The Son

Chapter Thirty. Diaries of Peter McCullough, JUNE 22, 1917

I stood there with the door open, expecting her to draw a pistol, or rush with a knife, but she didn’t move. She was smaller than I remembered, her clothes ragged, sun-beaten, beyond worn, her skin leather over bone, scabs on her face where she had fallen or been struck. Her hands hung at her sides as if she did not have the energy to lift them.

I tried to recall her age, thirty-three or — four, except she would be older now… I remembered her as a pretty girl, small with dark eyes; she now looked her mother’s age. Her nose had been broken and it had set crooked.

“I came to see our house,” she said. “I was hoping to find my birth certificate.” She shrugged. “Of course they assume I’m not a citizen when I try to cross.”

I looked away from her. There was something troubling about her accent — she had spent four years at a women’s college — compared with the way she looked.

“You may have trouble finding it,” I said quietly, referring to the birth certificate.

“Yes, I saw.”

Still I could not look at her.

“I’m very hungry,” she said. “Unfortunately…”

Every time I tried to lift my eyes, they wouldn’t. It was quiet and I realized she was waiting for me to say something.

“I’ll try at the Reynoldses’,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Come in.”

SHE HAS BEEN living in Torreón for two years with a cousin, but the cousin was a Carrancista and the Villistas had come to his house and killed him, then beaten up María and the cousin’s wife, perhaps done worse. What money she had was long spent and she had been on the road for nearly a month. Finally she’d decided there was nothing else to do but come back here. She reminded me, several times, that she was an American citizen. I know that, I told her. Though of course she looks as Mexican as anyone else.

Was it polite to offer condolences for her family? Probably the opposite. I didn’t say anything. We stood in the kitchen as I heated beans and carne asada, some tortillas Consuela had made, my hands shaking. I could feel her eyes on my back. The beans began to burn and finally she pushed me aside. I smiled at her, I didn’t usually do this sort of thing, but she didn’t smile back. As the beans were stewing she cut some tomatoes and onions and a few peppers and mixed them together.

“If you will excuse me, I am quite hungry.”

“Of course. I have a few things to do upstairs.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off me, not touching the food until I’d left.

I SAT IN my study as if all the life had been sucked out of me… all the energy I’d once had, my years at university, smashed against the rocks of this place. I nearly picked up the phone to call the sheriff to come remove her, though what my reason would be, I couldn’t say. We had killed her family, burned her house, stolen her land… she ought to be calling the sheriff on us… she ought to have shown up at our door with a hundred men, rifles cocked.

I considered climbing out the window onto the roof of the gallery — it was only fifteen feet to the ground — I could drop to the grass and walk away, never to come back.

Or I could simply wait until someone, perhaps my father, more likely Niles Gilbert, would take her outside, walk her into the brush, snip the last frayed end. I see Pedro, the tear weeping from beneath Lourdes’s eye, I see Aná’s head tilted back, her mouth wide as if trying to scream even in death.

I decided I would tell her. I had done my best — perhaps she had been watching? I had stood between the two lines and the shooting had begun anyway. I went to the safe and counted out two thousand dollars and put it into my pocket. I would drive her to the hospital in Carrizo or wherever her birth had been registered, procure the necessary papers, and help her on her way, polite but firm; there was nothing for her here.

SHE WAS TRIMMING the skin off a mango.

“What are your plans,” I said, as gently as possible.

“Right now I am planning to eat this mango. With your permission, of course.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember the times we sat out on our portico?” She continued to peel the fruit. The knife slipped but she continued as if nothing had happened.

“Do you want a bandage?”

“No, thank you.” She put her thumb into her mouth.

I looked at the table, then around the room, at the patterns in the tin ceiling. Her shoulders were shaking; her head was down and I couldn’t see her face. But there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be taken the wrong way.

It was like that until I decided to put the dishes in the sink.

“Of course I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“It’s not inconvenient,” I told her.

“It was inconvenient to my cousin.”

“Do you have other family?”

“My brothers-in-law. I’m hoping they’re dead but they are the type to survive.”

Of course it was obvious what any normal person would do. We had provided a place to live for numerous of my father’s old friends, decrepit herders from another age, men who had no families, or who no longer had anything to say to their families; dozens of them had lived out their last days in our bunkhouse, taking their meals with the vaqueros, or with us, depending on how close they had been to my father. But this was a different matter. Or so it would be said.

