MEANWHILE THOMAS WAS making plans to come out to all his old friends, to everyone he’d known in Houston, she had discouraged him, she had relentlessly discouraged him, there was not a single bit of upside to his plan. He would only be making things harder on himself. He never saw those people anyway.
“Why should I have to hide who I am?” he said.
She was so surprised she couldn’t think of anything to say. He was finally standing up for himself, she ought to support him. And yet, she was not sure, it was a cry for attention—to identify yourself in public by what you did in your most private moments—it was wrong, entirely wrong, he ought to look to Phineas, who had taken the world in his fist and crushed it.
She had made some error. Neither of her children had any confidence, they were both muddle-headed, Susan in her addiction to gurus and therapists, Thomas in his liberal politics, his insistence on coming out. They could not seem to grasp that what mattered was what you did. Not what you said or thought about.
The coming-out had been a nonevent. She had sensed his confusion, she had felt terrible for him, he had thought it would be important, a pivotal moment, but nothing had changed, he was the same person.
It was not fair of her. She did not know what he’d been through. She had begun to wonder again if it was her fault, both her children had become unhappy, she guessed because neither one had ever engaged in any meaningful endeavor. She had flown to see them, a formal proposal, a few million each, or twenty, whatever they needed, whatever they wanted to do—a gallery for Thomas, a vineyard for Susan—there was no reason to start small. They were confused. She had always left them alone. And then they saw. They understood. She considered them failures, she considered them trivial, she was trying to save them from themselves.
BY THEN SUSAN had two young boys, Jeannie barely saw them, it was as if her daughter, without ever hinting at it, knew this was the only war she might ever win with her mother. But then Susan’s boyfriend, father to neither of the two children, ran off somewhere and Susan was calling to ask if she might move to Texas, though she didn’t actually mean that, what she meant was could her mother look after the children while she went off to hunt another man.
Jeannie was delighted, though she tried not to show it. The boys were six and eight, but had little recollection of ever meeting her. Ash was pale and blond, Dell a pure Spaniard; they looked like exactly what they were, boys with different fathers. She loved them. They had not seen the ranch since they were very small and she took them over it in a helicopter, the vast kingdom, they were its princes.
“One day this will belong to the two of you,” she said.
“Mother,” said Susan.
“One day this will all be yours.”
She loved the boys. They sat there in front of the television, she bought a few tame ponies they enjoyed riding, but in general both were possessed by a clumsiness, a wariness, as if the physical world were conspiring against them. She could not help comparing them to her brothers, even to Ben and Thomas. It was likely an illusion. It was likely her failing memory. She loved them anyway; sitting there on the couch watching jangling cartoons, she forgave Susan everything she had ever done.
But the slackening. By five she and her brothers were throwing loops. By ten she was at the branding fire. Her grandchildren were not good at anything and did not have much interest in anything either. She wondered if the Colonel would even recognize them as his descendants, felt briefly defensive for them, but of course it was true. Something was happening to the entire human race.
That is what all old people think, she decided.
She took them on walks for as long as they would put up with her, this is a javelina track, this is a deer track, that is a green jay. That is a kettle of buzzards and there is where a rabbit has been making his run and here is where a hawk ate a woodpecker.
WHEN THE FIRST men arrived, she told them, there were mammoths, giant buffalo, giant horses, saber-toothed tigers, and giant bears. The American cheetah—the only animal on earth that could outrun a pronghorn antelope.
Her grandsons listened politely. Maybe they sensed where the story was going; where all her stories went. The American cheetah had disappeared and antelopes had gotten slower—the laggards got to keep breeding. People had become slower as well.
They went inside to watch television. She sat on the gallery alone. McCullough land, as far as the eye could see. There was no reference. There was the Colonel of course, but what kind of man had it taken to thrust a spear into a twenty-thousand-pound animal? The bears were twice the size of a modern grizzly, they must have died horrible deaths, as many words for courage as an Eskimo had for snow. For suffering as well. That is who we came from, she thought.
They’d left nothing but tracks and bones. In Australia, frozen into rock, there were the footprints of three people crossing a mudflat. At twenty-seven miles per hour—all three moving as fast as the fastest man on earth today. They were speeding up when the tracks ended.
WHAT SHOULD SHE tell her grandchildren? There were too many facts and you could arrange them in any order you wanted. Eli McCullough had killed Indians. Eli McCullough had killed whites. He had killed, period. It depended on whether you saw things through his eyes or the eyes of his victim as he pulled the trigger. Dead people did not have voices and this made them irrelevant.
She didn’t know. Perhaps he had sown the seeds of his own ruination. He’d provided for all of them, and they’d become soft, they’d become people he never would have respected.
Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all? People needed something to worry about or they would destroy themselves, and she thought of her grandchildren and all the grandchildren yet to come.
