The Son

Chapter Six. Diaries of Peter McCullough, AUGUST 12, 1915

The newspapers are already running their version, straight from the mouth of the Colonel. The following will stand as the only true record:

Yesterday our segundo Ramirez was riding in one of the west pastures when he saw men driving whiteface cattle toward the river. As the Garcias still run mostly unimproved stock, it was obvious to whom the cattle belonged.

It was just after sundown when we caught them at the water. Most of the stock had already been crossed and the range was extreme, nearly three hundred yards, but everyone — Glenn, Charles, myself, the Colonel, Ramirez, our caporal Rafael Garza, and a handful of our other vaqueros — began shooting anyway, hoping to scare the thieves into abandoning the herd. Unfortunately they were old hands and instead of leaving the cattle, a few of them dismounted to shoot back while the others continued to drive the beefs into the brasada on the Mexican side. Glenn was hit in the shoulder, a Hail Mary shot from across the water.

Back at the house two Rangers were waiting along with Dr. Pilkington, whom Sally had called when she heard the shooting. The bullet had missed the artery but Glenn would need surgery and Pilkington thought it best to take him to the hospital in San Antonio. While he and Sally patched up Glenn, I spoke to the Ranger sergeant, a hard-faced little blond boy who looks like he escaped from a penitentiary. He is perhaps twenty but the other Ranger is conspicuously afraid of him. Beware the small man in Texas; he must be ten times meaner to survive in this land of giants.

A gang of Mexicans does not just shoot a white teenager without retaliation and I had wanted as many lawmen around as possible, but one look and I knew these Rangers were not going to help things. Still it was better than Niles Gilbert and his friends from the Law and Order League.

“How many more of you are coming?” I asked the sergeant.

“None. You are lucky we are even here. We are supposed to be in Hidalgo County.” He went to spit on the rug but then stopped himself.

Of course the King Ranch has an entire company permanently stationed, but it was not worth mentioning.

We loaded Glenn into the back of Pilkington’s car. Sally climbed in after him. Glenn looked pitiful and I wanted to ride with him but I knew I was the only voice of reason within twenty miles; if I left I did not want to imagine the scene I might return to.

Sally leaned out of the window and whispered: “You need to go kill every one of those bastards.”

I did not say anything. Around here, talk like that turns quickly to action.

“You’re the Colonel’s son, Pete. Tonight you need to act like it.”

“I think it was José and Chico,” Glenn called out. “The way they sat their horses.”

“It was pretty dark, buddy. And we were all pretty worked up.”

“Well, I’m sure of it, Daddy.”

Another kind of man would not be doubting his own son as he lay pale in the back of a car. But of course it was not him I was doubting at all; it was my father.

“All right,” I told him. “You’re a brave man.”

They drove off. I doubted that Glenn really thought that he’d seen José and Chico until he’d heard the Colonel say it. My father can put ideas into other men’s heads without them realizing.

THE MOOD WAS to ride on the Garcias immediately, before they had time to barricade their casa mayor. All the vaqueros had gathered and were waiting outside, smoking cigarettes or chewing tobacco, ready to spill blood for their patrón.

A dozen or so white men had arrived as well: Sheriff Graham from Carrizo, two deputies, another Ranger, the new game warden. Additionally: Niles Gilbert, his two sons, and two members of the Law and Order League visiting from El Paso. Gilbert brought a case of Krag rifles and several thousand rounds of ammunition from his store, as he’d heard that others were coming as well.

“Coming for what?” I said.

“To help you all run them copper-bellies out.”

“The copper-bellies in question are across the river,” I said.

He gave me a look. I nearly pointed out that I have four years of college to his four years of grammar school. But he is one who believes that power is best used for the humiliation of other men. I might as well have explained myself to a donkey.

I have always possessed a near-perfect recall, of which both Charles and my father are quite aware, but neither supported me when I pointed this out to the others. It had been less than three hours, but the facts were already changing — men who had appeared as apparitions, their white shirts barely visible in the dusk, were now seen clearly. I reminded everyone that it had been too dark to identify any man — so dark, in fact, that the flashes from our guns left us blind — but it no longer mattered. In the light of memory, it was bright enough to see faces, and the faces belonged to the Garcias.

I suggested we might wait for more Rangers or the army — I was anxious to delay until daylight, when men become harder to lynch — but Charles, who spoke for most in the room, said firstly we could not let them get away with shooting Glenn, and secondly that the army would not be coming at all, as General Funston had made clear that he would only interfere if his soldiers were directly fired upon. He would not put his men to chasing common cattle thieves. Unless of course the cattle are King Ranch Brahmas.

At this I got even more depressed. The soldiers are the only government agents in South Texas who have no marked tendency to shoot Mexicans. As for the Rangers, they are both the best and the worst. The sergeant pointed out that there were only thirty-nine of them in the entire state of Texas; the fact we had three in the same room (a third had arrived from Carrizo) was a miracle.

A miracle for whom, I thought. The room had the atmosphere of a cattle association, old friends politely discussing grazing rights and which politicians we ought to be supporting and how we were going to keep our stock competitive in the northern markets. The Colonel chimed in from the peanut gallery and laid out a long argument in support of Charles, in what I have now begun to consider their usual unholy alliance. He claimed that Glenn’s wounding was his responsibility, as he’d had a chance fifty years ago to push the Garcias off this land forever, and had not taken it, and damned if he was going to let the same thing happen twice in a single lifetime.

I pointed out that due to various events on our land our family tree had already shed quite a few leaves. My father pretended to ignore me.

“I have lost my mother here and a son and a brother,” I said. “And now another son is on his way to the hospital. I would prefer to wait until daylight.”

All agreed that our family had suffered great tragedies, but the best thing was to take Pedro as soon as possible. This was the community’s problem now — not just ours — no telling who the Garcias’ next victim might be.

I laid out another argument, namely that Pedro Garcia was as proud as any other man, and if pressed by a mob, he would certainly not give up his yerno, or any other member of his family, but if asked by the law, in the light of day, it would be a different story.

“We are the law,” said the Ranger sergeant.

The others agreed. Not one of them would have considered surrendering to an armed mob in the middle of the night, but they did not see why the Garcias ought not to. I considered mentioning this but instead I said: “With due respect it might be better to wait until the sun comes up. Pedro will give up the guilty parties if they have anything to do with his family.”

Not only was this suggestion dismissed, but now there was rumbling that I might retreat to the kitchen and sit it out with the other women. We would hold a little longer for reinforcements, which were certainly coming, as by now the word was out all over the four counties.

A SHOAT WAS killed and set roasting; a loin of beef set out with tortillas and beans, the good linen, the fireplace lit and coffee served. Men lounged in the great room, talking or flipping through old issues of Confederate Veteran, boots up, rifles askew in the palatial dark room with its drawings of Florentine ruins, its busts and statues, idly thumbing the engraving on the chairs and tables, resisting the urge to whittle with their pocketknives, everything around them bought wholesale from a dead Philadelphian, the contents of the entire house including the Tiffany windows bought and shipped, the house built to contain them. Not a single man asked about the marbles; they stopped to admire the picture of Lee and His Generals, a dime-store print they have in their own homes, then moved on for another serving of beef or coffee.

Around three A.M., fifteen more men arrived; an hour later another dozen drove up in two Ford trucks. Until then I’d been hopeful the plan would be scotched, as we had less than forty men, versus the Garcias’ twenty or so, and them holding a virtual fortress. Now we had over sixty, all with repeating rifles, a few with Remington and Winchester automatics. The Colonel could not contain his satisfaction.

“One of your grandsons has been shot,” I told him, “and the other is about to go to war. What you might be happy about I cannot fathom.”

He gave me a look that said, for the thousandth time, how sorry he was that I had abandoned my studies to return to the ranch. I reminded myself that he is from another era. He cannot help it. Of course there is the third grandson I did not mention, my namesake, buried now next to my mother and brother.

I went upstairs to my office, lay in the dark among my books — the only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family, maybe in my own country. Outside the coyotes were yipping in the distance; on the gallery the vaqueros were talking in quiet Spanish. Someone told a joke. If they were nervous or had second thoughts about attacking their own countrymen, I could not hear it. I knew things would get worse.

I must have fallen asleep because I heard someone shouting my name. At first I thought it was my mother calling me down for supper; we were back in the old house in Austin with its green fields and woods and streams running all night. My mother and her soft hands, the scent of roses lingering everywhere she walked. I thought about those things and allowed myself to forget where I was, and for a few moments I was certain I was young again, that we had not yet moved out to this monstrous country where all our misfortunes began. How the Colonel can love the place that has claimed so many members of our family, and may yet claim a few more, I don’t know.

IT WAS NEARLY five in the morning when we rode out. Nearly seventy men. Everyone had been up all night but was as somber and awake as if we were riding to Yorktown or Concord. The Colonel wore the buckskin vest that is famous in town, everyone believing that it is made from Apache scalps. Even the Rangers were deferring to him, as if they were in the presence of a general, rather than an old man who was not even a real colonel, but a brevet colonel, and had fought for the cause of human slavery.

The vaqueros formed a flying squad around him; the Colonel has no great respect for the Mexicans and yet they are all willing to die for him. I, on the other hand, consider myself their ally — no patrón has ever been more generous — and they despise me.

AN HOUR BEFORE sunrise we hobbled the horses and made our way on foot toward the Garcias’ house, which overlooks the surrounding country with its watchtower and high stone walls and parapets. A hundred years ago it was a bastion of civilization in a desert, a stronghold against a wilderness of Indians, but now, in the minds of the men marching toward it, it had come to be something else: the guardian of an old, less civilized order, standing against progress and all that was good on the earth.

I slipped off into the brush. I noticed the Colonel squatting nearby. He looked at me and grinned and I couldn’t tell if he was smiling because he was looking forward to the gunplay or because he was proud of me for coming out for the old family ritual.

As for our neighbors from town, they all considered themselves great heroes but not a single one had lived here during the old days; they had kept their distance until it was safe. I wondered how I had ended up on the same side as men like that. For that reason alone I thought I ought to be making my stand with the Garcias.

Shortly thereafter I came across Charles. He was very nervous and I asked him to come home with me, to wash his hands of whatever was about to happen, but it was out of the question. He thought he was about to take part in an important ritual; he was about to become a man. I had always worried he might be bitten by a snake or kicked by a horse or gored or trampled, but he had survived all those things and somehow I had still failed him. Here he was, sweating despite the cool night, gripping his rifle, ready to make war on men who had attended his christening.

The Garcia casa mayor overlooked what was left of their old village, a few small buildings and an old visitas, all built of adobe or caliche blocks, several acres of corrales de leña. A stone wall surrounded the yard — a leftover from the days when you fenced cows out, rather than in — and that was where we made our line, the house surrounded on three sides, at a distance of fifty or sixty yards. The somber mood had not changed. This was no mere lynching; it was an overturning of the ancient order, the remaking of things for a new world.

Then Pedro was standing there. His thick gray hair was combed neatly back; he was wearing a clean white shirt and his pants were tucked into clean boots. He looked surprised as he searched the crowd, noting his many neighbors, men whose families he knew, whose wives and children he knew. With the stiff shuffle of a man mounting the scaffold, he walked out onto the gallery, to the edge of the stairs. He began to speak but had to clear his throat.

“My sons-in-law are not here. I don’t know where they are but I would like to see them hanged the same as the rest of you. Unfortunately they are not here.”

