with questions of a material character; this is a place of the spirit, of philosophy, of the nature of the universe itself.”
(This is not really what the Indian said, I interrupt.)
(The fact that he was an Indian has no bearing on his intelligence. She puts her finger to my lips.)
That night he couldn’t sleep, thinking about all he had to lose. He returned to the seer the following morning.
“Seer, will I lose my land?”
And the seer said: “You have the best horses for five hundred miles, the biggest house, the most beautiful wife, an ancient lineage, and four healthy sons. I am a blind, penniless Indian. You should be the one giving me the answers.”
“But you are wise.”
“I am old. So old that I remember playing at your house before it was there.”
“I suspect you are mistaken,” said Arturo. “That house has stood nearly a hundred years.”
“Nevertheless, I remember. There was an enormous rock I used to sleep on with my wife and all my children, for it was very warm, even in winter, as if it went down to the center of the earth. It must have been removed, as it was a growing rock, and became a little taller each year.”
Arturo knew there had been such a rock. The top had been blasted off and the house was built over what was left. But as the years passed, the rock had begun to grow, cracking the plaster and bowing all the floors, so that a marble placed in the center of the room would roll toward any of the walls. Finally the floor was removed and the rock hammered and chiseled away. But there was no way for the Indian to have known this. Arturo said: “Old Man, I have done you a favor, and now you will kindly do me this favor as well. Will I keep my land or not?”
The old Coahuiltecan did not take a single breath for ten minutes. Then he said: “You will not like my answer.”
“It is as I suspected.”
The man nodded.
“I must hear it.”
“I am sorry but you will not keep your land. You and your wife and all your sons will be killed by the Anglos.”
THAT EVENING ARTURO stood on his portico, watching his sons play in the grass, his beautiful wife standing near, his vast pastures where his vaqueros and their families tended his herds.
He could not understand why a man like him, a good man, should suffer such a terrible fate and that night he took the most ancient weapon of his family, an alabarda that had seen com
bat against the French, the Dutch, and the Moors, and honed the edge so fine that it would split a hair. The next morning he returned to the camp of the old Coahuiltecan, where he cut off the man’s head with a single stroke. But even as the head lay there, detached from the body, it looked at him and uttered a curse.
(But the lungs, I say. Without the lungs there can be no air . . . )
(The finger goes again to my lips.)
A few months later, deciding on the course of maximum caution, Arturo sent his family to Mexico City for their safety. But before they could even cross the river, they were waylaid by white militiamen, who committed enormous outrages upon his wife as she lay dying and murdered Arturo’s four sons as well.
Arturo resolved to never marry again, and did not. In 1850, after the second war, he went to Austin and paid all his property taxes, and it was only because of his mastery of both written and spoken English, which exceeded that of every Anglo lawyer in the capital, that he was allowed to retain any property at all. Half his lands were immediately confiscated because the Anglos claimed the title was flawed, though they could not point out how, or where.
TWENTY YEARS LATER he disappeared, murdered with all his vaqueros. My father, who was his nephew, inherited the property. My mother wanted no part of it. She wanted him to sell the land to the Americans.
“But they are murderers,” my father said.
“Better to sell to them than live among them,” said my mother.
But my father began to go crazy thinking about the vast pastures he might own and six months after Arturo’s murder, he and my mother moved here, along with a dozen vaqueros he hired in Chihuahua.
The house was untouched, the family treasure still intact. After reading my uncle’s journals, he went and dug up a skeleton at the place they described. He reburied the man, whose head was indeed detached, at the most peaceful place he could find, under a persimmon tree next to a spring, with a good knife and a sack of beans to carry the man through his journeys in the next world. He was certain this would lift the curse and keep our family safe.