The Son

Chapter Fifteen. Diaries of Peter McCullough, SEPTEMBER 5, 1915

Glendale has been home two weeks, but he is pale, weak, and still fighting off some infection. Tomorrow they will take him back to San Antonio. Charlie’s arm is better, though not entirely, and there is an image clinging to my mind, which is both of my sons laid out together in one casket.

AFTER A LONG absence, the dark figure has returned. I see him in the shadows of my office; he follows me around the house, though he has not yet begun to call to me (I once saw him rise from the middle of the flooded Red, his arms open for me like Christ). I have unloaded all my pistols. No longer the energy to be angry at Pedro and my father. Visited the graves of my mother and Everett and Pete Junior (snakebite, which I cannot blame on the Colonel, and yet I do).

Of course he senses something wrong. Appears to not know what. A few times he has found me reading in the great room and stopped as if waiting for me to speak. When I did not — where would I even begin? — he shuffled on.

A MAN OF Pedro’s intelligence could not have overlooked it. So my father’s voice — the one inside my head — tells me. The same voice says Pedro had no choice — his daughters had married those men, they had become his family, fathered his grandchildren. And if Pedro had no choice, then we didn’t either. That is my father’s logic — there is never any choice.

Meanwhile my old acts of cowardice continue to haunt. Had I married María (for whom I briefly harbored feelings), instead of Sally (my proper match)… who was thirty-two and twice jilted, who loved her life in Dallas, whose bitterness was apparent from the moment she stepped from the train, who came because her father and my father and her own biology gave her no choice. I was so lonely when I met Peter, that is the story she tells of our courtship. Our fathers arranging the breeding as if we were heifer and bull. Perharps I am dramatic; in truth our first years were quite pleasant, but then Sally must have realized that, just as I always said, I really had no intention of leaving this land. Many families of our stature, she rightly pointed out, maintain more than one residence. But we are not like other families.

THERE ARE MOMENTS I see José and Chico and (impossibly) Pedro himself on the other side of the river, shooting at us. Other moments I remember the event as it truly happened, a half-dozen riders in the dark, dodging into the brush, hundreds of yards away. Perhaps Mexican because of the cut of their clothing, perhaps not.

Being at the rear, higher on the riverbank, I had the best vantage. If I’d taken more time with my shooting, or dismounted… but I did not want to hit them. I thought I might push death aside, if only for a moment, so I held over their heads and emptied my rifle, nothing but sound and fury, the extreme range absolving me of marksmanship. Had I simply adjusted the ladder on my sight… one of the men I intentionally missed likely shot Glenn. The incident might have ended there. Though it is unlikely.

I CANNOT HELP having sympathy for the Mexicans. So far as their white neighbors are concerned, they come into this world coyotes in human form, and when they die they are treated like coyotes as well. My instinct is to root for them; they despise me for it. I see myself in them; they are insulted. Perhaps you cannot respect a man who has what you do not. Unless you think he might kill you. A preference for hardhanded authority seems bred into them — they are comfortable with the old relationships, patrón and peón—and any attempt to change these boundaries they find undignified, or suspicious, or weak.

TO BE A simple animal like my father, untroubled by consciousness, or conscience. To sleep soundly, at ease with your certainties, men as expendable as beef.

WHEN I SLEEP I see Pedro, neatly arranged with his vaqueros in the yard. Eyes open, mouths gaping, the flies and bees swarming. I see him in bed, his daughter dead at his feet, his wife dead at his side. I wonder if he saw them shot down. I wonder if he recognized the men doing it as his friends.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1915

Sally has moved into her own room. Glenn continues to recover in San Antonio; we drive there alternately to be with him. Pilkington has no explanation. The vaqueros suspect dark forces, a bruja at work.

Today Sally began a conversation at supper:

“Colonel, what did you used to offer for a bounty on wolves?”

My father: “Ten dollars a pelt. Same for a panther.”

“What would be a good bounty on Mexicans, you think?”

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’m just asking, Pete. It is a reasonable question.”

“I don’t think you’d have to offer a bounty,” said Charles.

“So is ten dollars too much? Or not enough?”

“I would prefer not to talk like this. Today or ever.”

“I do not even know if you are upset about this, Peter, I can’t even tell. Can anyone else? Does Peter look bothered?”

Everyone was quiet. Finally the Colonel spoke up: “Pete has his own way of handling things. You can leave him be.”

She got up and took her plate into the kitchen, with a furious look at my father. Me, she already hates.