“I live here alone,” I told her. “My father has his own house a little ways up the hill. My wife has left me; my remaining sons are in the army.”

“Is this your way of making a threat?” she said.

“It’s the opposite.”

“I imagined you might shoot me,” she said. “I imagine you still might.”

The sympathy began to go out of me. I continued to wash the dishes, though they were already clean. “Then why did you come?”

No answer.

“You’re welcome to stay the night. There are plenty of spare rooms on the second floor, just go up the stairs and turn left and pick one.”

She shrugged. She was sucking at the pit of the mango, the juice had run down her scabbed chin. She looked like she belonged on a stoop in Nuevo Laredo, the old combination of hopelessness and rage. I began to hope more than ever that she would turn me down, that a meal in the house of her enemy would be enough.

“Okay,” she said. “I will stay the night.”

JUNE 23, 1917

My bedroom did not feel secure so I lay back down in my office, door locked. I loaded, unloaded, then reloaded my pistol. I listened for her footsteps in the hall, though the runner was thick and I knew I would likely hear nothing.

Around midnight I unloaded the pistol a second time. Of course I am no different from the others, the same dark urges inside me. I was not afraid of her physically. It was something much worse.

AROUND FIRST LIGHT, I drifted off. Then the sun was coming in; I rolled over and fell back asleep. In the distance was a sound I had not heard in a long time; when I realized what it was I woke up immediately and got dressed.

Downstairs, Consuela was standing at the entrance to the parlor, watching. She saw me and walked away as if I had caught her at something.

María was sitting at the bench, playing the piano. She must have heard my footsteps because her back went straight and she missed a few notes, then continued playing. Her hair was down around her shoulders, exposing her neck; I could make out the vertebrae easily. What she was playing, I didn’t know. Something old. German or Russian. I stood a few paces behind her; she continued to play without turning. Finally I went to the kitchen.

Consuela looked at me. “Should I prepare breakfast for her?”

I nodded. “Is there coffee?”

“In the pot. Frío.”

I poured a cup anyway.

Consuela busied herself chopping nopales, tossing them into the pan with butter.

“Does your father know?”

“He will soon enough.”

“Am I to treat her as a guest or…?”

“Of course,” I said.

I wondered how well she had known the Garcias. But of course the Garcias were wealthy and Consuela is a servant. The sun had been up two hours and was filling the house, the warm air coming through the windows. I was four hours late for work. I went to the icebox and pulled out a few chunks of cabrito, then wrapped them in a cloth with a tortilla.

“Let me heat that,” she said.

“I better go,” I said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Should I watch her?”

“No,” I said. “Just give her whatever she wants.”

I DIDN’T GET home until well after dark, when I knew Consuela would have gone back to her house. I could smell that someone had been cooking, but the plates had all been cleaned and put away. María was at the table, reading a book. The Virginian, by Wister.

“Do you like this one?” she said.

“It’s not bad.”

“The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing.”

We sat there with nothing to say. Finally I decided to bring it up.

“Everything happened pretty fast that morning.”

She went back to the book.

“I think it’s best we talk about it.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “You want to be forgiven.”

The night air was blowing through the house. There was a screech owl outside and the windmill, and, in the distance, the sound of my father’s drilling rig. I sat and listened.

“I’ll leave in the morning. I’m sorry I came.”

I felt myself relax. “All right,” I said.

LAY AWAKE SEVERAL hours. Am courting disaster, some cataclysm I cannot imagine; I feel it as the old man knows rain is coming. I want only for her to disappear… the thought itself relaxes me. All my noble thoughts vanish — when kindness is truly needed it is scarce as the milk of queens. It seems that any moment a company of sediciosos might kick down the door, carry me off to the nearest adobe wall…

But that was not what I was really afraid of. I had a memory of Pedro and I sitting on his portico. Aná came out and brought us sweet tea, but when Pedro drank, the tea ran down his shirt and onto his lap; there was a hole under his chin I had not noticed. Then I was standing with my father and Phineas, on one side a deep green pasture, the smell of huisache, the shrubs all around us dotted with gold. In front of us an old elm tree… a man on a horse, a rope slack around his neck, people expecting something of me; I could not do it, though it was a simple enough action. Finally Phineas slapped the horse across the hams and the man slid off the back, twisting and kicking, his legs searching for purchase, but there was only air…

Humiliation of failure, jealousy of Phineas. And yet I knew I could not have done it, no matter how many chances they might have given me. They were trying to harden me; all wasted effort.

