The Son

Chapter Five. J.A. McCullough

If she were a better person she would not leave her family a dime; a few million, maybe, something to pay for college or if they got sick. She had grown up knowing that if a drought went on another year, or the ticks got worse, or the flies, if any single thing went wrong, the family would not eat. Of course they had oil by then, it was an illusion. But her father had acted as if it were true, and she had believed it, and so it was.

When she was a child, her father often gave her orphaned calves to look after, and, every so often, she would fold the grown ones in with the steers when they were shipped off to Fort Worth. She made enough money off her dogies to make investments in stocks, and that, she told people, is what taught her the value of a dollar. More like the value of a thousand dollars, some reporter once said. He was not entirely masculine. He was from the North.

The Colonel, though he drank whiskey the entire ten years she’d known him, never slept past sunrise. When she was eight, and he ninety-eight, he had led her slowly across a dry pasture, following a track across the caliche she could not see, around clusters of prickly pear and yellow-flowered huisache, following a track she was certain her great-grandfather was imagining, until finally they arrived at a particular clump of soapbrush and he had reached into it and pulled out a baby rabbit. Its heart was pounding and she cradled it against the skin under her shirt.

“Are there more?” She could not have been more excited. She wanted all of them.

“We’ll leave the rest with their dam,” he said. His face was brown, cracked and furrowed like a dry riverbed, and his eyes were always running. His hands smelled of cottonwood buds, the sap that was like sugar and cinnamon and some flower she couldn’t name; he was always stopping among the cottonwoods to rub the bud sap onto his fingers, a habit she adopted as well. Even at the end of her life she would stop at an old tree and scrape the orange sap onto a thumbnail, that she might smell it the rest of the day, and think of her great-grandfather. Balm of Gilead, someone once told her, that’s what the sap was called, though it didn’t need a name.

She had taken the kit home and given it milk but the next day the dogs got it. She knew she could go back to the brush for more, but the dogs would get them all eventually, so she decided to leave the remaining rabbits where they were, a decision she knew to be very grown-up and merciful. And yet she could not stop thinking about the kit’s fur against her belly, a nearly liquid softness, her great-grandfather’s hand on her shoulder, leaning on her for support.

SHE WAS A small, thin girl with light hair and a snub nose and skin that went brown in the sun, though she imagined that when she grew up, she would have dark hair and pale skin and a long straight nose like her mother. Her father snorted at this. Your mother didn’t look like that at all, he said. She was a towhead, like you. But that was not how Jeannie thought of her. Her mother died young, giving birth to her at twenty-six. There were only a handful of pictures, none of them close up, or good, though there were plenty of pictures of her father’s horses. But in the pictures of her mother, her hair did look dark and long, and her nose was straight, and after thinking on it, she decided that her father was simply wrong, that he had no eye for she-stuff, unless it were cattle or horses. She knew that if she had ever seen her mother alive she would have noticed a thousand things that her father had not.

What her father noticed was if an old cow had been left in the brush during roundup, or if another cow was open a second year, or if a new man, who claimed to be a top hand, missed his throws, or didn’t charge into the brush with proper enthusiasm. Her father noticed if a ladino bull, living wild as an old buck, was mixing with his heifers, and what the Mexicans said about rain, and how much work his sons did, and whether she, Jeannie, was getting in the way. Despite her grandmother’s discouragement, Jeannie rode out every morning with her brothers, so long as it was not a school day. During roundup she rode drag, though she knew she was simply extra; her father did not figure her into the head count, and at the branding fire, while her brothers did their best to rope, learned throwing from the tumbadors or branding from the marcadores, she was only allowed to carry the bucket of lime paste to dab on the fresh brands. Sometimes she would help make the calf fries, scooping them from an overflowing bucket to roast on a bed of coals specially raked out for that purpose. They were sweet and so tender they nearly burst in your mouth, and she would eat them by the handful, ignoring her brothers’ snide comments, which she only half understood, about her enthusiasm for that particular delicacy.

Calf fries were one thing — if she even stood near the tumbadors, her father would be on her immediately. She had taught herself anyway. By the time she was twelve, she could flank and mug as well as her brothers, she could forefoot anything that moved, but it didn’t matter. Her father didn’t want her working among the men and her grandmother found it embarrassing. The Colonel, had he been alive, would have supported her; he had always seen in her what no one else did, her unshakable sense of her own perfectibility, her certainty that if she set her mind to something, she would master it. When the Colonel told her, as he often did, that one day she would do something important, she barely took any notice. It was as if he’d pointed out the grass was green, or her eyes large as a deer’s, or that she was a pretty girl, if a bit small, that men and women alike enjoyed her presence.

So while the cattle drives struck her as boredom incarnate, a slow trudge behind an endless dusty line of steers, her rope flicking at their feet, walking at the slowest of walks toward the holding pens at the rail station — despite all that — she went on every drive she could. Despite the heat and thirst of the branding fire — best done in August, when it was too hot even for blowflies — she went out anyway, throwing calves when her father wasn’t paying attention, her hands covered in their slobber, running the iron if the marcador let her, light pressure if the metal was hot, heavy pressure as the iron cooled; she did not allow herself to make mistakes. The vaqueros found her amusing. They knew what she was doing and while they would never have let their own daughters come to a branding fire, they were happy to let her take their place so they could rest in the shade and escape the heat. As long as she didn’t make mistakes. And so she didn’t.

