The Son

Chapter Fifty. J.A. McCullough

Things had gone wrong from the start. She’d walked onto her plane and her pilot was missing and his replacement — a woman — had a certain look. For the first time in her eighty-six years, decades of flying ten or twenty times a week, she wanted to get off the plane. Of course everything was fine. The woman was an excellent pilot, she’d flared so perfectly that Jeannie had barely been able to tell they’d touched down. But still there was that feeling.

Later she was sitting on the gallery, the sun was going down and it was quiet and she had begun to weep, the entire sky from front to back was red and purple and fiery orange, one day soon would be her last, perhaps this one, everything was so beautiful she could not bear the thought of leaving it. Then Frank Mabry had made his presence known. He took off his hat and waited for her to acknowledge him. She wondered if he were blind, or deaf, but he was just stupid. She ignored him, but still he would not leave, he stood there like a scolded dog and waited.

“Ma’am,” he said, after a minute.

She nodded. Dabbed at her eyes.

“I was wondering if you’d thought about what we talked about last time.”

“No,” she told him. She had no idea. He flew the small helicopter they used on roundups. She dabbed her eyes again and hoped he would drop dead but he didn’t retreat, he seemed to have a sense that he might yet be able to weasel his way into her good graces.

“How long have you known me, Frank?”

“Thirty-four years. And in fact that is just it. I have been wondering if something… were to happen, if any arrangements had been made, any considerations, for the people who had been in your employ so long.”

She wondered what he was talking about. Then she understood. “Please leave,” she said.

He clomped away. She hoped he might be kicked by a horse or that his truck would flip or that the rotor might fall off his little helicopter. She watched him drive away, had the sense everything was ruined, and went up to bed without dinner.

THE NEXT MORNING she woke up earlier than she wanted. Normally she turned on the computer, checked the oil and S&P futures, where Asia had closed and Europe was trading, but this morning she had no interest. She dressed and padded down the long hallway, the light just coming in on the dark wood and busts of old Romans, but instead of going downstairs she stood at the top and watched the sun come up through the stained glass. There was something about it. She’d seen it thousands of times but now there was something different. You’re being sentimental, she decided. She began to make her way down the stairs.

In the kitchen she made breakfast but when she went to put her plate away, she found the dishwasher full of clean dishes and glasses. Not hers; she’d only been here a night. Someone — some employee — must have thrown a party, she didn’t remember being asked, no, she thought, I was not asked, of course it was Dolores, who ran the house, no one else would have dared.

Dolores had worked for her thirty years and they’d always maintained a tactful sort of friendship, hugs and air kisses, J.A. making the occasional showing at Dolores’s family gatherings, birthdays or graduations, a benevolent presence. Certainly she had helped them live far above what was normal in Dimmit County. And, unlike Mabry, Dolores was being taken care of, though she did not know it yet.

She felt a heat rising in her; she should not be having these feelings. They were no longer healthy. She pulled back into her mind. The anger went out of her, the sun came brightly through the windows, she could see hummingbirds just outside and the scent of vanilla — the agaritos were blooming — but it didn’t matter, everyone was against her, they all saw the end was near. She wondered if she should have remarried. Which was ridiculous — Ted had died years ago, another husband to bury — but still, she had not led a natural life.

Your pills, she thought, and your drink. But even the small container seemed like too much effort. She wondered when Dolores would come, she would mention the incident but make it clear all was forgiven, she could have parties but only with permission. The light was spreading through the house, across the old rugs and dark floors, the portraits of her father and grandfather and great-grandfather along the main stairway; of course there ought to be one more, the person who had run the ranch longer than her father and grandfather combined, but one did not hang a portrait of oneself. And there was no one behind her to do it. Her grandson: perhaps he would be happy. That was all she could hope for.

The front door opened and closed and Dolores appeared at the end of the dining room, a tiny figure, out of proportion to all her surroundings. There was a long minute as she walked closer; she was carrying a new white handbag and when she reached the near end of the dining room, she smiled and said, “Good morning, Mrs. McCullough.”

“Good morning,” she said. “How was your little party?”

The woman looked away. Jeannie could see her mind working. “Party?” she said. “It was not a party, it was just a gathering, it was not planned.”

This was clearly rehearsed and she became angry again: “Well, let me know next time. It is still my house.”

Dolores continued to look away and then Jeannie felt bad; what would it be like to be nearing the end of your life, still being scolded? She came around the counter, intending to hug her, to show this was nothing serious, they were old friends, but if Dolores noticed her intention she didn’t let on. She said, “I’ll go see about your room,” and turned back toward the stairs, giving Jeannie the feeling that she, not Dolores, was the one who ought to be apologizing.