I opened my eyes. I was cold. The wind was blowing through the house, two or three A.M., the windmills creaking, coyotes yipping. I thought of a fawn running in panicked circles, then went to the window and stood looking, there was enough moonlight to see far out over our pastures, ten miles at least. Nothing in sight that did not belong to us.

Finally I got dressed. I made my way to the hallway in the west wing of the house, stepping quietly, as if meeting for an assignation, though it did not matter… we were alone. I noticed that my breath was foul, my hair and face greasy, the smell of old sweat, but I continued down the hall. A prowler in my own house. Past the busts on their pedestals, the drawings of ruins… another portrait of my mother, past Glenn’s room and Pete Junior’s room and Charlie’s room… finally I heard a fan blowing behind one of the doors. I knocked softly.

I knocked again and waited and then knocked a third time. Then I opened the door. The bed was empty but the sheets were mussed and it was dark. I went to the window and she was standing on the roof of the gallery, at the very edge.

“Come back from there.”

She didn’t move. She was wearing a nightdress Consuela must have given her. For a moment I thought she was sleepwalking.

“Come here,” I repeated.

“If you’re going to kill me…” she said. “I don’t care but I am not just going to walk out into the brasada with you.”

“You should stay here,” I told her.

“Imposible.”

“Stay until you’re well.”

She shook her head.

“I wanted to stop you before you left. That’s all I wanted.”

“In order that you will have done something kind.” She looked at me, shook her head, then looked out over the land. She was looking toward her old house, I realized. I worried she might step over the edge. She said, “Today in the kitchen while your back was turned, I thought about how I might put the chopping knife into your throat. I thought about how many steps it was and what I would do if you turned around.”

“Stay,” I said.

She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re asking, Peter.”

JUNE 24, 1917

In non-Garcia-related news, the vaqueros complain that the noise of the drilling is ruining the cattle. They do not see this year’s calf crop being a good one if the animals are subjected to all that noise.

I went to my father to ask how deep they intend to drill. He told me to the center of the earth. I ask if he knows that our aquifer is shallow, and our water some of the best in this part of Texas, and that if he leaks petroleum into it, we are done for. He tells me these men are experts. He means the ones who sleep in hog wallows.

IT OCCURS TO me that we are entering an era in which the human ear will cease to distinguish sounds. Today I barely heard the drillers. What other things am I not hearing?

WHEN I RETURNED to the house for dinner, there was the sound of the piano before I even reached the door. I removed my boots and left them outside so she would not hear me enter, opened and closed the door very softly, then lay on the divan listening to her play. When I opened my eyes she was standing over me. For an instant I imagined her as she had been ten years earlier: her round face, dark eyes. Then I looked at her hands. They were empty.

“I am going to eat.”

“Alone?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

She heated up what Consuela had left for us. When we finished I asked her again what had happened that day.

She acted like she hadn’t heard. “Would you mind if I cooked a little more? I can’t stop thinking about food.”

“There are always things in the icebox,” I said.

She took some cold chicken and began to eat. She tried to be dainty but I could tell it took a lot of effort, I was full but she was starving.

“Tell me.”

“You think that talking about this will allow me to forgive you.”

“I haven’t forgiven myself,” I said quietly.

“Telling you changes nothing,” she said. “Just so we are clear.”

I nodded.

“Fine. So, when they came into the house, they shot everyone, whether they were already on the floor or standing up. Someone shot my niece, who was six, and then, like a coward, I went into my room and hid in my closet. After that I remember sitting on my bed and someone removing my shirt and realizing they are going to rape me before they kill me, then I saw it was you. I thought you were going to rape me and somehow it was much worse.

“Then you walked me through the house. I saw into my parents’ room, my mother and father dead, my sister lying with them, then in the sala were Cesár and Romaldo and Gregorio, Martin and my nephew, and their families. I could see the front door was open, and the sun was coming through it and I began to hope I might live, but when we reached the portico I saw the entire town had gathered. Then I wished I hadn’t hidden in the closet. I nearly took your gun.