Chapter Sixty-one
Ulises Garcia
The ranch made all its money from oil and gas, and the men from those companies were always driving around checking the wells and tanks and pumps. They were mostly white and their soda cans were always found along the roads. The vaqueros did not care for them and every time they saw a piece of surveyor tape marking some turn, they would stop to cut it down.
But the work was not bad; there was something to be said for air-conditioning when you wanted it, and the money, compared to Mexico, was unbelievable. In late January he’d gone to a rodeo with the other vaqueros, all of whom had work permits. They had been reluctant to take him—a truck full of Mexicans was a prime target and if they were caught they would lose their permits—but he pretended not to notice their hesitation. He quickly realized that three-quarters of the men in the competitions did not live or work on ranches—they competed at rodeos for fun.
He and Fernando got third in the team roping; he was going to collect his ten dollars when he saw a pair of ICE men talking to the promoter. He walked the other way. He waited in the brush outside the parking lot and watched for Fernando and the others to come out.
No one spoke on the ride home. It was no small thing to have a work permit; even being around them, he was putting them in jeopardy.
He was going stir-crazy. He could not even leave the ranch. One Sunday he rode up to the old Garcia place; it was just crumbling walls now, but it had once been a big house, a fortress even. There was still a spring running nearby, and trees and shade, and a view. He entered the ruins of the house and knew instantly, felt in his gut, that his people had lived here. Though Garcia was not exactly an uncommon name.
A truck came up the road, and he slipped out of the ruins and considered hiding; he felt as if he were doing something wrong. Though of course he was not. He might be trailing a lost cow.
The man who got out of the truck was short and baggy, old pants and an old shirt and thick glasses, the look of a person who spent all his time alone. The other hands had mentioned that Mrs. McCullough was paying someone to write a history of the ranch. He had never met a writer, but he thought this man looked like one, like he had not washed his hair or his gla
sses in a long time. Ulises introduced himself.
“I like to come up here and eat lunch,” said the man. He seemed embarrassed to be breathing. “It’s about the best view on the property, plus”—he indicated the spring—“it’s nice to be near water.”
After they had been sitting and talking, Ulises asked: “So what happened to the people who used to live here?”
“They were killed.”
“Who killed them?”
“The McCulloughs. Who else?”
Chapter Sixty-two
Diaries of Peter McCullough
SEPTEMBER 15, 1917
Feel my heart growing moderate. An even worse punishment. The might-have-beens filling in my years.
I think of my son’s wounding, his near-death, as an excuse for other deaths. Both my children in some barracks, waiting to be sent overseas. This house nothing more than a mausoleum. Just in recorded history the polestar has changed four times. . . . yet men insist we will endure on this earth.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1917
Went out to help the vaqueros check the fences after last night’s rain. In an arroyo, sticking out of the bank, I found a bone so ancient it had completely turned to stone; it rang like steel when I struck it.
SEPTEMBER 20, 1917
Ab Jefferson at Pinkerton came by today in person. Pretended it was a social call. We went for a drive and he informed me that in Guadalajara there are three possible María Garcias, all recent arrivals. Gave three addresses.
I had to pull the car over. He patted me on the back.
“It’s one of the most common names in Mexico, Pete. They are probably farm girls.”
“It’s a start,” I said.
“Do you want me to send someone?”
“No,” I said.
Wrote letters to each of them, begging them to take me back. Lay on the sofa all day. The shadow is no longer standing over me. He has retreated to one of the corners.
Chapter Sixty-three
Eli McCullough
Early 1870s
Beef was up four straight years but in ’73, with the economy falling over, most went back to killing steers for hides.
I would not allow it. By then I owned 118 sections in fee simple with another 70 on lease. I held my stock. Our losses we kept to a minimum as we shot any mounted rider inside our fences. It was all according to Gunter.
Those afoot we let pass: it can never be said I denied an honest man his day’s work. It was known in Carrizo that any man who found his family short rations could entitle himself to one of my calves, so long as he left me the hide. Only bullets and walls make for honest neighbors and a single night in my pastures would net any rustler a year’s wages, a year of my own life. If they had built a cow-proof fence between us and the river . . .
There are plenty of old pistols still to be found in the brush country. Bone rots faster than iron. It was all according to Gunter.
MADELINE AND THE children had moved to a big house in Austin. The children had schools and tutors and I would have sooner burned the ranch than had them out to it, though Madeline had been asking for a proper house on the Nueces, so that we could all live together. I put it off. There were no schools. And she would not have cottoned to our treatment of fence crossers.
ONE DAY A black mood came over me for no reason, I was ornery as a snake and could not stand for anyone to look at me. I went off by myself. I guessed it was the heat.
The next morning they were shouting it in the streets: Quanah Parker and the last of the Comanches had surrendered. There were barely a thousand left on earth—the same number that had lived in Toshaway’s village—and now the whole of Texas was open to the white man. I told Madeline I needed time alone, saddled my horse and went up the Colorado. I was riding and riding, but no matter how far I got there were hog callers and boatmen. I rode well into the night until finally it was quiet. I climbed a ledge and built a fire and howled out to the wolves. But nothing howled back.