He gave an embarrassed shrug. If there is a worse sight than a proud man brought to terror, I have not seen it.

“Perhaps some of you might come inside and we can discuss how to find them.”

I set down my rifle and stepped over the wall and walked until I was standing in the middle of Pedro’s yard, between our men and his. Everyone on our side looked nervous, but they quickly got angry, as they saw I intended to rob them of their fun.

“I am going to talk to Pedro,” I told them. “If the sergeant and his men would care to come inside with me, we can figure this all out.”

I looked at the sergeant. He shook his head. Maybe he worried it was a trap; maybe he worried it wasn’t a trap — it was hard to tell.

“Most of you know that Glenn is my son,” I continued. “And the cattle lost were mine as well. This is no one’s fight but my own. And I do not want it.”

Everyone stopped looking at me. Glenn and our cattle no longer had anything to do with this. They settled on their knees and haunches, as if, without a single word exchanged, they had all decided that I did not exist, the way a flock of birds changes direction without any individual appearing to lead. There was a shot somewhere to my right, and then, all at once, a rolling volley from our line. I heard and felt the bullets crack past my head and I fell to the grass.

Pedro fell as well. He lay on the porch clutching his stomach but two men rushed out and pulled him inside as the bullets splintered the doorframe around them.

Over the top of the low rock wall I could see all our neighbors, their heads and gun barrels showing, the smoke puffing out and the shiny brass casings levering through the air, the spray of dust and stone as bullets slapped into the wall. I couldn’t move without being shot by one side or the other so I lay there with the grass underneath me and the bullets over top. I felt strangely safe, then wondered if I’d already been shot; there was a feeling of drifting, as if I were in a river, or in the air, looking down from a great height, it was all pointless, we might as well have never crawled from the swamps, we were no more able to understand our own ignorance than a fish, staring up from a pool, can fathom its own.

The bullets continued to snap overhead. I was looking at Bill Hollis when a pale cloud appeared and his eyes went wide as if he’d had some realization. His rifle clattered over the wall and he lay down his head as if taking a nap. I had a vision of him playing the fiddle in our parlor while his brother sang.

Meanwhile the house was being shot to pieces. The heavy oak door, three hundred years old and brought from a family estate in Spain, was nothing but splinters. The parapets were disintegrating, the top of the stone tower as well. The caliche sillares were remnants from another era, suitable for stopping arrow and ball but not jacketed bullets, there was a thick cloud of dust rising from the house, the dust of its own bones.

Finally there was no return fire. Sometime during the fight the sun had risen and the beams of light were shining through the old gunports. Every door and window hung from splinters; except for the fresh dust the house might have been abandoned a century ago. I began to inch toward the wall.

“Reload,” someone shouted. “Everyone reload.”

I reached the wall and crawled over it. The young Ranger sergeant was talking to the men gathered: “… I go through the door, you follow me, get out of the doorway as soon as you can but don’t move faster than you can shoot. The Mexicans will be in the corners. Do not pass a corner, do not turn your back to a corner, unless you or someone else is shooting into it.”

He raised his head so everyone could see him.

“When I stand up,” he called out, “I want you to empty your guns at the building. But as soon you see me clear this wall, you stop firing. You hear?”

I did not trust that anyone had heard. Between the ringing ears and the spectacle of destruction before us, everyone was in his own world. But somehow most agreed and those who did not had the instructions shouted into their ears.

When the sergeant stood up, there was a long volley that did not stop until finally he waved his hands and shouted for a long time and then he and a dozen other men, including Charles, rushed for the gallery. I called for Charles to come back, but he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to, and then I noticed that fat old Niles Gilbert had not gone, nor had either of his two sons.