“After that I was at the Reynoldses’ house. They thought they were rescuing me, they thought they were doing me a favor. They fed me, allowed me to bathe, gave me clothes, a room with clean sheets. Meanwhile, my own house, with my own bed and my own clothes, was just a few miles away. But it was already not mine.”

“No one wanted it to happen.”

“These lies come out of your mouth so easily,” she said. “You yourself, I believe you had reservations, perhaps a few others… the Reynoldses, obviously… but not anyone else.”

She looked at the plate in front of her. “And still I am hungry. That is what I cannot believe.”

It was quiet and finally she said, “Can we go outside? I get spells of hot and cold, and now I am very hot.”

We went onto the porch and looked over the land. It was an unusually cool day, a pleasant evening, with the sun just going down. I considered remarking as much, then decided against it. I could hear the drilling going on from the other side of the hill.

After we’d sat awhile, she said: “I’ve spent a long time thinking about what happened. And the longer I thought about it, the more I began to think that things had just gone very badly wrong, of course the shooting of your son — it was Glenn?”

“Yes.”

“And how is he?”

“He is alive.”

“I am glad.”

I felt my face get hot. For some reason this — Glenn still being alive — embarrassed me.

“One of yours hurt, eleven of mine dead…” She put up her hands, as if balancing scales. “We have all suffered, the past is the past, it is time to move on.”

I didn’t answer.

“That is what you think, isn’t it? Your child injured, my family exterminated, we are even. And of course you are the best of them; the others think okay, a white man was scratched, there is no amount of Mexican blood that can wash out that sin. Five, ten, one hundred… it’s all the same to them. In the newspapers, a dead Mexican is called a carcass”—she held up her fingers—“like an animal.”

“Not all newspapers.”

“Just the ones that matter. But of course I’m no better; for a long time, I had fantasies about nearly every white person in town, burning them, cutting them. I remember very clearly Terrell Snyder staring at me with a grin on his face and the Slaughter brothers as well…”

“I don’t think the Slaughters were there,” I said.

“They were, I saw them clearly, but that is irrelevant. I decided I would stop being angry and perhaps accept that the entire situation, everything that had happened, was bad luck. In fact I became certain of it. We had known your family for decades, it didn’t make sense. You in particular we knew very well; I could not imagine you plotting against us. I began to think that perhaps I overreacted by fleeing from the Reynoldses’ house.

“And so when my cousin was killed, I decided I would come back. I crossed the river and reached our pastures and felt more alive than I had been in months. I decided to walk all night. I had a story prepared if I met one of your fence riders, though I hoped I would not, as I knew that, depending on their mood, my story would not matter. But… there was no one. This I also took as a sign.

“I knew what condition the house would be in. The stuffing would be pulled out of chairs, bird droppings, dirt everywhere, our papers shredded by mice, and of course the old pools of the blood of my family would not have been cleaned and the bullets would still be in every wall. It would look exactly as I had left it, except that it would have aged two years.

“When I reached our lower pasture, by the old church, the sun was coming up and I could see the house had been burned. But still I thought no, empty homes are often vandalized, lovers go to them, the poor occupy them, the dry climate — even a cigarette might have started a fire. I went through one of the doors, made my way through the rubble to my father’s office, where I knew all our papers were kept, in metal cabinets that would have resisted any fire. The cabinets were buried under debris, like everything else, but after some time I uncovered them. My birth certificate, perhaps some money, stock certificates, things like that. But do you know what I found?”

I looked away.

“Nothing. They were empty. The papers were gone. Every single document and letter, every record had been removed. And then I knew it had been intentional. It was not enough to exterminate my family; it was also necessary to remove every record of our existence.”

“No one wanted that,” I told her.

“Another lie. You of all people, you have already forgotten that you are lying. Your lies have become the truth.”

I decided to study a green lizard scuttling across the porch. Sometime later I heard a sound; her breath was rattling like a dying man’s. I had a terrible feeling but I watched her and she continued to breathe; she was asleep. I watched her for a long time after that and when I was sure she was not going to perish, I went inside and got a blanket and put it over her.