That I had done wrong was plain. I was not thick enough to believe I might have saved the ponies from Ranald Mackenzie’s troopers, but you could never say for certain. A single man can make a difference.
I thought how I might have gone back to the Numunuu when the war started. It hit me that fifteen years had passed since. I could not believe it; I could barely name a thing I’d done. I sat there looking out over the cliff, running it through my mind. It was not that I did not love my family. But there are things no person can give you.
Then I could not stand looking at my fire; I kicked the logs into the river and watched their spark quench. Then I rode home. I arrived well into the black morning, filled a lamp, and went into my office.
I took out my ledgers and securities and laid them on my desk. Deposits, shares in the Pacific Express, a steel concern in Pittsburgh, a sawmill in Beaumont. I considered how good the rains had been and the pastures I had just leased and all the new cowbrutes the green grass would nurture. I sat in my chair and thought about these things. I began to feel at ease.
Chapter Sixty-four
J.A. McCullough
Ted had not left her so much as asked to be released. There had been some final revolution of the blood and he’d gotten tangled with a woman half his age. She was angry, she was worried about him, about the convenience this woman—a schoolteacher—might see in him. Which only made him furious. You could have kept me, he said, you could have kept me a hundred or a thousand different times. But of course she could not have. It was not in her.
It was true that she was lonely, that she was occasionally struck by a physical need that she had not felt for him in decades, but mostly there was a lightness. She wondered what was wrong with her. She had always been a person who did not need much affection, she did not need much from other people, but of course there was the downside; she did not have much to give, either.
Her worry that Ted might be her last lover turned out to be ridiculous. There were other companions, men who could have, and still did have, younger women, but they were companions nonetheless; there were things they could not share with young people, and she suspected, though not a single one had admitted this to her, that decades of being the less attractive partner might take a toll. She wondered what it would be like to look into the mirror and see yourself, white haired, slough skinned, your wilting everything and uncountable skin tags, right next to some perfect young specimen of the human race.
She was not sure. She had not compromised. She had not compromised and in that way, she’d escaped. I am the last of my kind, she thought, the last the last the last . . . but even that was a kind of vanity, there could be no last of anything, there were uncountable billions to come.
Milton Bryce became a widower, there had been another chance, she had known him nearly fifty years, and they had talked about it, how the two of them might form a sort of partnership, they had kissed but not otherwise touched, they were both into their seventies, he was a good man, but there was not a drop of fire in him. It was better to be alone. She was not some spinster. There were things she had not done, perhaps she had missed out, but the Colonel had not remarried, either. There was a reason for that.
Maybe if she’d gotten sick she would have felt differently. But even then she would not have wanted a lover taking care of her, even after two decades she had not liked using the toilet in front of Ted, had not liked brushing her teeth in front of him and when she got out of bed she always put on a nightgown, it was not modesty. It was just that without keeping something to yourself, the only thing left was comfort.
SHE HAD ALWAYS suspected (known, she thought) that she might outlive Thomas. There were people with a will to survive, people who might drag themselves across a desert, but Thomas was not one of them.
At a certain point, she had begun to think he would dodge it, he had been with the same partner (lover, she thought, husband) for over a decade, then quick as that, his partner was dying and they all knew what that meant for Thomas. It did not make her special. All
stories ended that way. And yet it seemed to her that she had willed her son’s fate, that by somehow suspecting it, considering it, she had witched it up out of the future, where a child’s death was supposed to remain.
As for the man Thomas lived with—Richard—she had never cared for him. He was not sure of himself and he compensated. Thomas and Susan both found him hilarious, but he was not and she hated the sight of him at the hospice, you have killed my son, that was all she could think. She had to fly back to Midland in the morning. “When will you be here again?” Thomas asked her. For the funeral, she thought. Richard hated her even as he was dying; she hated him right back. But there was something in her son’s face.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll be here tomorrow.”
She’d been trying to unload some acreage in the Spraberry to Walt and Amos Benson. They wanted to take her out at $16.26; she was looking for $19.00. It was high but things were happening.
“Come out to the ranch,” they said. “We’ll get the quail opener.”
There was nothing she would have liked better; the Bensons were old friends, Walt’s wife had died a year earlier and there had always been some spark . . . but she couldn’t. She had to go back to San Francisco. She did not want to tell them why.
So she had flown back and spent the night in the hospice, staring at the gaunt-faced man in the bed, knowing she would be looking at her own son there soon enough. The man’s parents had not been told. She wondered if she ought to find out who they were and call them. She decided she should, they had a right to know, but then she wasn’t sure, and then she had never been more afraid of anything, she made one bargain after another, her own life, all her money, speaking to God the entire night. None of it meant anything. She would lose her son. In the morning she slept two hours on her Gulfstream and woke up in Midland to meet with the Bensons again. She told them that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait.