The Son

Chapter Fifty-nine. Eli McCullough

In 1521 a dozen Spanish cattle were landed in the New World; by 1865 there were four million living wild in Texas alone. They did not take to domestication; they would happily stick a horn through you and go back to chewing grass. Your average hayseed avoided them as he might a grizzly bear.

But they could not help being herd animals. Once you had a big enough bunch even the mossy horns would fall in. Starting from nothing it might take a year to build your brand, roping and cutting and marking seven days a week, and if you weren’t gored or trampled there was always a neighbor who found it more enjoyable to spend that same year grinning up at the sun; all he had to do was come into your pastures one night with ten of his boon companions, where, in a few hours, he could take your entire year’s work and make it his.

FOR ROOM, BOARD, and a sliver of the future profits, I hired two former confederates, John Sullivan and Milton Emory, along with Todd Myrick and Eben Hunter, who had spent the war dodging the Home Guard in Maverick and Kinney Counties. They knew the land better than I and were not allergic to sweat or blood. All knew Arturo Garcia and hated him, but as it was common to dislike Mexicans in those days, I did not think anything of it.

YOU BEGAN A cattle drive owing your hands a year’s back wages and after borrowing money from everyone you knew. The brutes were gently walked and allowed to graze and drink at will, so they would not drop even an ounce of weight. They were treated as precious eggs. Meanwhile, a storm might cost you half the herd.

The life of the cowboy has been written about as if it were the pinnacle of freedom in the West but in fact it was a sleepless drudgery almost beyond imagination — five months of slavery to a pack of dumb brutes — and had I not been riding for my own brand I would not have lasted a day. The fact the country was tame enough to drive valuable property across tells you all you need to know; the days of Bridger and Carson and Smith were long gone, the land was already going domestic.

We lost two of the thirty-dollar men when their horses went off a cliff in the dark. The others we released in Kansas. They were happy to see the big city and look for other work; they had more money in their pockets than they’d ever seen. On 1,437 head I cleared $30,000 and two hundred Indian ponies no one wanted. We drove the ponies back down the Chisholm and I stopped in Georgetown to see the family while Sullivan, Myrick, Emory, and Hunter took the ponies back to the Nueces.

Madeline was still living on the farm with Everett, Phineas, and Pete. Her mother, still a known beauty, had remarried and there were dining room servants again.

WE WERE IN the kitchen in the sun. The money was in the bank and I was happy to be home, happy to be looking at my pretty wife. She had a white hair among the red ones on her head. I leaned and kissed it.

She smacked her hand there. “Is it one of the gray ones?”

“More white,” I said.

She sighed. “Now you’re going to miss me even less.”

I kissed her again.

“Do you miss me?”

“Of course.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure if you even like me.”

“That is crazy,” I said, though I knew what she meant.

“I mean, I know you like the idea of me. But I am not sure you like the thing itself.”

“I love you.”

“Of course you do. But that is different than liking me.”

It was quiet.

“The year before last, when we were all together here, I still think about that. I don’t want another bite of venison in my life but when I think about it, it was the happiest time I’ve ever had.”

“We were broke,” I said. “There was no future in it.”

“Well, one day I’ll be dead. There is no future in that, either.”

I looked at her with the sun coming in and her elbows on the whitewashed table. Her hair went softly over her shoulders and I looked at that and her red lips and high cheeks and pale chest still heavy under her dress. I thought any man would be happy to have her in any way he could.

“Let’s go to the bedroom,” I said.

She gave me a tired smile. “Okay,” she said.

Then I was looking at her in the white sheets. Her eyes were closed.

“I needed that.”

“Me too,” I told her.

She shook her head. “You don’t need anything.” She pushed the sheets off herself and lay there in the sun. I ran my fingers up and down.

“If you keep doing that I am going to want you again.”

I kept on but I wondered what was wrong with me. She saw and crawled over and took me into her mouth. I wondered how or where she had learned it. Then I was ready again. As we were doing it I almost told her that if she had to do it with someone else I wouldn’t care but then I changed my mind again. I tried to slip off but she held me where I was.

“Ten years from now we’ll have the biggest house in Austin.”

