The Son

Chapter Fourteen. Jeannie McCullough

In 1937, when she was twelve, a man named William Blount, along with his two sons, disappeared from his farm near the McCullough ranch. The farm itself was dried up, the family living on relief flour and rabbit meat, and Blount’s wife said her husband and two boys had gone onto the McCullough’s property — which still had plenty of water and grass — to get a deer to feed themselves. Neither Blount nor his sons ever came home and his wife claimed to have heard shots from the direction of the ranch.

Everyone knew what happened if you trespassed on McCullough land. Both roads to town wound through its quarter-million acres and if your car broke down, you were better walking ten miles along the road than cutting through the pastures, where fence riders might take you for a thief. After the Garcia troubles, the ranch had been declared a state game preserve, which meant that in addition to the vaqueros, the McCulloughs had game wardens — technically employees of the state — as additional security. Some said they buried a dozen people a year in the back pastures, poachers and vagrant Mexicans. Others said it was two dozen. Those people are just talking, is what her father said. But she could see that her brothers, who treated the vaqueros as family, were not comfortable around the fence riders.

The day after the Blounts disappeared, Jeannie answered the front door to find the sheriff standing there alone. He was originally from up north; suspected of being a half-breed Indian, he was a tall thin man with a sunburned face and hawk nose. He had been elected over Berger, her father’s man, by pandering to the Mexicans. Berger had hunted their land and borrowed their horses; Van Zandt only came when there was trouble. Or, said her father, when he needed money.

On the staircase landing, right under the big Tiffany window, was a daybed where you could lie and read. You could also hear downstairs without being seen. She lay there, with the sunlight coming through the window, the portraits of her family along the staircase: the Colonel leaning on his sword, in the uniform of the Lost Cause; the Colonel’s dead wife with their three boys. Both the wife and one of the sons (Everett, she knew) were illuminated by an otherwordly light; Peter (disgraced) and Phineas (whom Jeannie liked) looked normal. Also along the stairs were marble cherubs and busts. She listened to her father and the sheriff.

“I didn’t want to call,” said Van Zandt.

Her father said something she couldn’t hear.

“Folks are saying we ought to be searching for these Blounts.”

“Evan, if we let ten deputies on our land ever’time some greaser disappeared…”

“This is a white man and two boys and folks are pretty worked up, even the Mexicans. I haven’t seen anything like it.”

“Well, it is nothing new,” said her father. “There are plenty around here who won’t like me unless I lose money to them in every horse trade.”

Relations between the McCulloughs and the citizenry had been strained for some time. A third of the town was out of work; a few months earlier it had come out that her father had blocked the construction of a new state highway through their lands — the road would have cut thirty miles off the trip between Laredo and Carrizo Springs. The San Antonio Express picked up the story. It was the same thing they were saying about the King and Kenedy ranches: Another Walled Kingdom. Common men not welcome.

“It’s this goddamn Roosevelt,” said her father. “You mark my words, that was the last free election we will ever see in this country. We are on the verge of a dictatorship.”

THE NEXT DAY a crowd gathered at the main gate. They stayed there all day. Her father did not go down to talk to them; instead he distributed the ranch’s half-dozen Thompson guns among the hands who knew how to use them.

“Stay off your porch tonight,” he told her. “Stay away from the windows and don’t turn on any lights.”

“What’s going to happen?” she said.

“Nothing. This has gone on plenty of times before.”

She went to bed early, climbing the stairs to the east wing, where the children slept. All the bedrooms had their own sleeping porches and she turned out the light, debated a few seconds, then, disobeying her father’s orders, went out to her porch and got quietly into bed. The stars were bright as always and she lay listening to the crickets, the hoots of owls, lowing of cattle, whippoorwills, a coyote. There was the creaking of the windmill that fed the house cistern, but she barely noticed. The tree frogs were thrumming, which meant rain. She heard a rustling from the next porch — her brother Paul.

“Is that you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What d’you think’s gonna happen?”

“I dunno.”

“It’s nonsense about those Blounts, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Are Jonas and Clint in bed?”

“They’re with Daddy.”

“Can you see down to the gate?”