TRYING TO CONSOLE myself that we aren’t alone in our suffering. Two weeks ago the railroad bridges to Brownsville were burned (again), the telegraph lines cut, two white men singled out from a crowd of laborers and shot in the middle of the morning. About twenty Tejanos killed in reprisal — twenty that anyone heard about. The Third Cavalry has been in regular fights with the Mexican army all along the border, shooting across the river. Three cavalrymen killed by insurgents near Los Indios and, across from Progreso, on the Mexican side, the head of a missing U.S. private was displayed on a pole.

In better news, the air smells sweet and the land is already coming back to life. The rain continues to fall and there are adelias and heliotrope, the hummingbirds everywhere in the anacahuita, bluewing butterflies, the scent of ébano and guayacan. The clouds glow at sunset and the river shimmers in the light. But not for Pedro. For Pedro, it is only dark.

OCTOBER 1, 1915

Woke up in a chair next to Glenn’s hospital bed, thinking if I stayed there long enough my mother would come and rub my neck. I have always depended on other people to drive out the ghosts. When I shaved, the face I saw in the hospital mirror was not quite mine; it was as if there was some defect in the glass, my features crooked, out of proportion, like a dead man’s.

OCTOBER 3, 1915

Back at home. Judge Poole visited from Laredo to tell me Pedro Garcia was eight years delinquent on his taxes. I knew what he was angling for. I was overcome with shame. I could barely hear what he said, my ears were throbbing.

The judge was looking at me.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I said.

“Pete, I hold the Webb County tax register and I have checked with Brewster in Dimmit.”

“Well, I still don’t believe it.”

Poole sat there quivering like a bucket of clabber. He knew I was calling him a liar, but as I’m the Colonel’s son he elected to overlook it. He repeated that the State of Texas was offering to sell us all the Garcia land, nearly two hundred sections, for back taxes. “Sheriff Graham has already taken possession of the property for the court.”

“I thought notice of tax sale had to be posted.”

“It is posted. It is on the courthouse door, in fact, but I do not think anyone will see it, as there are some other things posted on top of it. I do not see why any Yankee speculator ought to get into a bidding war over land that ought rightfully to belong to you.”

Like all adulterers he is as passionate as a drummer, as sure of himself as Christ making his long walk… that the Yankee speculators were scared off long ago by all the shooting meant nothing to him. But there was no way out… I apologized and said my mind was still not right due to worry about Glenn. He nodded and patted my hand with his slippery claw.

I hoped my use of Glenn’s name in such a mercenary fashion would not get me condemned to the flames, though if it allowed me to escape Poole’s company, I might have agreed to it. I excused myself, but before I could leave (my own living room) Poole mentioned that a small consideration for his advocacy might not go unappreciated. I was thinking one hundred dollars but he read my mind. Ten thousand sounded fair, didn’t I think?

Poole could have given the land to anyone, but Reynolds and Midkiff (along with all the other cattlemen in Texas) are known to be having money troubles and with the Colonel spending so much money buying up oil rights, we probably appear rich. Everyone loves the underdog. Until they have to take his side.

I AM CURIOUS if Pedro did miss some tax payments. A year, maybe. Eight is not possible. He knew what happened to Mexicans who didn’t pay their taxes, though he did not know that the same thing might happen to Mexicans who did. I can hear the Colonel — no land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth — but it does not make me feel any better.

Total price for the Garcia sections: $103,892.17. About what the land was worth when the Apaches lived here.

OCTOBER 27, 1915

The Colonel insisted I ride with him to the Garcia compound. When we dismounted he produced several jugs of coal oil from his saddlebags.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I should have done this fifty years ago, Pete. It is like killing all the wolves but leaving a nice den for other wolves to return to.”

“I won’t let you burn their house.”

“Well, I won’t let you stop me.”

“Daddy,” I said.

“Pete, it has been too long since we had a real talk and I know I am hard on you. And you are mad at me for the oil leases. I should not have gone behind your back. I am sorry but it was the only way I saw of doing it.”

“I do not give two shits about the oil leases.”

“Well, they were necessary,” he said.

“We are surviving just fine. Unlike some of our neighbors.”

“You know I was fond of old Pedro.”

“Not fond enough, apparently.”

It was quiet for a long time.

“I don’t have to tell you what this land used to look like,” he said. “And you don’t have to tell me that I am the one who ruined it. Which I did, with my own hands, and ruined forever. You’re old enough to remember when the grass between here and Canada was balls high to a Belgian, and yes it is possible that in a thousand years it will go back to what it once was, though it seems unlikely. But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do.”

“The brush can be removed.”

“At enormous cost, which used to go into our pockets.”

