The Son

Chapter Twenty. Jeannie McCullough, 1942

Phineas called her to Austin a week after she finished high school. It was May and already hot, one hundred in McCullough, ninety in Austin, it would be nice to make a trip to Barton Springs, to lie in the grass and watch the people swimming — flirting couples, young men and their footballs — to spend the day by herself in a place she was not known. She wouldn’t, of course. There were people you could never figure — her great-grandfather for instance — but that was not her. I am boring, she thought. Predictable. But brave in my own way, brave despite… she did not like to think of the North, she did not like to think of her time there. She had been miserable and she had left. She did not mind taking risks when she wanted something, though no one else understood this. When she wanted something, she was truly brave. And yet no one else knew. So it didn’t matter.

The train made its way to Austin. There were more cars on the highway, double or triple what she had seen in her childhood, most Texans now lived in cities, they said. You would not have known it in Dimmit County. She watched a truck with a half-dozen Mexicans in the back, their knees scrunched around a pile of scrap iron, the driver weaving and changing lanes, one miscalculation and they would all be spilled to the pavement. She wondered why they allowed themselves to be treated that way. They’re animals, is what her father said. On Election Day he would take her down to the south end of McCullough, dusty streets, tin shacks, wreaths of chilies and goat meat hanging with the flies buzzing everywhere. Her father would hand out slabs of beef from an ice chest in the back of his truck, cases of warm beer; he would pay their poll taxes and show them how to mark the ballot. Gracias, patrón. Gracias. They were more gracious than niggers — that was another thing he always said.

The windows in the train were open and her face was cool in the breeze but she was sweating under her dress, under her arms. It was the time of the year the heat became its own entity, a creeping misery. No. It was like a sledgehammer on the head of a steer. It would only get worse until September. From the other side of the car, three soldiers were stealing glances, one of them was much older, the other two were Mexican, barely her age, afraid to look. Most draft boards had not yet begun to call up whites, though some, like her brothers, had volunteered.

She studied her reflection, imposed as it was on the dry rushing landscape beyond the window. I am pretty, she thought. There were prettier, but she was well above average. Phineas will offer me a job. A sort of special adviser, a confidante. But that was not possible, either. She was not even qualified to be a secretary; you needed shorthand for that. There was nothing she really knew how to do, nothing she did well, she was a dabbler. Pointless. If she vanished from the earth that instant, it would not have made a lick of a difference to anyone.

Maudlin, maudlin. She leaned her head against the glass and felt the shaking of the train. That’s not even your word, she thought, that’s from Jonas. She could see the hills to the north, the Llano uplift. The Colonel had known those things: this rock is ten million years old, this other two hundred, here is a fern contained in stone. The soldiers were staring at her openly now. When she was young, a year or two ago, she would have turned and stared them down, but now she let them drink her up, have their fantasies, or so she imagined. In a few months they would be off to war, and many would not come back, their final rest in a foreign place. Perhaps all three of them, their lines come to an end. She wondered who would survive, she guessed the bigger one, though you could not tell. It was not like the old days, it was a falling bomb and a hundred dead at once, all mothers’ sons. An emotion came over her, and she wondered if she might give them something, cigarettes or a soda pop, but those were just tokens, money would not help them. There was only one thing and she allowed herself to think about this for a while, shifted her legs and adjusted her dress, it was just a thought, out of the question, she had never given herself to anyone. But what did it matter, truly? There were times she was desperate, absolutely desperate to be shed of her virginity, but no, she thought, impossible, it could not be some pimple-faced soldier, or that older, more scary one with the patch of razor burn along his neck as if chafed by a rope. He will be the one to die. She felt it instantly. It excited her. It was all very dramatic.

Then she felt guilty. She thought of her brothers, who were still in America, training in Georgia. Clint would do something to show off and be killed. Paul would be more careful, though easily convinced to do something risky, especially if a friend were in trouble. She prayed he would have no friends. Otherwise he would surely be killed. It was Jonas: he was the only one among her brothers who acted like a rich man’s son. He would not take any risk if someone else might do it instead. And he was an officer.

