The Son

Chapter Sixty-seven. Eli McCullough

With the surrender of the Comanches, an area as big as the Old States opened to settlement and every easterner who owned a whaling ship or hotel began to fancy himself a cattle baron. There were Frenchmen and Scots, counts and dukes in scissortail coats, peacocked Yankees with their faces shining like new mirrors. They overpaid for range, overpaid for stock, overpaid for horses, they were trying to catch up to the rest of us. Meanwhile the southern grasslands were already run-down; the smart stockmen drove their herds to Montana to get fat on what grass remained.

Half the cowhands were Harvard men in lisle thread socks, with mail-order pistols and silver-decked tack bought straight from a leathershop drummer. They’d come west to grow up with the country. Meaning see the end of it.

I said I would sell out by ’80. The part of me that was still alive hated the sight of cowbrutes, hated chewing every waking minute on how I would profit or lose by them. The rest of me couldn’t think of anything else. How to protect them, how to get the best price for them, and, when the money had gone out of them, how I might make it another way. I was caught in the thorns of my own undertaking, unmaking, I considered the beasts more than my own wife and children, I was no different from Ellen Wilbarger with her laudanum. She had not needed it until she tried it, but soon saw no other way.

MADELINE THOUGHT I was interfering with some senorita. She gave me too much credit. The problem was much bigger than any girl.

BY THEN I had moved them to San Antonio, but I still spent my time in the brasada or along some dusty waterhole and Madeline was not any happier. She told me to get a proper house built on the Nueces or else. I told her I had only a few years left — I could feel it doing something to me.

“Like what?” she said.

I started to tell her, but couldn’t. Old Nicky himself had pinched my jaw shut.

She paced the living room. She’d fallen in with some other grass widows and had taken to wearing paint; just a touch but I noticed it. The servants were off being servants and the boys were in the yard.

“I hate this house,” she said.

“It’s a hell of a nice house,” I said. It was a big white one in the Spanish style, big as the one she’d grown up in, with a good view of the river. It was two years’ wages and a sizable note to match.

“I would rather be living in a hut.”

“We’ll be out soon enough,” I said.

“Why not now?”

“Because.”

“We do not have to live in the biggest house. Now or ever. I believe you have confused me with my sister.”

She smiled but I wanted to keep it serious. “Three years,” I told her. “Come hell or high water I swear I will not touch a cow after that.”

“That is the same as never.”

“There is no school.”

“We will build one. Or hire a teacher. Or we keep this place and go back and forth and hire a teacher half the time.” She threw up her hands. “There are any number of ways,” she said. “We are not exactly building a railroad.”

“Well, it’s a waste of money to build a place and leave it.”

“The fool who buys the land will also buy the house. Meanwhile I am here with your children, who spend all their time pretending they are you when they don’t really know you.”

“It’s not the right place,” I said. “I am sure of it.”

But she was already not listening. I could see her thinking. “The representative is going back to Washington,” she said. The representative was her mother’s new husband. “There is a nice house for sale next door to theirs. Which is where I am taking the children unless you convince me otherwise.”

I walked away from her and stood by the window. The best part of me knew I ought to let her go but I could not get the words to my mouth. Outside, Everett was wearing my old buckskin shirt. He had a feather in his hair and he was stalking the other boys. I had been promising to show him how to make a bow for so long that I realized he had stopped asking me. Pete and Phineas were digging at something in the yard — they didn’t have the fire of a firstborn. I had also promised Everett I would let him ride with me a few days during roundup. In truth I liked that the boys were in school. I had not wanted to start them on the outdoor life; soon it would be fit only for hobbyists and outcasts.

Madeline was still talking. “Or,” she was saying, “you can move us to the Nueces.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Wonderful. September, then.”

“That is barely enough time to build a dugout.”

“Then hire twice as many men. Or ten times as many. I don’t care. But three months from now the children and I will not be living in this house.”

IN ABILENE A new tailor opened shop every week, and, after making a drive, most of the hands would sell their horses, buy suits, and take the train home. The ones who’d seen a Ned Buntline or Bill Cody show would brag on the incident for months, as if the shows were more real than their own lives. The others passed the winter reading Bret Harte.

The drives got shorter. The International and Great Northern surveyed a line through our pastures. The grass was disappearing but it didn’t matter — the railroads brought the farmers and nesters, people who wanted to live in towns — the land I had bought for a quarter was worth forty dollars an acre when they built.

Had it not been for the children I would have moved to the Klondike. The country was ruined, as a woman would have been after riding the cat wagon. I had never known it could fill up. I had never known there were so many people on earth.