The Son

Chapter Twenty-three. Jeannie, Spring 1945

It was a bad storm, a gully washer, the rain coming so fast the ground had no time to absorb it, the clouds so heavy they blotted out the light. By noon it was completely dark. The lightning was echoing through the house and she was sure it was a gunnery raid, a mission from the Kaufman air base gone off target. She watched fire leap through a patch of cedar close to the house, entire trees erupting ahead of the flames; a great sheave of rain put it out.

Her father had been out in the far pastures. He did not return for supper but a few hours later his horse showed up at the gate, alone and still saddled. It was even darker now; she could barely see her own feet. There was no chance of going after him, but it was not cold, and he was resourceful, and she expected he would show up sometime in the morning, soaked and footsore but otherwise intact.

Still, she slept in fits, waking every hour or so until at some point she looked out and saw the moon. The vaqueros were all waiting downstairs; her horse was already saddled. At first light they followed the dim tracks of her father’s grullo, nearly obliterated by the rain but, when she put herself in the right mind, clear enough to follow.

The tracks led to a big arroyo but they did not continue on the other side. The light was spreading across the horizon and the birdcalls were starting up as if nothing had happened. Jeannie and the older vaqueros continued the search, the horses and most of the men held back so as not to trample any sign, but even later, with the sun risen, there were no tracks.

Her father, upon reaching the arroyo, must have dismounted. Or more likely, he had come upon it at speed, blinded by the rain and dark, and been thrown. There was only a thin trickle of water now, but high along the banks, fresh grass dangled from the sycamores. A man might have been carried miles. Dozens of miles.

FOUR DAYS LATER, one of the Midkiff vaqueros found him at a water gap, the white sole of a foot showing under the brush and flotsam. No one told her; the telephone rang and then Sullivan got into his truck and went to town and when he returned, there was a box on the front seat with her father’s clothes. They were filthy and torn but she recognized his shirt. She picked it up, thinking to bring it to her face, then dropped it. It was crawling with blowflies.

Clint had died at Salerno, Paul at the Battle of the Bulge, even though she had prayed every night, even though she had not missed a Sunday of church. When Clint was killed she had continued to pray for Paul and Jonas, and at some point, months before his death, she had begun to pray for her father as well. Now she wondered if she had somehow killed them. One seemed as likely as the other. She decided she would stop praying for Jonas, and he had lived.

BECAUSE OF HER father’s condition, the funeral was planned for the next day, and as she lay in her bed that afternoon, exhausted but unable to fall asleep, it occurred to her that the ranch still needed to be run, that there was no one left but her.

She allowed herself a few more minutes, then drew a bath, scrubbing herself thoroughly, though without wasting any time, as she imagined a mother might wash a child. She put on her black dress, then decided against it; she could not afford to be worrying about her clothes. She changed into blue jeans and old boots and knew her grandmother would not have approved, though of course she was gone as well, dead the previous year. She put on a bit of makeup — almost as bad as the pants. But her eyelashes were blond, like the rest of her — they made her look too young. Where is Jonas? she thought.

No work had been done in four days; everyone had been looking for her father. Now all thirty of his employees — vaqueros, fence riders, the windmill monkeys — were gathered around the bunkhouse, sitting on the porch or under trees in the shade, speaking quietly and wondering what was going to happen.

She told them nothing would change, that if for some reason she were not around, their paychecks would be distributed by Mrs. Wright, the bookkeeper. Everyone will be paid for the past four days, she continued, and tomorrow will be a day off. But between now and then, the water gaps need tending, the Midkiffs have some of our stock, and anything else the storm broke, you just get to fixing it, you don’t have to ask.

She did not tell them that she did not have the authority to sign their checks. She spent the rest of that day and night alternately worrying that no one would attend the funeral and wondering where her father kept his will. Their lawyer tore his office apart but found nothing; around midnight Jeannie found the document in an old file cabinet. It had been updated several times: once for Clint and once for Paul, but the newest version, dated only a few months previous, which had doubtless caused her father much anxiety, named her sole inheritor of his share of the ranch. Jonas got a share of the minerals but that was all.

