The Son

Chapter Sixty. J.A. McCullough

To lie around and do nothing but think — if you’d asked her yesterday she might have wanted a year of it; now all she wanted was to get up. It was bright again in the room, the sun was coming in, but something was wrong: tables and chairs had been flung, pictures were off the walls, busts and pedestals scattered about. Aphrodite was facedown in the corner. The roof would fall in and animals would build their nests.

I am not really seeing this, she thought. She decided to ignore it. She decided to be glad to be in this room, the one place her father hadn’t had the gumption to redecorate, he had filled the rest of the house with Remingtons and Russells and Bierstadts. But the Colonel would not have abided that. For him, this was what success looked like: dark wood, old sculpture, Eastern money. Which was trying to look like European money. Of course that had changed. The Italians now made movies about cowboys.

Even before the boom ended she had begun to diversify again, oil was overheated, every housewife in Midland was driving a Bentley. Along with most everyone she knew, she got into the savings-and-loan business. The S&Ls had been deregulated, allowed to loan money in commercial real estate, oil, and gas, the ceiling had been removed on the interest that could be paid to depositors. She bought a small one, offered high rates to attract depositors, then used the money for real estate projects in Houston and Dallas, taking a ludicrous up-front fee. But then real estate crashed along with oil, and Southsun was bailed out, which she felt guilty about, though not so guilty she wanted to lose the hundred million dollars herself. She thought she might have to testify in Washington, but she didn’t.

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.