Philipp Meyer - The Son

“Well, I don’t have it,” I said.

“I’ll lay with you despite your pox. I love you and now you’re going off to die.”

I did not know what to make of her.

“Well,” she said. “Do you love me?”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I’m kidding.” She sighed. “All right, I’ll go.”

“I’m going to die of old age,” I said.

“Don’t be hurt.”

“I’m not.”

“You shouldn’t be afraid of him.”

“I’m not afraid of him. I’m afraid of what will happen if you spend too much time with me.”

“Well, I’m sure you would like that honor, but you’re about five years too late. As I’m sure you’ve heard.” She began to move her hips. I allowed my hands under her shift. I knew even then I was not doing right. I will not lay it on anyone else. But I told myself she was a young girl and whatever affection she possessed would be gone by the time the dew burned off the morning grass.

For most of the night we were enthusiastic and in the morning she snuck back to her room. I expected a speech about us being married in the eyes of God, as that was the price of milk in those days, but all she said was: “My mother and father are going to San Antonio.”

That night we did it several more times and each time I took precautions.

“You’re afraid you’ll have to marry me,” she said.

“I don’t mind marrying you.” I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but I knew it was true and I didn’t regret saying it.

“Well, that is a very sweet way to put it.”

I ignored her. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”

“You really shouldn’t talk like that.”

I nearly told her that there were things God and I had buried the hatchet on, though it was just as likely Old Scratch. But I decided to keep quiet.

A FEW WEEKS later we got orders to ride on Kansas. The judge summoned me to his office. He was unbarbered and his hair was askew and I could see he’d slept in his clothes. He was a big man in every way and except for his ginger color I had never noticed anything to link him to his daughter. But now I saw that Madeline had his eyes and his large mouth, and something about this made me happy.

“You are nearly a dead man,” he told me. He took a pistol from a drawer and thumped it on the table. “I tried to get her to admit that you’d abused her honor, but she insists you have not. Is this true?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“I told her you had syphilis and her face would be marked by pox.”

“That is not true, so far as I know.”

“I told her you laid with whores.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “You shouldn’t worry about it.”

“I’m not,” he said, “but I am very worried for my daughter. I am terrified for my daughter, in fact. I don’t approve of this. I approve of you but not with Madeline. Unfortunately she gets what she wants. You will marry her.”

“I intend to.”

“Good man,” he said. “Good man.”

The whole time he hadn’t looked at me. He was staring out the window. I knew what he was trying to find: the exact moment in time he’d made his first mistake. Was it taking me in when I came back from the Indians, or was it saving me from the hanging in Bastrop, or was it allowing me to come around all those years since, the whole time against everyone’s best judgment? His eyes were wet.

“Say something terrible, Eli.” He began to straighten the papers on his desk, pushing them into neat stacks, and then he stood up and picked up an armful of books that had been sitting on the floor as long as I could remember. He carried them to the shelves.

“Don’t make my daughter a widow.” He looked at a title and shelved it and looked at the next one and walked a few steps and made a space.

I was nearly to the door when he called after me: “You have to understand I wanted something different for her, Eli. You’re a good man, and I love you like my own son, but I know the life she will have with you.”

He continued to shelve his books.

“I wanted her to marry someone with a house in a city, some banker or clerk or Yankee. I didn’t want her living in a cabin and dying in childbirth or from drinking bad water or being kicked by a horse or scalped or shot.” He shook his head. “My daughter…”

“I promise.”

“You can’t,” he said. “You can’t make a promise about what other people will do to her.”

She was back in the office in Houston. Milton Bryce in his thick lawyer’s glasses, already combing his hair over, telling her to make an offer on Brown and Root. But there was very little oil flowing anywhere; she couldn’t see the point in a pipeline company.

“They also do dams, military bases, things like that,” Bryce was saying. “A lot of work for the Corps of Engineers. You know Herman Brown died…”

“I heard that.”

“And now George is trying to get out of the business. I mean now. This week.”

Something about his insistence put her off; she stopped listening.

“It’s clean and you could probably get the whole thing for forty. If I had the money myself…”

She made a note to look into it, but a few days later, Ed Halliburton scraped together an offer, despite the fact that, along with the rest of the industry, his well-cementing company was hitting bottom. George Brown sold out for thirty-six million dollars; within a decade the company was grossing seven hundred million a year, building bases for the army in Vietnam.

It was hardly her only mistake. For years after Hank’s death, she’d felt the need to calculate and recalculate every risk, as if everything she did was being recorded for others to judge, as if her most private thoughts would become public. She became deliberate to a fault, building cases for every decision, she was never not reading, she was never not thinking; it was unusual for her to have a conversation that she had not already rehearsed in her mind, and there were times she convinced herself that not even Hank could have kept pace. Though in more sober moments, she knew there was something missing. The men around her were always sure they were right, even when there was no good reason. That was what mattered. Being sure of things. If you were wrong, you just defended your position even more loudly.

Meanwhile, everyone was stealing from her. T.J. Block, their partner on several drilling projects, had for “purposes of convenience” moved into Hank’s office. In her haze she had signed off on new leases, not having the energy to look into them herself, though the problem was also Hank: he had made so many verbal agreements, had his fingers in so many projects, so many promises… she could not keep track. She could not tell when someone was lying to her. She was being charged twice for the same orders of casing pipe and drilling mud, she couldn’t tell if it was her drillers ripping her off or the suppliers or both, everyone saw an opportunity, there were offers to buy her out. Hank’s sisters sued her for half the company and her own employees thought she was stupid; they were slow to follow orders, seemed to think she could not tell the difference between a good job and a bad job, they were reluctant to start big projects that they were certain she would abandon. There were casing problems, cementing problems, flow problems, the equipment broke constantly… to Hank they had given their best, to her they gave nothing.

Of course, they all assured her this wasn’t so. She was not sure if she was being paranoid or going crazy or was just in over her head and ought to sell the company to T.J. Block, who acted like it was already his. Everyone seemed to know things she didn’t; she wondered if her phone had been bugged.