The front door was so shattered they just walked right through it. The shooting began again, the tempo increasing as each man entered the house until it was nearly continuous. We couldn’t see any of what was happening inside, dark shapes passing behind the doors or windows, a few bullets leaking out and kicking up dirt in the yard. Then it got quiet and then there was a sudden pop pop pop. Then it got quiet and then there were more orphaned shots. After that I couldn’t bear to look. In the distance I could see the Nueces and the green river flats all around, the sun continuing to rise, catching in the pall of dust, the air around the casa mayor turning a brilliant orange as if some miracle were about to occur, a descent of angels, or perhaps the opposite, a kind of eruption, the ascent of some ancient fire that would wipe us all from the earth.

I looked for some sense in it. It was the best piece of land for miles — high, well-watered ground — we had not been the first to fight here. If we were to scratch the earth we would find the bones of crushed legs, ribs gashed from spears.

Then someone was waving his hat. It was Charles. His shirt was in tatters and his arm was bleeding. He shouted for us to put down our guns, but no one moved so I stood and stepped over the wall again, waving my arms and walking up and down the line so the others would lower their rifles.

I ATTEMPTED TO tend to Charles’s arm but he pushed me away. It appeared to be birdshot.

“Let me look at it,” I said.

“It doesn’t even hurt yet.” Then, as if I had some disease, he would not allow me any closer.

Inside the house, it looked as if workmen had been called to perform a demolition. Or vandals let into a museum. Antique furniture shot to pieces, upholstery shredded and the stuffing spilled as if the house had been invaded by a swarm of birds, ancient dark paintings of matriarchs and patriarchs, a Byzantine portrait of Christ, antique quilts, sketches, weapons, crosses, all punctured or smashed or knocked onto the floor. An illuminated Bible, the pride of Pedro’s family, fallen from its place in the altarcito and splayed open in the plaster.

In the living room I counted five dead men and one dead woman, shot so many times that every drop of blood had leaked from their bodies and mixed with the splinters and dust and gutted upholstery. One looked old enough to be Pedro but when I turned him over it was Cesár, a vaquero, a man who had helped us on roundups since I was a boy. In kneeling to turn him my pants soaked through and when I stood up the fabric stuck darkly to my legs.

Underneath one of the sofas something caught my eye: a young girl in a blue dress. Next to her a boy of six or eight, dead as well. By then a barricade had gone up between my eyes and mind; I saw them with scientific interest; here was the blood, there were the holes. Smaller details: standing pools of bright crimson, handprints and bootprints and long smears where the wounded had been dragged, bloody spray over the walls indicating some final moment, some story which would never be told. A young man with the white of his spine, another stretched out as if drunk; his brains had been spooned out onto his shirt. I saw others looking with the same cool interest; when blood does not belong to your kin it might as well be wine or water.

In the kitchen, six dead; three of Pedro’s vaqueros — Romaldo, Gregorio, and Martín — along with Pedro’s middle daughter, Carmen. Two men staring at each other over the crumpled bodies of Pedro’s twin granddaughters, the same white dresses and pigtails. The room smelled like an abattoir; blood and the musky smell of opened bellies, waste from the bodies, but there was something sweet as well — roses — which I suspected my mind had invented from a swamp of confused sensations.

I went to Pedro’s office. It was surprisingly untouched and I felt tired; I sat down in the chair opposite his desk as I had done many times. I resolved I would let the others make the necessary discoveries. Though of course that would be worse. There was no absolution. I got up and followed the scent of rosewater toward one of the bedrooms, where the door was perforated with two large holes from a shotgun, plaster dust grinding under my feet.

At the far end of the room, in the middle of his canopy bed, Pedro lay on his back as if taking a nap. The scent of rosewater was so strong I nearly retched. A small price. When I got closer I saw his face, the pillow and bedclothes stained. Something — a pair of teeth — had been knocked from his mouth. A few white feathers had settled on his face.

There had been a fight here — the back wall was pocked by bullets, the dressers and wardrobes splintered, jewelry scattered. I thought I heard Pedro speaking, but it was just a trick of my ringing ears. Near the foot of the bed lay Aná, Pedro’s youngest daughter, her church dress soaked to the waist, her back and neck arched as if she had gathered her energy to shout something. There was an old Colt Army.

