The Son

Chapter Eleven. J.A. McCullough

The house had been dead a long time; she was the last of its children. She willed herself to get up. The chandeliers hung quietly above her, indifferent to her suffering. Get up, she thought. But nothing happened.

DURING HER CHILDHOOD it been a gay, chattering place, not a moment of silence or privacy; the idea that she might one day be lying alone, the house silent as a graveyard… When she came home from school there was always someone talking in the great room or on the gallery or she would wander around and there would be the Colonel, a cluster of his friends talking and drinking or shooting clay pigeons. There were serious-looking young men who came to take notes, ancient plainsmen living out their last days in rented rooms, and there were others who, like the Colonel, were millionaires.

There were reporters and politicians and Indians who came in great bunches, six or eight to a car. The Colonel was different around the Indians; he did not hold court as he did among the whites but rather sat and nodded and listened. She did not like to see it. The Indians did not dress the way they should have — they might as well have been grangers or Mexicans — and they smelled strongly and did not pay her any attention. She would find them stalking around the house and her father thought they stole. But the Colonel did not seem to mind, and the Indians got along fine with the waddies; many mornings she came into the great room to discover a dozen old men asleep among their former enemies, spilled beer and whiskey, a beef quarter half-eaten in the fireplace.

It was the Colonel’s house, there was no mistaking it, though he mostly slept in a jacal down the hill. Her father complained about the noise and grandstanding and endless strangers and houseguests, about the food bills and the size of the domestic staff. The Colonel did not care for him, either; he found her father’s interest in cattle quite taxing. “We have not made a dime off the dumb brutes in twenty years” or “That man can’t take a shit without asking the county agent.”

The Colonel was in favor of oil, in favor of Jonas going to Princeton, and as for Clint and Paul, they would make damn fine hands. But you, he would say, tapping her on the shoulder, you are going to do something. She had not known how fragile that all was. Now, looking across the dim room from her place on the floor, she saw the house as it would soon be: a haven for bats and owls, for mice and coyotes, the deer leaving footprints in the dust. The roof would give way and brush would begin to grow inside the house until there was nothing left but stone walls in a desert.

ASIDE FROM THE Colonel, her grandmother was the only one who paid her any mind. On hot days they would sit in the library while her grandmother sorted, for the thousandth time, the contents of various boxes, pictures and tintypes, here was her first husband, who had died before they had children, here were her two sisters, dead of typhoid, here was Uncle Glenn in his army uniform. There were more pictures of Glendale — who had been shot by the Mexicans but had died fighting the Huns — than there were of Jeannie’s mother. If her grandmother knew a single thing about the woman who’d brought Jeannie into this world, she didn’t share it. Here is your great-grandfather Cornellius, the most famous lawyer in Dallas, your great-great-grandfather Silas Burns, who owned the biggest plantation in Texas before the Yankees ran the niggers off. Jeannie did not know much about niggers, except for the few she’d seen working on the trains. They said East Texas was full of them. But she did know something about the old men in the tintypes, their ridiculous collars and mustaches, coats buttoned to their necks, looking like they had sat on a splinter. She did not care what her grandmother said; she was not related to them and never would be.

Invitations to parties, calling cards, gaudy pins. Cheap jewelry only a child would wear. The engagement ring from her first husband, who had died before she met Peter McCullough. Jeannie’s grandfather. The Great Disgrace.

Her grandmother occasionally took her riding; a hand would prepare her horse and sidesaddle, the only one in Dimmit County. She was a fair horsewoman, even on the awkward device. She scolded Jeannie for going bareback and for climbing fences. You will do things to yourself you will be sorry about later. What those things were, she wouldn’t say, and sometimes, if Jeannie fell asleep during the stories of her grandmother’s dull girlhood, she would awake to a firm pinch.

Her grandmother and the other grown-ups did not mind being boring; they often went on until Jeannie wished she were the dead one, instead of the person in the story, who was always more clever, or handsome, with more style and grace and wit than anyone Jeannie had ever met. If the Colonel had any boring stories, he must have forgotten them. He never said the same thing twice. Here was where to find a hawk’s nest or a pair of bucks who had died with their antlers locked, here was a leaf fossil or old bone or piece of purple flint. They kept a box of things they had found together, the skulls of little mice, squirrels, raccoons, and other animals.

When there were no visitors the Colonel would sit on the gallery making arrowheads or whittling cedar. Once, after whittling a piece into shavings, he told her: “If I wasn’t so old we’d get into the airplane business. We could build ’em here and sell ’em to the government and they would fly ’em at that field near Sanderson.”

He had tried to teach her to make arrowheads, but it had not taken. She had gashed her palm on a piece of sharp flint, at first surprised that a simple rock could cut her so deeply, then fascinated by the free flow of her own blood, then nauseated. The Colonel had come out of his trance and they had hobbled into the kitchen, where he bandaged her up and brought her back to the porch.

“I guess you’re off drinks duty,” he said, and winked. He went to the cart and made her a julep without the whiskey, and, against her father’s rules, let her sip straight from the cold silver shaker, the two of them conspiring against all that was right and good. She sat happily, forgetting the pain in her hand.

“It’s a foolish activity,” he said, taking up the arrowhead she’d begun. “Though if you make a knife, you can do anything. One day I will take all the arrowheads I’ve made and scatter them around the ranch and then maybe in a thousand years, some historian will find them and make up stories that aren’t true.” Then he looked up. “There is a thrush in that granjeno.”

She looked out over the pasture, but she didn’t see anything. The sun was bright but it was early in the year; the grass was still green and the live oaks beginning their springtime shed.

“They have told me there is a German named Hertz,” he said, “who has given his name to, among other things, the way flint breaks when you strike it. It is always the same way.” He held up a chip. “Though of course Hertz did not discover this. In fact the man who did discover it has been dead two million years. Which is how long people have been knocking rocks together to make tools.” He took another flake. “Remember that,” he said. “None of it’s worth a shit until you put your name on it.”