“Stop asking questions.”

It was quiet and then he added: “I can’t see anything.”

“What’ll happen if they come through?”

“I imagine Daddy will shoot them. I saw them carrying the Lewis gun a few hours ago.”

Her father must have called the governor because the next morning a company of Rangers drove down from San Antonio. The day after that he agreed to let the sheriff search the property, all quarter-million acres. The Blounts were never found, but she knew as well as anyone it would have been like needles in a haystack.

OF THE FOUR children, only she and Jonas liked school. Paul and Clint found it boring; their father had no use for it either; the compulsory attendance laws were another sign of the government reaching into his pocket. The school was in McCullough Springs, named after her great-grandfather. After the Blount incident her father set out to mend relations, agreeing to pay for a mural that had long been planned for the school, a pastoral scene showing Americans and Mexicans working together to build the town, but when the mural was finished, it showed skeletal Tejano farm workers stooped in an onion field, eyes bulging, a few ragged crosses in the distance. A patrón bearing a passing resemblance to Jeannie’s father sat astride a black horse, keeping watch. The mural was painted over and Jeannie’s father gave up trying to be nice to the townspeople.

The McCulloughs paid most of the school’s expenses, though the Midkiffs and Reynoldses chipped in as well. The children of Mexicans attended free, though never for very long; they came and went throughout the year, a month here, a month there, the truant officer never went after them. There was no point trying to be friends; they would disappear for half the year and when they came back she would have to start all over. The children of the white farmers were better, but when they visited the ranch she could see how they wished they lived there instead of her, and an uncomfortable eagerness would come into their manner. Eventually she had stopped being friends with anyone. The only person she had much in common with was Fannie Midkiff, but she was three years older and crazy for boys. She was bound for a sorry end, they all said, Midkiff or not.

BEFORE THE COLONEL died, so long as he had the energy, she was allowed to sit with him and do her studying. The Colonel spent his mornings on the west gallery, out of the sun, and his evenings on the east gallery, also out of the sun. The visitors never stopped: a man from the government (a Jew, they said) came with a recording machine and the Colonel would talk into it for hours. There were daybeds on the galleries so he might sleep whenever he wanted; he slept and slept, that was what he did mostly; One day I will sleep forever, that is what he told her.

He never slept for very long, though. He was always up in time to shoot a snake trying to get across the wide dirt yard, hoping to reach the cool under the porch. Someday we will live in a house that doesn’t have a damned dirt yard, said her grandmother. That will be the day we get snakebit, said the Colonel.

If Jeannie happened to be nearby when the Colonel woke up, he would send her for ice. Or mint; he had planted a patch around one of the stock tanks. He seemed to live off juleps. She would crush the mint at the bottom of the glass and add three spoons of sugar and fill the glass with ice. Sometimes, before he added the whiskey, he would let her suck on the sweet minty ice.

When it was not too hot, she and the Colonel would go on walks, shuffling through the tall grass under the bright sky, stopping to rest in an oak mott, or a copse of cedar elms, or along the streams if they were running. She was always missing things: deer, a fox, the movement of a bird or mouse, a flower blooming out of season, a snake den. Though she could see twice as far as he could, she felt blind around him — she noticed practically nothing except the sun and grass. She often wondered if he were making things up, but every time they went walking, he recovered some keepsake — the bleached skull of a possum, a shed antler, a bright wingfeather off a yellowhammer woodpecker. He walked very slowly and often had to stop and lean on her for support. If it were not too dry when they came on a snake den, he would send her back for a jug of kerosene to pour down the hole, but it was dry most of the time. Sometimes when they stopped to rest he would ask her to dig a thorn out of his hard yellow foot. He didn’t wear boots; he could no longer keep his balance in them. He wore only Indian moccasins. Indians — the real Indians from the reservation in Oklahoma — would give him things like that, and when they left, he got a sad look and would be short with her father or anyone else who bothered him. Jeannie was his favorite, it was plain to everyone, and her father pretended not to care, though she knew he did.