Lourdes Garcia was on the other side of the bed, still gripping a Spanish fowling piece.

Just then the game warden came into the room, surveyed the damage, and told me not to touch the bodies.

“If you do not get the hell out of here,” I told him, “you will be looking for another job tomorrow.”

I straightened Aná’s skirts and placed her and Lourdes in the bed with Pedro. It was a pointless gesture. They would soon be carried outside. I left the room.

In one of the closets in another bedroom we found a woman in her thirties. She was alive. ¿Estás herida? I guessed it was María, the unmarried daughter, but her face was so filthy and bloody and her eyes so wild I couldn’t be sure. She looked at me. She submitted as I ran my fingers over her scalp and through her hair to check for wounds, then opened her shirt quickly to check front and back for the same, then closed it again, then lifted her skirts to check her hip and waist area. She was not injured. She sat dumbly as I straightened her clothes.

I led her outside and turned her over to Ike Reynolds and his sons, whom I know to be respectable. A minute later they rode off. What family she has left I don’t know; the Garcias have been in this country far longer than any of the white families. They were once proper hidalgos, having been granted this land by the king of Spain himself. Pedro never spoke of any family in Mexico; he did not think of himself as Mexican.

Outside the sun was all the way up. Charles and one of the Rangers had both been hit by birdshot, but the pellets had not gone deep. I thought of the shotgun lying next to Lourdes. I wondered if Charles had killed her, or if he had killed Pedro, or maybe Aná.

Niles Gilbert’s friend from El Paso, who had been so anxious to “naturalize” some Mexicans, had been shot through the mouth. A brief sense of satisfaction rose within me, then slipped away; he would go down a martyr. The small blond Ranger sergeant had been hit in the hand and forearm and the stock of his carbine split by a bullet.

Wounded or not, the twelve living assaulters sat dumbly on the porch, some lying on their backs, others dangling their legs over the edge, staring at the roof or into the sky. Sullivan was lifting their shirts to check them for injuries, shouting instructions into their ears. I wondered again if Charles had been the one to shoot Pedro and Lourdes, but pushed away the question a second time.

Meanwhile, the men at the wall had begun to come forward. Bill Hollis had been laid out in the shade. His brother Dutch was sitting next to him. Four others were carried over. I could tell that one was a vaquero of ours, though I did not have the heart to get up and see who it was.

A FEW HOURS later the photographer showed up. The Rangers posed with the bodies of the male Garcias, the faces shot off most of the dead men, a detail that would be lost in the printing. They would look blurred, overdirty, as the faces of all dead men do.

No one commented on the absence of Pedro’s sons-in-law. It was just as he had told us — they were not in the house. The bodies of the women and children were placed in the shade, away from their men, perhaps out of some old-fashioned impulse, perhaps so they would not show in the pictures.

Watching the photographer take pictures of townspeople posing with the Garcias — a loose queue had formed — I began to feel even more tired. I knew what anyone looking at the pictures would think, or rather not think, of the Garcias, whose remains were so matted with dust and dried blood that they were barely distinguishable from the caliche. The audience would notice only the living men, who had done a brave thing, while the dead would not even register as men. They were props — like a panther or dead buck — they had lived their entire lives in order to die for just this moment.

People from town continued to arrive, women and children now. Our vaqueros disappeared, taking the body of their fallen comrade, while the vigilantes and their wives went through the cupboards. The furniture inside the casa mayor was all quite valuable; most had come from the old country: old Spanish weapons and armor, a good deal of silver. The Garcias had once been quite wealthy and I knew when I returned I would find the house completely plundered.

As for myself, I have always known I will leave nothing behind me in this place, no sign I ever passed, but for the Garcias it was different, because they had hoped, and believed, that they would.