“And then you’ll come back from the middle of nowhere?”

“Yes.” I kissed her on the neck.

“I think you like the middle of nowhere.”

“I like people, I just don’t know how to make money where they live.”

“Well, soon you won’t have to.”

“Soon I won’t.”

“That’s right,” she said.

WHEN I GOT back to the ranch Todd Myrick was dead in the yard and Eben Hunter was on the porch. They had been there for days. I went looking for Sullivan and Emory. In the lower pasture were more buzzards and by his lathyness I realized the man I was looking at was Emory.

Sullivan was at the Brackett army post. He had been shot through the lung but he had lived this long, and they were optimistic. He was a big man with a strange high voice he would pass along to his son. I asked him how he was feeling but he did not want to talk about that.

“It’s a real piece of pudding how we were gone five months, then happened to get visited right when we got back,” he said.

“And expecting us to have a wallet of money from a cattle sale.”

The thieves had pried up the floorboards and tore the cupboard off the wall but there had not been any money. I had put it in the bank.

“A thinking man would allot upon your Mexican neighbor.” He had to breathe awhile. “The buckras here paid him a visit, but it did as much good as a dog smelling his own piss.”

“We get any of them?”

He looked out the window and I knew I shouldn’t have asked.

“All I care about is you keep breathin’.”

“Emory got a couple shots off. That boy was always quick.”

I offered my handkerchief but instead he took my hand and held it. My throat got thick. I was thinking about the others. Then it was quiet.

Sullivan let go of my hand and took my bandanna. “I’m not leavin’ this county without naturalizing at least a few of them. I wondered if you might stake me until then.”

I SPENT THE day burying Emory, Myrick, and Hunter. Then I went to see Arturo Garcia.

He lived in a big white house that looked like a fortress of old. There was a long covered porch around the front and he came out to greet me. Through the open door I could see the house was filled with gold-framed paintings and weapons, furniture of the sort kings owned.

He was sorry for my loss. By some miracle his stock and horses had not been touched. I wanted to ride his fences and look for my two hundred Indian ponies, but I knew they had already gone to Old Mexico.

“What bamboozles me,” I said, “is to get to my pastures, they must have passed pretty close to your house. Unless they wanted to ride twenty miles around. And to get my stock out, they had to lead them through your pastures again. Which is obvious because the tracks are all still there.”

“It is big country, Eli. I am sorry.”

“They also knew within a day that we’d got back.”

“Eli, I will say this once, because I know you are upset, but the fact that I live on the border, and am Mexican, does not mean I had anything to do with stealing your horses, or killing your men.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

A young white man came out of the house wearing bright yellow trousers and a blue silk shirt. His boots were spit shined and he had a pistol on each hip. He looked like a stage actor, an easterner’s impression of a badman. “Jim Fisher,” he said. “Very sorry for your loss, sir.”

Then other men were coming from the pastures. I took my leave and spent a few nights sleeping in the brush, far from my house, thinking it over.

There were no other neighbors, no roads going in or out.

LET ME SAY that Garcia being Mexican had nothing to do with it. White or Mexican, the bigger a rancher was, the more liable he was to run his neighbors out. Your slice of pie is one less I can eat myself, that was his attitude, and for every orphan he helped in public there were ten he made in private.

Garcia had lost half his estate. That the state had stole his land I do not deny. But I had nothing to do with it and furthermore he was not the first to have lost it. He figured there was nothing I could do. I would dig out sooner or later.

Except I was not playing a lone hand. There was a twisting barranca to climb from his back pasture, where the walls were steep and you could only ride single file, a place where two men with ten-shot Winchesters, if they were patient, might stop any number of others. When Garcia died he was speaking in a language that was not English or Spanish or even Comanche, it was like nothing I had ever heard. Still, I understood him. He thought he was cursing me but it was nothing I didn’t know already.

When Sullivan healed to ride the distance we hired a half-dozen sympathetics and drove Garcia’s horses and cattle to New Mexico. Every unmarked calf and colt we drove into my pastures. I should have burned that house then, and salted the earth, because a year later, his nephew came and picked up where his uncle had left off.