The Son

Chapter Eighteen. Diaries of Peter McCullough, NOVEMBER 1, 1915

Phineas came down from Austin. We are the darlings of the capital for killing nineteen of our neighbors and getting two family members shot in the process. Phineas talking about a run for lieutenant governor.

Glenn is home, but still sick. He and my brother talked for a long time. The boys have always liked Phineas; to them he is a younger version of the Colonel, the pinnacle of manly attainment. Of course I do not dare tell them what I suspect, though I am not sure he would extend me the same courtesy, were the situation reversed — he would probably take me out to a pasture and shoot me.

HOW TWO MEN from the same stock might be so different… my father likely reckons my mother snuck off for congress with some poet, scrivener, or other nearsighted sniveling half-man. I have always seen myself as two people: the one before my mother died, fearless as his brothers, and the one after, like an owl on some dark branch, watching the rest move about in the sunlight.

How he and Phineas can stand in front of a hundred men and never once wonder what they are thinking — I can barely eat dinner without considering if I’ve been talking too much or not enough, drinking too much or not enough, making as little noise as possible with my knife and fork, paying mind to the clunk as I set down my water glass. And yet when I crossed the wall at the Garcias’, I forgot myself.

HAVE BEEN TENDING their grave, unbeknownst to everyone. That day, after I left, they were all buried in a single pit: mother, father, daughters, grandchildren, assorted employees. No marker and, owing to the caliche, the hole was not very deep so I have been piling rocks and dirt on top. Old Pedro, who sent a priest to his vaqueros after every miscarriage, who always paid for a lined casket and a Christian burial. I still imagine the house as it has always been; each time I am freshly shocked, the charred walls, the birds flying freely where there was once a roof. The wood was old and seasoned and the fire burned hot. Little left inside but nails and bits of glass and metal. Even staring directly at it, part of me believes it is an illusion.

Perhaps this is why I am constantly disappointed — I expect good from the world, as a puppy might. Thus, like Prometheus, I am unmade each day.

PHINEAS AND I rode out to see what was left of the casa mayor; he explained he had already been talking to Judge Poole about the Garcias’ “tax problems.” I waited for him to acknowledge the chicanery, but he did not. He does not trust me entirely. No different from the Colonel.

When we reached the house Phineas was shocked. He sat there on his horse while I dismounted and went to pay my respects at their grave. He must have realized what I was doing so he left me alone. As I passed their spring I saw that someone had thrown a dead dog into it. I roped the animal and pulled it out.

“See clear to the goddamn border, can’t you?”

It was an exaggeration but I got the meaning.

“You know, Pete, you might want to stay away from here for a while. I don’t like looking at this myself and you…” He shook his head.

“Pedro Garcia was a friend.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said.

I walked off behind the house, where I could sit on the patio and look over things. A few minutes later he came and found me.

“You shouldn’t hold this against Daddy.”

“How would that be possible?”

“This would have happened anyway. And of course, Pedro wasn’t eight years behind in taxes. But there are things he could have done…”

“Such as?”

“Marrying his daughters right? I guess he thought he was making them happy, but…”

“If they’d married whites, you mean.”

“Why not? All the old families did it. They saw the writing on the wall and married their daughters off to the proper people.” He shrugged. “It’s Darwin at work, Pete. Dilution is what the situation called for, but Pedro decided to double down.”

I thought about Pedro encouraging me to call on María. I began to get a sick feeling.

“You and Daddy see eye to eye on a lot of things.”

“There is not a moment of my day I am not thinking about this place.”

“You are here twice a year,” I said.

“You think a bank in Austin wants to lend a half-million dollars to a ranch it’s never seen, and doesn’t know anything about except it’s already mortgaged out its asshole? Or Roger Longoria in Dallas? You ever wonder why your credit comes on such good terms from him? Or why it even comes at all? Or how it might be that the cattle business is collapsing all around Texas but somehow money comes easy for us?”

I decided to change the subject. “Meanwhile Daddy goes and spends the money on oil leases.”

“Daddy can smell a change coming like a buzzard can smell a dry canteen. He’s got more sense than both of us put together and if he had any ambition, he’d be governor.”

“That I highly doubt.”

He shook his head. Any word against the Colonel is like a word against God, or rain, or white men — the good things of the earth.

“I have spent most of my life trying to figure out what goes on inside your mind,” he said. “First I thought you were slow and then I thought you might be red. Finally it occurred to me that you are just a sentimentalist. You believe in the open range, the code, the nobility of the sufferin’ cowpoke and the emptiness of bankers’ hearts — all stuff you picked up from Zane Grey…”

In fact I have not read Zane Grey, though I do not mind Wister, but explaining these distinctions to my brother is pointless.

“… you know in the old days, when Daddy needed stock, he found them in the bushes or paid some half-breed a dime a head to steal them. If a slick calf was found, it got branded, if a piece of land caught his eye, it got fenced. If there was someone he didn’t like, he ran them off. And”—he looked at me meaningfully—“if someone stole your cattle, you crossed the river, burned their entire fucking village, and drove all their animals back to your pastures.”

“That does not appear to have changed much.”

“It has changed. You now need an adding machine just to figure out if you’re getting enough beef per acre to cover your payroll. You’ve got a quarter of your labor going into brush, another quarter into screwworms and fever ticks. And when you’re worrying about that kind of piddling bullshit…”

I put up my hand to stop him. “This is what we have, Finn. We can complain about it or we can keep working, and I would rather keep working. Daddy wants to think we are sitting on a sea of oil, but we are not; we are sitting on a bunch of expensive and utterly worthless leases on land we don’t even own.” I thought it was well played but he was smiling. Through sheer willpower I forced myself to stay where I was.

“When did they find oil in North Texas, Pete?”