Outside, the grass was already brown from the heat. To the south, the flat Texas plain stretched down to Mexico; to the north the escarpment began. A yellow tint of summer haze. A mule pulling a plow. She did not know why, it was plain to see there would be no rain for weeks, the dryness made you wonder if it would ever rain again.

Her uncle Phineas was a powerful man, head of the Railroad Commission, more powerful than the governor, they said. He was not really her uncle, but great-uncle, and he determined how much oil could be pumped in all of Texas. Somehow that controlled the price. She supposed it was like cattle. In a drought everyone had to sell quickly so the price went down, though when beef got scarce the price went up again. Except the packers were now interrupting this — buying cheap from distressed ranchers while raising the price on the other end — telling the city buyers, who did not know better, that a drought meant scarcity. The packers were where the money had gone; it was no longer made on grass, but in cement buildings. Armour and Swift. Her father hated them. Meanwhile Texas made more oil than anyplace on the earth. You did not hear people who made oil complaining very much.

SHE OPENED HER eyes. She was on the floor of the great room, watching the fire. Her arm, the skin old and so thin the light seemed to pass right through it, the watch askew on her wrist. Perhaps she might inch just one finger? No. Her eyes moved around the room and settled on a globe next to the divan. It was no older than she was, but many of the countries had already ceased to exist. No hope for a single person. She could see that the mortar had begun to crumble in the fireplace; the stones would soon come apart. When did that happen? she wondered, and then she thought: I did not expect to live this long myself. Except that was lie. She had always known it was the others who wouldn’t make it.

Death the common companion; it was not like the settled places of the North. Jonas sensed it and saved himself. You did not know better. Or did and thought you could escape it. She watched the ember on the hearth. She wondered if she had really known that about Paul and Clint, or if it was another trick of the mind, the memory recording something that had never been true, like a magnetic tape that had been tampered with.

PHINEAS HAD BEEN good to her. It was hard to imagine the power he’d had: as OPEC would years later, the Railroad Commission controlled the price of oil in the entire world. Phineas had become enormously wealthy. He could make or break any oilman in the state, any politician — you might drill all the wells you wanted, but you could not pump a drop without his say-so.

The commission’s offices were in a drab state office building; the only thing giving it away were the cars — Packards, a Cadillac Sixteen, Lincoln Zeyphrs, and Continentals. Phineas had a corner office, the walls lined with his trophies, the Colonel’s Yellowboy Winchester, a brace of Colt Peacemakers, plaques from the Southwest Cattle Raisers and the Old Trail Driver’s Association. There were pictures with elephants and lions and antlered game of every description, he had hunted on five continents. There were pictures with Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, Phineas smiling broadly, more sure of himself than the old man.

He was seventy-five now and, when seated, still gave off an impression of power. He looked nothing like the Colonel: a tall man with thick white hair, expensive suits, beautiful secretaries. He did not wear cowboy boots or a bolo tie — those were affectations of a later generation — he was more like an eastern banker.

But his health was failing. His legs were swollen, his heart unsteady. He would never live to see his father’s age, that was plain.

Jeannie watched the secretary as she left coffee and a tray of kolaches. A brunette with violet eyes, high cheekbones, a perfect figure — she would never be pretty enough. Phineas asked about the news from Paul and Clint, congratulated her on finishing school. Did she have plans? Not really. She settled into a chair overlooking the capitol and downtown Austin. She was only five hours from the ranch but it was a different country entirely.

When the secretary had closed the door, something in Phineas’s manner changed and she knew he meant to talk business.

“I suspect it is obvious to both of us that the ranch is losing money.”

She nodded, though it had not been obvious: beef had been climbing steadily since the war began.