If the Colonel was busy and she did not have schoolwork, her job was to gather the milch cows from the pasture and milk them, smelling their sweet breath and listening to the sound of the pail, tinny at first, then soft as it filled with milk. Her brothers hated the job — it was not proper work for a vaquero, being swished in the face by the cow’s dungy tail — but there was a satisfaction at seeing the animal’s relief, the sounds she could make with the streams of milk, playing them against the sides of the pail. It was not a song, but it was something like one. The milk was taken to the kitchen, strained, and either put into the icebox or left out for the cream to rise and be skimmed off. The domestic staff were allowed to have all the skimmed milk they wanted, but everything else was for the family. They always had more milk than they needed and often entire buckets would clabber and one of her brothers would carry it out to the bunkhouse for the vaqueros. It was something she missed later in life, clabbered milk with brown sugar and fruit. When pasteurization came along, they said clabber wasn’t safe, though she’d been eating it all her life.

When she was not gathering the milch cows she was looking after the dogies; technically this was her brothers’ job as well, but they rarely attended to it. When a calf was orphaned, the hands would drive it to the pens near the house. Jeannie would tie a cow to the fence, then splash the cow’s milk on the dogie’s head. She allowed the cow to smell her own milk on the orphan, then brought the dogie to the cow’s udder. Usually the cow would kick the strange calf away, and Jeannie would have to wait a while before repeating the process. Sometimes the cow gave in immediately and allowed the dogie to suckle; other times it took days. Clint and Paul were always buying horses with their dogie money; no one knew what Jonas did with his. She gave hers to her father to hold, and when she was twelve she opened an account in San Antonio, depositing nearly ten thousand dollars.

WHEN SHE COULD not sit on the porch with the Colonel, her other favorite place was the old Garcia house, which, though the Garcias were long dead, was still called the casa mayor. She had known from a young age what happened to them.

“Pedro Garcia didn’t have any sons to work the ranch,” her father said, “and his daughters all married bad men who ran Pedro into debt. The bad men started stealing our cattle and then they shot your uncle Glendale.”

“So we went and shot them back.”

“No, the Texas Rangers went to their house and tried to talk to them, and we went along with the Rangers. But the Garcias started shooting at the Rangers.”

There was nothing higher in her mind than a Texas Ranger. “I am glad they are dead,” she said about the Garcias.

“They were good people who had bad luck,” he said. Then he added: “Bad things can happen to good people.”

Daughters — that was one bad thing that could happen to you. Once she had overheard her father telling a reporter, who was visiting for the occasion of the Colonel’s hundredth birthday, saying: “First you pray for sons, second you pray for oil. You look at the Millers over in Carrizo, they used to own eighty sections, but they had nothing but she-stuff to pass it to.”

She went right up to her room and at supper she pretended to be sick. After that she had not minded when the Colonel talked bad about her father.

THE GARCIA HOUSE had been built in the 1760s, one of the first settlements in the area; it sat on a rise over the Nueces River valley where, even with the rest of the land dried up, a spring still flowed from the rocks. The house, which resembled a small castle, was built of heavy stone blocks. There was an observation tower, nearly forty feet high, for keeping watch over hostile territory, and the casa mayor’s windows were tall slits, too narrow to climb through. There were plenty of gun ports as well, which she imagined had spit death at heathen Indians.

The roof was long collapsed and inside the casa mayor, mesquite and huisache grew up among the debris, along with a few oaks and hackberries that were already higher than the walls. From the outside, the casa mayor now looked like a walled garden, a safe and inviting place, though it was not. The floor was dirt and there were rusty nails and springs and bits of jagged wood, not to mention the thorns of the huisache. She was not allowed inside but she went anyway, picking her way carefully to the tower. After clambering over more half-burned beams and thorny brush, she could reach the stone staircase that wound around the inside of the tower, all the way to the top, though there was no longer any platform. She would stand on the narrow top stair, in the sun, looking out over the country as it descended to the Nueces River, then back toward her own house, and beyond that McCullough Springs, with its two- and three-story buildings and big stone bank. When the Colonel first moved here he had lived in a jacal, and then a house made from timber. That house had burned after the Colonel’s wife died and he’d built another one from stone.

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.