THERE HAD BEEN a time when this was not unusual. A time when the wealthy were exemplars. When you held yourself to a higher standard, when you lived as an example to others. When you did not parade your inheritance in front of a camera; when you did not accept the spotlight unless you’d done something. But that obligation had been lost. The rich were as anxious for attention as any scullery maid.

Perhaps she was no different. She’d hired a historian to compile a history of the ranch, a history of the family, but in ten years he’d done nothing but notate every letter, receipt, and slip of paper the Colonel had ever touched, scanning them into his little computer, going to Austin to look at microfiche. He was, she saw, incapable of writing the book he’d promised. You can make any story of this you want, he told her. Well, pick the best one, she said. That would be lying, he replied.

He was a pudgy, infuriating little man and she could not remember why she’d ever thought the process should be so mysterious. She’d opened her checkbook and the fund-raisers had picked up the scent, a check here, a mention there, another check, another mention; the Colonel’s name had spread like roots from a mesquite. The next year he’d be appearing in the new state history books, the ones all the liberals had fought against.

IF YOU DID not work, you did not eat. If you did not wake up in the dark, be it ten degrees or a hundred, if you did not spend all day in the dust and thorns, you would not survive, the family would not survive, you had received God’s blessings and been profligate.

Later, when she was old enough to look at the books, she realized the family had been safe all along. But it was too late. She could not sit still without thinking of the coyotes watching her calves, windmills that needed their gearboxes greased or sucker rods checked, fences flattened by weather or animals or careless humans. Later, when she stopped worrying about cattle, it was oil. Which wells were producing more or less than she’d hoped (less, she thought, it was always less), what new fields might be in play and what old plays the majors were giving up on. Which drillers might be hired, who was out of credit, what could be bought on the cheap. All wells went dry — the moment you stopped looking for new ones was the moment your fortunes began to decline.

Why am I on this floor, she thought. She looked around her. There was a haze in the room. She wondered if there was a problem with the flue. And the throbbing in her head; it was not the pain of a stroke. There had been someone in the room with her, she was sure of it.

THE THING THAT had gone wrong in her children… she had always assumed some weakness from Hank’s side, though it might also have been the city, the schools they attended, the friends they had made, their liberal teachers. There were things children did in the city, but work was not one of them, and spending weekends riding with the vaqueros was just another form of entertainment, like dressage or skiing. Making it worse, in order to get to the ranch and back in time for school on Monday, it was necessary to fly there. Her children were not stupid. They knew that real vaqueros did not take private planes to work.

Meanwhile they had no constitution. Working them during the summer was out of the question. July and August were the hottest of hot months, hot as the plains of Africa, a branding fire you could never escape. Clothes soaked through in minutes, a filthy paste over every inch of skin, and while she’d grown up thinking this was normal, unpleasant but normal, her children could not stand it even for an hour. Susan had passed out and fallen off her horse.

J.A. was embarrassed by this, though no one else was. She had begun to doubt herself. It was only later, when the children were grown, that she knew she had been right, that once people grew used to free money, to laboring only when the mood struck them, they began to think there was something low about work. They became desperate to excuse their own laziness. They came to believe that their family property was something inherent to life itself, like water or air or clean sheets.

You ought to give all this money away right now, she thought. But it was too late. She had ruined her daughter; perhaps her son as well. She thought about this and felt sick… the money was not the only thing; she knew what she had done to her children. She could not figure out if leaving them more money was penance or some strange form of additional punishment. You are a bad Christian, she thought.

When her father died she had immediately stopped going to church. If prayer could not even keep your family alive, she did not see what good it was. But after she and Hank moved to Houston, she had started going again. You were marked if you didn’t. She did not really think about whether she believed, though in the past decade, her faith had come back, and they said that was all that mattered. Being old, you had no real choice — salvation or eternal nothingness — and it was no wonder who you saw in church, it was not young people with hangovers and their entire lives ahead of them.

She remembered a sermon in which the minister named some of the interesting people you would meet in heaven: Martin Luther King Jr. (for the blacks), Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan. Except the minister would not have mentioned Gandhi. John Wayne, maybe. You wondered: all the interesting people in heaven, everyone would want to talk to them. It didn’t take much thinking to realize that there would have to be a separate heaven for famous people, just like on earth, a place they would not be bothered, a private community. She wondered if she would go there. But in heaven there was no such thing as money, so perhaps people would stop caring about her. Trump, Walton, Gates, herself; they would be no more interesting than the garbagemen.

Of course it would be nice to be reunited with Hank, with her boys Tom and Ben, her brothers as well, but what about Ted, who had been her lover for twenty years after Hank? Someone would be jealous. And Thomas — that small detail — would he be there?

If you listened to what they said about heaven, it was a massive city with twelve gates. No eating, bowel movements, or sex; you lay around in a trance listening to harp music. Like a hospice you could never leave. She would sleep with every nice-looking man she met. Which of course meant she would be sent to hell.

Do not let me die, she thought. She opened her eyes. She was still on the floor of her living room, lying on the burgundy rug. The fire was still burning. Was the light growing? She couldn’t tell. She willed her head to move, then her legs, but there was nothing.