“I lived on that land before it was settled,” he continued. “I buried my mother and father and brother there. And now my nephew — your father — is running it into the ground. He is content to burn through our money as if a fresh supply will come up like grass in the springtime. Why the old man left him majority holder, I have no idea.” He leaned back in his chair. “Have you seen the books?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Of course not.” He beckoned her around to his side of the desk, where a ledger was sitting open. He pointed to a number: a little over four hundred thousand dollars. “Last year’s cattle sales. It seems like a large number, and it is, because your father sells a lot of cattle. But the next thirty-seven pages are debits.” He skipped forward, first a page at a time, then two or three at a time, until he reached the end. He pointed to another number, just under eight hundred thousand dollars. “The ranch’s expenses are nearly double its income.”

There is some mistake, she thought, but she kept quiet. Instead she asked: “How long has it been like that?”

“Oh, twenty years, at least. The only thing keeping us in the black is the oil and gas, but the wells are old and shallow and the Colonel, quite wisely, leased only a few thousand acres, trusting that we would lease the rest at higher prices. Which we have not yet done.”

He paused again.

“For reasons I do not quite understand, our state has a club of wealthy children who like to play at being cattlemen. As if the term can even exist today. Bob Kleberg has put it in your father’s ear that with technology, better bulls, and a few bump gates, he can make money selling beef, which is a feat Kleberg has not even managed on his own land. As you may or may not know, the King Ranch, all million acres of it, was on the verge of bankruptcy until Humble Oil loaned them three million dollars. Which was a pity, because I had made Alice King a very generous offer. And I have always liked the coast.”

He looked for her reaction but she sat quietly, so he continued.

“Your father is counting on the fact that I will not be around forever, because he thinks that once he gets my money, his problems are over. What he does not seem to realize — or care about — is that even with my money, the ranch will still go bankrupt — it is just a question of how many millions your father will go through until it does.”

She knew then why she had been called: he wanted her to betray her father. To her surprise she did not object to this as much as she might have hoped. Her father, for all his rough-and-tumble image, was a dandy. She had always known this, perhaps because the Colonel was always pointing it out. Earning money was the furthest thing from her father’s mind, he wanted to be on magazine covers, like the Colonel had been. She had always known that the Colonel did not respect him and now she saw that Phineas — the other famous member of the family — did not respect him, either.

“Shall we get lunch? Or can you handle a little more business?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Good. Tell me what you know about the depletion allowance.”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Of course. That’s what your father knows about it as well. The depletion allowance is one of the things that makes the oil business as far from the cattle business as the North Pole is from the South. At the moment, it says that if you drill for oil, you can write twenty-seven point five percent of your proceeds off as a loss.”

“Because you spent money to drill the wells?”

“That is certainly what we tell the newspapers, though in general we have already written off about sixty percent of those costs as intangibles. The depletion allowance is something entirely different. Every year a well produces oil, even though it is putting money into your pocket, it is simultaneously reducing your tax burden.”

“You’re making a profit, but calling it a loss.”

She could see this pleased him.

“It sounds dishonest,” she added.

“It is the opposite. It is the law of the United States.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing. The law was put there for a reason. People will raise cattle even though they will lose money doing it — you do not need to incentivize the cattle business. Oil, on the other hand, is expensive to find and even more expensive to get out of the ground. It is an enormously risky enterprise. And so if the government wants us to find oil, it must encourage us to do so.”

“So we should drill.”

“Of course we should drill. How your father can still be thinking about cows is a mystery. Every bit of profit we made in the old days was based on overstocking, on using up a thousand years of grass in a decade. The way we used to fill those pastures, it was like those file cabinets there, touching on both sides, it was mining for grass. But, as you must know from listening to me this long, facts are boring, especially to men like your father. Because what does every coonass wildcatter do when he makes his first million? He buys a ranch and stocks it with Herefords, in the same way he acquires a Packard or a beautiful wife. Though he does not expect any of them to be profitable investments.

“In the meantime, the rest of us have no choice but to exist in the present. I’m getting calls from the secretary of the navy, who is telling me he does not want a single production control in place. He wants drilling, drilling, and more drilling — the only thing we have over the Germans is our oil — they are building a pipeline from here to New Jersey, where all the refineries are, and they want every goddamn drop we have.”

He was looking out the window; he was talking again but she could not follow the thread — it was more taxes — and she was beginning to feel sick, she could not bring this up to her father, it was out of the question. This war won’t last forever, that was what her father was always saying, things will go back to the way they were. She wondered what it must be like to be her father, taking himself so seriously, imagining himself a kind of royalty, though from a country no one had heard of. Of course, in his defense, people had lately begun to agree with him. The Colonel had been dead long enough that her father was now interesting to reporters; they would visit and he would tell them the Colonel’s stories, jumbled together with his own, the time he and the Colonel had charged a house full of Mexican horse thieves during the bandit wars of 1915. It was said he had once shot a man in cold blood.

Regardless, her father was part of a dying breed, for better or worse, most of the old-time ranching families had gone bankrupt. Most people now lived in cities — she could still not get her head around that one — the days of the frontier were gone, long gone, though there were those who preferred not to admit it. As for her father, with his heavy face, his big hands, he had finally become what he had hoped for since childhood, the representative of a bygone era, an emissary from a lost time. That he himself had not lived during this time was irrelevant — he would take the reporters out to the corrals and put on a show, rope and cut for them, he had begun to keep older, gentler horses just for visitors, which would have been unthinkable in the old days, because horses cost money and they were for work, not play.

An automobile horn on the street brought her back. Phineas was still talking.

“… even if most of the Hill Country still doesn’t have electricity, even if one does encounter the occasional bucktoothed child on a donkey, this war has dragged the rest of the world into the modern age. The Polish cavalry smashed itself against German tanks, every cannibal in the South Pacific has now seen a Zero, and if there was doubt in any mind that the era of the horse was over, that question is now settled.”

She nodded. It was obvious even to her.

“Jeannie,” he said, “it will not be long before we look back on this time and think we barely used any oil at all. Which is why we need to get some wells sunk on that land. I am tired of lending your father money.”

THE NEXT DAY she took the train home. It stopped for a long time in San Antonio, the air still, the sun beating against the car. She lay against the window, trying to breathe slowly, thinking of cool things, the stock tank, the spring at the casa mayor. There were soldiers everywhere, Mexicans sweating through their uniforms, heads hanging numbly, sweat pooling, their only hope that the train might move again, they were like steers on their way to Fort Worth. Thousands had been abandoned to the Japanese, who were cutting off their heads with swords. Though MacArthur himself had escaped. A little too proudly, she thought.

She searched their faces but they were all looking down. The walking dead. How many were not even men yet? She was tired of being alone, she imagined her father’s angry face, I gave it to a soldier, the great burden carried away. Clint and Paul had gone to a house in Carrizo. Her father had known about it beforehand. But I am not allowed.

When she was younger and found her father working in his study she would sit next to his chair and read, or hang around his neck and look over his shoulder, and finally he would turn and silently give her a kiss, the signal to leave him alone.

That was all he had. A hug and a kiss. Though he would kiss a horse as well, give months to understanding it, more than his own daughter.

Phineas was just using her, that was true, but he had always made time for her, even when she was young; she must have been tiresome and yet he’d made a point of teaching her things. To her father, she was just in the way. An inconvenience. A thing that might have been a son.

It was all an exaggeration, it was not the entire truth, but it made her furious, the nights she’d spent alone in the house, her father and brothers in the pastures. Things had improved since Clint and Paul left, but still. He loves you, she thought, but he prefers not to think about you. What did he prefer? Horses. Cows. Women, perhaps, though if so she hadn’t heard about it. She decided if she ever had children, she would not leave them alone for a single minute.

“I won’t have children anyway,” she said out loud.

The Negro porter in the doorway looked up, then looked away, embarrassed. The train began to move. She wondered what she would say to her father.

WHEN SHE WAS sixteen she had kissed one of the vaqueros, out in the stables he was supposed to be cleaning; they had stood there for ten minutes, she could feel his tongue move lightly inside her mouth. She spent the whole night thinking about him, his cheekbones and soft eyelashes, but when she went to see him the next day, he would not let her near. A week later he was gone. She knew they had not been seen; it was as if her father had merely sensed it — as if he had sensed something was making her happy — and ruined it.