“And still we are not doing badly.”

He shrugged. “Pete, I love this land, and I love my family, but I do not love cattle. You grew up with them. I will not say I grew up with the buffalo, because while it is true it is also an exaggeration, but I will say that to you there is something sacred in a cow, and in the man who raises and cares for them, but me, I can take them or leave them; it was a business that I undertook to support our family, and I have seen so many things disappear in my lifetime that I cannot bring myself to worry about this one. Which brings me around to my point. What were our losses this year, in one pasture, to the Garcias?”

“Daddy,” I said again, a strange word to come from the mouth of a man who is nearly fifty, but the Colonel continued:

“In the west pasture alone, in this year alone, we lost forty thousand dollars. In the other pastures, maybe eighty thousand. And I would judge they have been robbing us for quite a while, at least since the first of the sons-in-law showed up. Now there has been a drought these four years, but does a drought reduce your calves fifty percent? Not if you’ve been feeding like we did. Do you suddenly lose thirty percent of your momma cows? No, you do not. That is the hand of man. You figure in the increase, they have stolen close to two million dollars from us.”

“Don’t forget the increase on the mules.”

He shook his head and looked off into the distance and it was quiet for a long time. Of course I did not have to acquire this land, as he did. Of course I take it for granted in a manner that seems unthinkable to him. The Garcia sections will double the size of our ranch; this at a time when other cattlemen are struggling. It is an enormous coup, from a certain perspective, and I wonder if he is capable of seeing any other. Then he was talking.

“You’ve never had any problem standing up to your own family, Pete. But you have a hard time standing up to strangers. That has always been your problem.” He wiped his forehead. “I am going to burn out this roach nest. Are you going to help me or not?”

“What’s the point of having all this?” I said.

“Because otherwise it would be someone else. Someone was going to end up with this land, maybe Ira Midkiff or Bill Reynolds or maybe Poole would have gotten half and Graham would have gotten a quarter, and Gilbert would have gotten the other quarter. Or some new oilman. The only sure thing was that Pedro was going to lose it. His time had passed.”

“It did not just pass of its own accord.”

“We are saying the same thing, only you don’t realize it.”

“It did not have to happen that way.”

“Matter of fact it did. That is how the Garcias got the land, by cleaning off the Indians, and that is how we had to get it. And one day that is how someone will get it from us. Which I encourage you not to forget.”

He took up two coal oil jugs, one in each hand, and made his way slowly up the steps. The jugs were heavy and he was struggling; he nearly dropped them.

As I watched him I realized he is not of our time; he is like some fossil come out of a stream bank or a trench in the ocean, from a point in history when you took what you wanted and did not see any reason to justify.

I realize he is not any worse than our neighbors: they are simply more modern in their thinking. They require some racial explanation to justify their theft and murder. My brother Phineas is truly the most advanced among them, has nothing against the Mexican or any other race, he sees it simply as a matter of economics. Science rather than emotion. The strong must be encouraged, the weak allowed to perish. Though what none of them see, or want to see, is that we have a choice.

I heard my father knocking things around inside the house. On a horse he still looks like a young man; on the ground he carries the weight of all his years. Watching him shuffle with the jugs of kerosene I could not help feeling sorry for him. Perhaps I am insane.

I followed him into the house. I could knock him over and take the kerosene away. But it was too late. This was only a formality.

Inside everything was covered with dust that had blown in the open doors and windows, the tracks of animals were thick, the blood dried to an indistinct black stain. In the living room, my father had pushed the furniture into a pile and sloshed oil over it. I followed him into the rest of the house, into the bedrooms and then Pedro’s office.

He pulled all the papers from their cabinets, old letters, stock records, deeds, certificates of birth and death for ten generations, the original land grant, back when this area was all a Spanish province, Nuevo Santander.

After everything was doused in coal oil, he struck the match. I stood watching the papers curl, the fire spreading across the desk and up the wall onto a large map of the state, drawn when all the sections had Spanish names. I heard someone calling my name — Pedro. Then I realized it was my father. I went to look for him and when I walked out of the office the entire house was filled with smoke; he’d lit fires in the other rooms.

I bent beneath the smoke, looking into Pedro and Lourdes’s bedroom. Their bed was beginning to burn; the canopy caught and flared and the light filled the dark room. I wondered how many generations had been sired there and knew the Colonel must have thought the same thing.

Through the flames I saw a dark shape calling me forward and only with effort did I turn and make my way toward the sunlight. When I reached the outside my father was already limping down the hill toward the Garcias’ stock buildings, a jug of fresh coal oil in each hand.