A feeling of happiness overtook her; she could not help smiling, then laughing, and then felt terrible. Still, Phineas would be overjoyed — the entire property was now split between them. Jonas would not care too much; he was trying to make his way back from Germany, though the flights were infrequent and always full and a ship would take weeks. She went back to worrying about the funeral.

Outside several fires had been built, calves and goats and hogs set to roasting. Trips had been made to Carrizo for beans, corn, coffee, and two dozen store-made cakes. A hundred cases of Pearl beer and four cases of whiskey. The house felt more alive than it had in years; the cooks were up all night, doing whatever it was they did, and the maids were as well, changing all the linens in the guest rooms, getting the folding cots out of storage, making the house ready for company.

PHINEAS ARRIVED WITH a sizable entourage; there was a trickle, then a flood, of people from Austin and San Antonio and Dallas, from Houston and El Paso and Brownsville, the other South Texas ranchers, newspapermen, nearly five hundred people in total, which at first caused her to weep — her father had been more appreciated than she had ever realized — but as the day went on she saw that most had come out of politeness, not for her father but for her, or for the family, for the idea of the McCulloughs. The local Mexicans, who had mostly hated her father, and not without cause, they all came as well, because that was what you did when your patrón died.

THE LAST TIME the house had been so full was at the Colonel’s funeral, but that had a different feel altogether, of genuine misery, the end of something, of grown men who could not stop crying. The faces now were somber but not troubled, the conversation easy. Her father had not mattered. It was not fair but the more she thought about it, the more condolences she accepted, the more she heard the circumstances of his death whispered around the room, the more furious she got. He had died stupidly. From stubbornness and poor judgment. The vaqueros had all lit for home as soon as the storm blew in — lightning killed more cowboys than guns ever had — but her father, with his notions, had wanted to finish his count. I don’t mind getting a little wet—those were his last words.

She circulated through the house, hundreds of people, thanking them for coming and insisting they eat, the smell of beef and cabrito and roast pig, unending dishes of beans and sauce and tortillas, gallons of beer and sweet tea. She was in and out of the kitchen; yes, another calf should be knocked in the head — on the coals immediately — yes, another run was needed to Carrizo — no telling how long people would stay. Sullivan periodically appeared and pressed a cold glass of tea into her hand. She had sweated through her dress. She went up to change but there was nothing else; of course she had only one black dress. She hung it in front of the fan in her bedroom, wiped herself down with a wash towel, then stood in front of the fan herself. She made a note to check Sullivan’s salary; his people had worked for the family three generations; her father had been stingy. She was tempted to rest but knew she would fall asleep.

Back downstairs she continued to move through the crowd, barely hearing what people said. There was Uncle Phineas in the corner, leaning on his cane, holding forth with a group of young men. He was so clearly enjoying himself that she turned away when he called to her.

The vaqueros and the Mexicans from town stood deferentially, speaking quietly, but the men from the cities — all in riding boots and stockman’s hats — clomped and talked noisily like they were family. It made her feel weak. The Colonel would not have stood for men like that. She wished that one of his old friends might show up — as a few still did, once in a while — and, for the sake of the Colonel, empty a six-gun into the ceiling to clear out the house.

But even that was a fantasy. From what she had known of cowboys, even the old ones, they tended not to do well in crowds, they tended to be polite and deferential, and most could not have even looked these new men, these city men, in the eye.

JONAS MISSED THE burial but came home from Germany anyway, where the war, for all practical purposes, was over. She practically smothered him when she picked him up; she was not sure what to expect — a thousand-yard stare, deep scars, a limp — but he looked fit and healthy and had a confident stride.

The first thing he said, when he walked into the house, their steps loud in the cavernous great room, with its stone walls and thirty-foot ceilings, was, “We need to get you the hell out of here. You won’t have a normal life. The war will be over in a few weeks and I could get a job for you in Berlin. It would probably be as a typist or something but we could live together.”