Meanwhile he did not care if the family declined. He cared only for himself. Eventually they would be bankrupt and all they had ever done would be forgotten; they would be no different from the Garcias, the children of strangers in their ruined house, a young girl in a grave. She leaned against the train window and listened to the tracks rumble beneath her, it would all come to an end.

No. She would not let it. She did not know how she would stop him, but she was as sure of this as she had ever been of anything; Phineas was old, her father was a fool, and Jonas cared only about himself. Paul and Clint were happy savages, running around without a thought in their heads. It is up to me, she thought. I will have to do something.

JORGE PICKED HER up at the station in Carrizo. She didn’t feel like talking so she rode in the backseat, which she didn’t normally do, she wasn’t inclined to make people feel like servants. But Jorge wasn’t bothered. He seemed relieved, even. He liked being alone with his thoughts just as she did, going for a drive to think, his own life, same as her, working through problems in his mind. Somehow this embarrassed her.

As they came up the caliche driveway, the house appeared at the top of the hill, the sun blinding white on the limestone, the dark green oaks and elms, the sky a hot pale blue. The third floor would be unbearable, the second floor only slightly better: she would be sleeping on her porch tonight, ice water on the sheets and two fans blowing. There was a black coupe parked in front that she recognized as her grandmother’s. The driver, a white man, was sitting on the porch by himself, far away from the vaqueros who were noisily taking their supper.

The curtains were drawn against the sun; the house smelled of hot stone. She went upstairs and changed out of her sweaty dress, fixed her hair and face, then went down to join her father and grandmother in the dining room.

Her father smiled and got up to kiss her hello and she knew immediately something was wrong. She wondered if one of her brothers had been hurt, then reminded herself they had not even left the country yet. Of course that meant nothing: one of their vaqueros had lost his son in basic training, run over by a jeep on a military base. It all went through her head in an instant; she dismissed it just as quickly. They would not be sitting for supper if something had happened to Paul or Clint.

Her grandmother, weaker even than Phineas, did not get up; Jeannie greeted her and kissed her cheek.

“How was your trip?”

“Hot,” she said.

“And Phineas?”

“He’s well.”

Her father, who had no use for Uncle Phineas, said, “Your grandmother was just telling me she’s spoken to the people at Southwestern in Georgetown.”

She nodded.

“You can start there in August.”

“Oh, I’m not interested in that,” she said cheerfully, as if they were asking her opinion.

A look went between her father and his mother and he said: “Jeannie, it’s unpleasant, but we all have our jobs in life. Mine is to make sure this ranch stays above water. Gramammy’s there is to make sure I don’t make any mistakes.” He smiled indulgently at her grandmother. “Yours is to get a proper education.”

He does not respect her, she realized. All the air went out of her; her talk with Phineas was just talk, it meant nothing. She felt cold. She would end up at Southwestern; she would make the best of it.

“You won’t have to go so far away this time,” her grandmother was saying.

Later she would not recall making any choice, the words seemed to come out on their own: “I am not going to be a secretary.”

“You don’t have to,” said her father.

“Or a teacher.”

“We all have our obligations, Jeannie.”

“Phineas and I were just talking about that same thing,” she said brightly. She took a drink of water.

“Well, it is true,” he said.

“He showed me the ledger.”

Her father was beginning to say something else but then her words caught up with him. She intended to stare him down but couldn’t and instead she spoke to her plate. “In fact, the ranch is not above water. It is quite the opposite.”

She looked up; her father’s face showed nothing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her grandmother trying to get her attention.

“I know what we lose on the cattle.”

“Well, you shouldn’t spend so much time listening to old Phineas,” he said. He tried to smile again, but couldn’t.

She began to feel sick; she wondered if she had caught a fever on the train.

“… this ranch is not the right place for a young lady with your talents,” her father was saying. “You’ll report to college, which is an opportunity I myself never had, at the end of summer.”