And there was that feeling — that Dolores no longer thought it worth hiding what they both knew, which was that in most important ways she no longer needed J.A. McCullough. Within her own community, Dolores was considered wealthy, a matriarch, people calling on her for favors, at every holiday there were cars parked on both sides of the road to her house.

In the old days it would have been the opposite. Jeannie would have been the one with the house full of lively children, weddings and birthdays and graduations to plan, while Dolores would have lost most of hers — perhaps all of them — to dysentery and malnutrition, to overwork and bad doctoring and the coraje and jealous husbands (they used to butcher each other, she thought, it was always in the paper that some peón had woken up and found he’d cut his wife’s throat). But now… now…

The sun was bright. Soon it would be summer and the light would extinguish everything, all the colors. But for now it was green and cool. She had a feeling, which became a clear thought, that she would not live to see it. She looked at her hands. Something was moving in the corner. She felt cold.

AFTER HANK DIED, there were times when the face that stared back at her in the mirror meant exactly nothing; given the right circumstance she would have obliterated it like a fly on a window. But they had not let her alone. If there was anything you could say about oilmen, they knew about suffering and loss; most were only a generation or two out of some tarpaper shack and for weeks after Hank died they had not let her alone. No matter how much she wanted silence there were people in the kitchen, living room, guest rooms, there was food out, servants she didn’t recognize, strangers coming and going, the kids going to school, coming back, how she didn’t know.

The Texans had been relentless; they might hate the blacks and Mexicans, they might hate the president enough to kill him, but they had not let her alone, they had cared for her like a mother or daughter, men she barely knew, men whose absence from their offices cost them thousands of dollars an hour, and yet she would come downstairs and find them asleep on her couch, and call their drivers to pick them up.

Though of course it was these same men who had nearly refused to do business with her in the years that followed. It was better not to think about. It was all forgiven, they had all gone back to the earth, they had lived only to die.

TED HAD COME into her life a few years after Hank left it. He was older and he came from an even older family, he spent most of his time playing polo — when he was not running or swimming — though he gave off the aura of someone who had done a lot of drugs, a man going to seed.

Not physically; at fifty he was over six feet, with a thirty-two-inch waist and the rugged looks of his ancestors, though his calluses were particular to polo mallets and dumbbells and he had never broken a bone in his life, most of which he had spent chasing women. But as if a switch had turned, he’d decided to settle down. He was smart, though it took her a long time to realize it, he paid attention to her in many ways that Hank had not and she had slowly come to see that Hank, as good as he was, had lived mostly for himself, though neither one of them had known it at the time.

And Ted, just in this difference, had given her hope, that she had not totally figured out life or people, that things might be different; it was a pleasant feeling. It mattered to Ted how she looked, he noticed all her haircuts and new clothes, he knew the difference between a mood he could talk her out of and one he couldn’t. He didn’t fawn, but he noticed. And yet he was not a serious person. He was an aging playboy who wanted company; who had grown tired, she guessed, of putting on an act for every waitress or stewardess who caught his eye. He’d decided he was old, and he wanted to be around his own people.

The boys liked him well enough. They did not quite take him seriously, though he was good to them, and filled a role she could not, taking them shooting and riding; he was too lazy to hunt deer but enjoyed hunting quail. The boys never seemed to learn anything from him; neither their riding nor their shooting improved in his presence, but he did not demand anything of them, either, and nights she would come home and find them sitting together on the sofa watching television, Ted with a bottle of wine, the boys with their pop, The Avengers or Bonanza, none of them with anything to say, but as happy as a pile of dogs in winter.

As for Susan, she had begun to summer in Maine with Jonas’s children, three months of blessed silence and privacy and after the second summer she came back asking to leave Kincaid and go away to Garrison Forest, like Jonas’s daughters. The idea that her daughter might disappear from her life for eight months was not entirely appealing, though it seemed better — barely — than having to put up with her. By then Susan was not just needy; she was a saboteur. She would go through her mother’s things, she would walk into their bedroom when she knew Ted was there, she would pretend to sneak to the kitchen for a snack, wearing only her T-shirt and underpants.

“That girl is a handful,” Ted told her.

“She will be lucky if she isn’t pregnant by her next birthday,” Jeannie said.

“I think you will be the lucky one.”

Of course he was right. But somehow, even then, it had not felt that way.

Ted didn’t have children of his own; she might have given him one while it was still possible, but neither one of them had been willing to commit to that. Mostly what Ted wanted was a family, without having to raise it himself; a woman who had her own money, a woman who accepted him as part of her pack, but otherwise asked nothing. She would never have guessed it, but she’d been more happy with him, more settled than she’d ever felt. Of course she could not help but be drawn to people like Hank, people with their own fire, but no matter how much they thought they loved you or their family or their country, no matter how they pledged their allegiance, that fire always burned for them alone.