She was not sure how to respond — it was appealing but also entirely wrong — she was not going to be a typist. It was her brother who ought to be coming home, not her going to some foreign country.

“Or hell,” he was saying. “We’ve got money. You don’t have to work at all, just come live.”

“How is it there?”

He shrugged.

“I guess you’ve seen terrible things?”

“No worse than others.”

She wanted to ask if he had shot anyone, or seen anyone shot, but he seemed to sense the question was coming and stood abruptly, walking to the other end of the room, looking at the old drawings, the marble statues and figurines, shaking his head, picking things up and putting them down.

“Would you like something to eat?” she called.

“We probably better go to the grave. I can’t stay long.”

This didn’t make any sense — he had traveled a week to get there — and she decided to ignore it, not being sure he was in his right mind.

“Do you want to drive or ride?”

“Let’s ride. It’s four years since I’ve been on a horse.”

OVER SUPPER, WHICH he was now calling dinner, he had asked, in a way that struck her as too direct: “Are there any men around here you like?”

No. In fact the year before there had been another vaquero, less handsome than the others, with a squishy sort of nose; they had kissed behind one of the brush corrals and later lain together by the springs at the old Garcia place. He had been more aggressive than she wanted — the few men left seemed to get their way far too quickly — but that night, when she was reflecting on it alone, she was sorry she’d stopped his hands. These chances only seemed to come at great intervals, and so a few days later, when they agreed to meet again, she had carried an ancient condom — found in Clint’s room, of course — tucked into a pocket in her dress. She had waited an hour, then two, lying by herself under the trees, in the soft grass overlooking the old church.

Her vaquero had not shown up. Again it was no mystery what had happened: the young man’s friends, afraid of her father, afraid for their own jobs, had warned him off. She had cried for days — even for this man, whom (snobbishly, she knew now) she had considered below her, she was not good enough. She had always thought herself a prize: blond, petite, not as shapely as some but certainly with a woman’s shape; her button nose had straightened out, her eyes had gotten bigger, and in a certain light she wondered if she might be beautiful. But most of the time she was at least pretty, far above average, and while it was true that there was a Mexican girl in Carrizo who was prettier, that girl was very poor.

And yet… she was nearly twenty, she was supposed to be out living, she was supposed to have suitors and she did not, with the exception of a few men from town who may have thought they were courting her, but, so far as she was concerned, weren’t. She did not think of herself as rich, but she knew that other people did; she did not trust any of the whites from town; they saw her in the wrong way. The vaqueros she knew and trusted well enough — it was against their interest to damage her reputation — though apparently they did not trust her, or they did not respect her, or perhaps they sensed her desperation.

As for Jonas, she barely recognized him. His face had filled out, his frame as well; there was no longer anything of the boy. He spoke too fast, like someone raised in the North, and he cursed constantly, like someone raised in the North; he seemed entirely too sure of himself. Over dinner he got drunk on whiskey and they talked and built an enormous fire, of the sort their father would have found wasteful, but when they finally decided to go to sleep, Jonas refused to go up to his old room — making a show, she thought — and instead he took a blanket to a couch near the fire. She went to her bedroom and as she sat there in her nightgown, she knew she would be responsible for losing everything. Jonas had absolved himself — he cared nothing for the house or their legacy. Though of course he had been cut out of much of it. It must have stung him, their father’s final insult, though he had still left Jonas half his minerals, which, in the end, mattered more to her brother than the land ever could have.

The next morning they took their breakfast in the great room, where they could listen to the radio.

“Will you stay here until the fighting is done?”

He shook his head. “I remember Daddy turning that off every time FDR came on.” Pointing to the radio.

She wondered if she would have to defend her father for the entire visit. Though as it turned out, it was for the rest of their lives. “He didn’t do that once the war started,” she said. “On D-day he let everyone off and we all sat here and listened, and he drew a big map, and he would say that is Paul’s division, the Eighty-Second Airborne, who have landed there, and that is Jonas’s division. He made all these notes for everyone to see. He was proud of you.”