“Your life is no harder than mine,” she said. “You ride a twenty-thousand-dollar horse but you act like we live in the poorhouse. We lose four hundred thousand dollars a year on your cattle. Phineas says he’s tired of lending you money. Something will have to be done.”

There it was: she’d declared her betrayal. He was saying you will leave the table, you will leave the table right now and she said: “I will not.” She couldn’t have anyway; she was sure her legs would not hold her. “Every day you pretend you are supporting the family, when all you are doing is spending the family’s money.”

“It is my money,” he said. “It is not your money; you have no say in this, you are a child.”

“It is the Colonel’s money. You did not earn a dime of it.”

“You will stop.”

“We have not had supper in two weeks. Why? Because you are playing with your horses. Before that it was almost six weeks. The oil is the only thing allowing you to do this.”

She expected to be slapped, but her father seemed to calm down and he said, “The oil pays for improvements to the land, honey. It pays so we don’t have to sleep in the mud at roundup, so we can just drive home and sleep in real beds at night. And that airplane, because we can’t hire enough men to check those pastures from horseback anymore.”

“Then perhaps we should stop doing roundup altogether,” she said. “As it would save us a great deal of money.”

Then he got up. He squared himself and stepped toward her, but nothing happened. He turned and walked out of the room. She could hear his footsteps slow as he reminded himself the house was still his, his boots went down the hall, past the parlor and into the foyer, then out the front door, slamming it behind him.

“That was very stupid,” said her grandmother.

She shrugged, wondered if she’d destroyed everything she knew; then had a feeling it had never mattered anyway. The day before, an hour before, to speak to her father, to speak to anyone like this would have been unthinkable.

“I didn’t realize you were afraid of him,” she said. “Is it because the Colonel didn’t leave you anything?”

Her grandmother ignored her. “You can’t stay here, Jeannie. Especially after this.”

Jeannie had a feeling she would be content if she never spoke to her grandmother again, or to anyone else in the family.

“Your father is not going to let you run this ranch.”

“There isn’t any ranch. We’re living on minerals and borrowed money.”

“Did Phineas write you that little speech? Because if you think a woman will have any place in his schemes, you’re mistaken.” She got a nasty look. “In more ways than one.”

“I guess we’ll see.” She was thinking about her father, how thin he was; she knew he no longer slept through the night.

Her grandmother set down her knife and fork, arranging them carefully and smoothing the tablecloth, and took a sip of her sherry. “I have always known that you find me tiresome,” she said. “You think it is my nature, or my disposition, or you have likely never thought about it. But when I decided to move here, I found I had a choice between being liked and having a say. That’s the choice you’ll have to make as well. They will either love you and not respect you, or they will respect you and not love you.”

“Things are changing.”

“It may appear that way, but when the war is over, the men will come back, and it will go back to the way it has always been.”

“I guess we’ll see,” she repeated.

“This place,” said her grandmother. She waved her hand, dismissing not only Jeannie but everything else, the house, the land, their good name. “I’m a member of the wealthiest family in four counties, but they still give me dirty looks when I vote.”

It was quiet. It occurred to Jeannie that for years she had wanted nothing more than this — for her grandmother to treat her like a confidante, a real person — but now she wanted nothing of the sort. She guessed she ought to feel privileged; instead she was embarrassed. Embarrassed that her grandmother was bullied by her own son, embarrassed that she would complain about her sex; what should have been sympathy somehow turned to anger, her grandmother ought to be out among the right people, solving the social problem, for if not her, then who? It was weakness, the entire family, and she felt a lifetime of fear and respect burn off as quickly as it had for her father. She sat up straight, smoothed her dress, she would be alone in life, that was clear, but right now she did not mind.

“You are not going to find a husband here who understands that we are halfway through the twentieth century. Do you understand?”

“I’ll end up like you, you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Married to men like your father or your grandfather or your brothers. To the sort of men who would choose to live out here, you will just be a place to get warm.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You won’t have a choice, Jeannie.”