Something they have always done: call me by name, as if disciplining a child. And yet still I feel compelled to answer them, as if, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, I might explain my point of view.

“Twelve years ago,” he said, when I didn’t respond. “And now half of our oil comes from there. Spindletop was only two years before that. The biggest fucking oil well in human history, before which the Rockefellers, Mellons, Pews, all those eastern cocksuckers, they made hundreds of millions in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania! There are two buckets of oil in that entire state. Christ, Pete, the Hughes bit, what was that, 1908? Before that, a drilling rig was not so different from what the Romans used. Do you follow?”

Looking over the grave of the Garcias I did not tell him that 1908 was also when they found the caves at La Chapelle, when they found an apelike man, a Neanderthal fifty thousand years old, who had been carefully buried in a sepulcher, a haunch of meat and several flint knives left to protect him in the afterlife. That is how long we have been hoping for a next world. Since before we were truly men.

“… this is like the cattle business in 1865. There’s nowhere to go but up. We find oil in even a couple of acres, our costs will be covered.”

I walked back to my horse, silently, and he did the same. We made our way down the hill, through the old Garcia hamlet, the ruined church and old graveyard, the burned tower of the casa mayor still the highest point on the land. We drifted slowly toward the river, not speaking, my brother riding a few paces behind.

Finally he caught up: “You know, I’ve always been glad you like living here. When you left for the university I thought I would be stuck taking care of this place, but then you came back. And I have always been grateful for that, because this place is too important to have someone running it who isn’t family. That is what I wanted to say. I am grateful you are here.”

“Thank you.”

“Just remember that you are not out here alone, and that I am thinking about it same as you.”

I did not say anything. Phineas inherited my father’s great ability to make any compliment sound patronizing. Then I said, “What’s going on with Poole? I am trying to figure out how this land deal won’t come back to bite us.”

“Back taxes.”

“Tell me.”

“Back taxes,” he repeated. “And possibly the judge has an itch to leave Webb County; we’re looking into a position for him on the Fifth Court. But you can dig all you want. The Garcias owed taxes, and if it was not in the books before, it is there now, and there is nothing more to it.”

OTHER NEIGHBORHOOD EVENTS:

October 18, a train attacked by sixty insurgents near Olmito (five killed).

October 21, army detachment at Ojo de Agua attacked by seventy-five insurgents (three killed, eight wounded).

October 24, second attack on the Tandy Station railroad bridge.

October 30, Governor Ferguson rejects calls for more Rangers. Reason? They are too expensive. Raising taxes out of the question.

Which is perhaps for the best — for every insurgent they kill, a hundred more are converted to the cause. The Tejanos do not mind the army, but they hate the Rangers.

NOVEMBER 15, 1915

Now that we have clear title to the Garcia land, it is just as my father supposed — we look like benevolent kings. Where Pedro was tightfisted, we employ half the men in town. Anyone who wants work now has it: clearing brush, digging irrigation, rounding up twenty years of maverick longhorn bulls. Two men have been gored and Benito Soto died of heatstroke but people are at the gate every day wondering if we are hiring. Despite the sheriff’s warnings, I am allowing some of the Mexicans to be armed. Just working for a gringo can get you shot by the sediciosos.

How we can appear to have clean hands, despite what happened, I find baffling. And depressing. As if I alone remember the truth.

MOOD MUST IMPROVE. Record year for rain — twenty-one inches already. The faster we get the brush out, the more grass will start. There is a pall of smoke over the town from all the brush being burned, and in that smoke I see nothing but good. The ashes will fertilize the soil and it is well known that the bluestems and gramas germinate best if they are heated.

Some bitterness in town (among whites) that no one else was offered the Garcia land. Bill Hollis’s widow was one of the lead rabble-rousers. She has no real means — she could not have afforded to buy even a quarter section, let alone two hundred — but she senses the unfairness of it. Dutch Hollis, Bill’s brother, apparently has not been sober since his brother died.

Will suggest to the Colonel that we offer Marjorie Hollis a generous price for her house, just to get her out of town. And perhaps we know someone a few counties over who might be induced to offer Dutch Hollis work. Certainly it cannot be good for him to remain in this town, our big white house on the hill, his brother’s grave…

Such is the way I deal with things. But the Colonel has never had any trouble knowing people dislike him.

JANUARY 1, 1916

Sally has decamped to Dallas with her father and sisters, taking Glenn and Charlie with her.

After they left I went to the graves of Pete Junior, my mother, and Everett. Seeded with rye to keep them green. The birds will probably get most of it. Not sure if cemetery so close to the house is good or bad.

In the afternoon went to the casa mayor. The Garcias’ grave has sunk in quite far. Spent three hours scraping dirt to fill it; did not return until well after dark.

Meanwhile the bandit raids continue: three ranches hit in the Big Bend. The Twelfth Cavalry, after several months of heavy losses, crossed the border and burned two Mexican towns.

JANUARY 4, 1916

Sally and the boys are back. She accused me of feeling more for the Garcias than she did for our own son. Asked me why I go back there so often.

“Because no one else will.”

“Those greasers shot Glenn,” she said. “I want you to think on that.”

“Well, we killed them. All nineteen of them, not one of whom was present when Glenn was shot.”

“That doesn’t make us even,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said, “but we do not have that many family members, do we?”

“I wonder if I am beginning to hate you. But then I wonder if you would even notice.”

“If you hate me it is because I have morals.”

That left her speechless. I went to my office and put a few logs in the fireplace and pulled the sheets over the couch.

It is only now, since we have been sleeping apart these three months, that I wonder how I ever managed to have any feelings for her at all. She is still pretty, charming in her way. But if she has ever had a thought that did not in some way involve herself, I have not heard of it.