“Well, he was wrong because I didn’t land until the second day. And Paul didn’t land on a beach at all, he dropped in by parachute in the middle of all the Germans.”

“I don’t remember all the details,” she admitted.

“Do you remember him saying that FDR’s election was the end of American democracy? Or that the Dust Bowl was a communist invention?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how we came from him.”

“He wasn’t so bad.” She had not remembered her brother as so cold, but then maybe she had never really known him. She closed her eyes.

“I remember him saying that we lived on the Frontier,” Jonas continued, “Frontier with a capital F. I told him the frontier had closed before he was even born, and then he would lecture me about the tradition we were carrying on. I would tell him there was no tradition, there could be no tradition for a thing that had lasted only twenty years. Anyway… I don’t know what this place will become, but right now I can’t see the point. It’s not settled enough to have any culture, but it’s not wild enough to be interesting. It’s just a province.”

She didn’t answer.

“You should sell it. Keep the minerals but make a clean break. We could get you into Barnard easy as that.”

“I’m not moving to the North,” she said quietly.

“You were a kid then.”

“I’m happier here.”

“Jeannie.” He put his hand to his forehead as if what she had said was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Everything we were taught was either a lie or a bad joke. It was always Yankees this or that, the worst sort of people, all full of shit, and then one day it occurred to me that if Daddy hated them so much, that was probably where I belonged. Meanwhile he was worse than anyone I met at Princeton, born into money but always complaining about how poor and put-upon he was. And the way he was with the Mexicans?”

She didn’t say anything.

His eyes were closed. “I was so fucking stupid when I got there.”

HE STAYED ANOTHER week, until they were both sure the estate was in order. By then all the anger had gone out of him. He changed his will to leave her everything in case something happened; he signed a power of attorney. She felt closer to him than she ever had; she had lost her father but regained her brother. And then he got on the train east, toward the war, and she did not see him for three more years.

STARTING THE DAY Jonas left, and continuing for how long she didn’t know, she kept hours like a cat, sleeping three-quarters of the day, waking in the middle of the night, pacing the empty house, crying herself to sleep on the sofa only to wake a few hours later with the sun in her eyes. Going back up to her room with its heavy curtains, finding breakfast or dinner on a tray outside her door, cold eggs, cold meat, visiting the bathroom.

There was nothing for her to do. No job, nothing useful to which she might attach her mind. Once a week, on what she knew must be Thursday, she found a clipboard on the dining room table with all the employee paychecks attached, which she signed individually and left by the door. She thought of her father and cried, she thought of her brothers and cried, she was vaguely aware that time was passing, she wondered why Phineas wasn’t calling her, why he hadn’t invited her to live with him. Often she could not tell if she was crying about this, or about her father, or her brothers, or even her great-grandfather, gone almost a decade but more tender toward her than her father had ever been.

A month might have passed. It might have been two. But she woke up one morning as the sun was rising, and accepted, with total certainty, that no one would ever look after her again.

A WEEK LATER a man from Southern Minerals showed up, wanting to talk about her future.

“I’ve been stopping by awhile, but they always said you were indisposed.”

He acted as if they were old friends but she crossed her arms and stood square in the door. He promptly offered a million dollars plus 12.5 percent to lease her property, with the exception of the acreage that Humble had already drilled. He knew her entire story. He knew her brothers had died in the war, that her father had died in the accident, that Jonas had gone back to Germany.

“You can move to the city.” He quickly adjusted: “Or raise your steers. Life won’t have to be hard anymore.” He gave her a sympathetic look.

She was not looking at him; she was hoping one of the vaqueros would ride past.

“You sound like a minister,” she said.

“Thank you.” He smiled and went back to talking about grass, and the weather, and how the cattle were doing, and after a time, when she had thought of what to say, she interrupted him.

“Do other people still sign at eighth royalties or is it just widows and orphans?”

