The Son

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.