He smiled again, saw right through her, saw the planning that had gone into her rudeness. He was standing closer now and she resisted the urge to step back — that would mean giving up the threshold — and then there was the heat; the natural thing was to invite him out of the sun. She decided she did not care how close he stood; she would not budge. But at the same time she wondered if this was stupid, if she was misjudging the situation entirely. She wondered if all the maids had left; she wondered how he had gotten through the gate.

He was so close she could smell his breath, and she felt a growing alarm at how alone she was. All the hands were out in the pastures — miles from earshot — and Hugo, the cook, had gone to Carrizo for supplies. She was alone and this man thought nothing of her whatsoever.

“I believe I’m getting tired,” she said.

He nodded but kept right on talking; he took off his hat to mop his forehead and she saw he had no tan line: an office man. He mentioned for a second time that it was no place for a girl to be alone and a tingling began in her neck and spread to her fingers; perhaps it was too late. He would take whatever he wanted. Her mouth went dry and she summoned up the effort to say, “If you do not leave I will call the sheriff.”

He stood as if this statement required further consideration, or maybe just to show that he was only leaving because he felt like it. Then he reached forward and squeezed her shoulder and wished her a good afternoon.

After closing the door she went straight to her father’s office, passing dozens of open windows, French doors with useless locks — there were any number of ways to get into the house — he was likely going around the back.

In her father’s drawer she found his Colt pistol, but after pulling back the slide in the manner she’d been taught, the magazine fell out onto the floor and bounced under the desk.

She unlocked the large closet where the rest of the guns were kept and found the.25–20 she had hunted with as a kid. Her brothers thought it weak medicine but she had killed two deer. She found the proper shells, prepared the rifle, and went back to the hallway. It had taken minutes. It was ridiculous. If the man really had followed her, he would have gotten her ages ago. She felt a fury building at Jonas, at her father, at…

There was something outside — the landman’s Ford — it was already at the front gate. She watched him, a distant speck now, open the gate and drive through. She felt very tired. She wanted to lie down.

Instead she loaded several revolvers (the automatic she no longer trusted), put them into a basket, and walked around the house distributing them as if they were flowers: one in the big vase next to the front door, another on a shelf in the kitchen, a third next to her bed, the fourth next to her favorite couch in the great room.

She went out to the gallery — where she could see a long way over the hills, nearly to the main road — and began to analyze what had happened. Calling the sheriff was wrong. It was the vaqueros you would call. The thought of someone killing the landman made her heart light, cleared her mind in a pleasant manner. She sat and watched the clouds and thought of what it might look like. He would go down like a steer or hog, right on his chin. She wondered why her hands were shaking. I am going crazy, she thought. She left the gallery and wandered through the house, stopping in front of the hall mirror. It was a joke, the guns were a joke, she was a child playing at grown-up things. She wondered again if she was going crazy.

It was a relief when she heard the cook come in and begin chattering to one of the maids. She was not sure if she had been talking to herself or not, if the maids had heard her. Everyone had been right — Jonas, her father, her grandmother — she did not belong here.

She saw the first of the vaqueros’ trucks crest a distant hill, trailering the horses from the pastures. Then the second truck, and the third. She felt everything get lighter. It was as simple as that. She would tell them. What would come of the landman, she didn’t care—I don’t, she thought, I really don’t—this was not the North, where you went around accosting people. Even loading the guns had been wrong; she needed a wall of armor around her, of men, like her father had kept.

Sullivan, the vaqueros, they would all know what to do. She decided to act before any further consideration weakened her; he was probably not such a bad man, she had probably misread the entire thing, she was young and alone (he accosted you, she reminded herself). Yes, that was it. The man would pay some price. Even Jonas would agree with that. He would not be killed, but it would be something unpleasant. She was not sure what. She didn’t care. She reminded herself of the way he had grabbed her and then, before she could change her mind, she was out the front door, ignoring Hugo’s calls about supper, making her way down the path toward the bunkhouse.