Philipp Meyer - The Son

She shrugs. I can see she has been crying. “I knew it had to end sometime.”

“It doesn’t,” I say.

She turns from me.

I try to hug her but she shakes me off. “It’s fine,” she says.

“It’s not fine.”

“I will be fine.”

I realize she is not even talking to me.

AFTER SHE FELL asleep I took a bottle of whiskey and walked out into the chaparral until I reached Dog Mountain, which is nothing more than a large hill, though it is the tallest around. At the top is a large rock with a backrest cut or hacked into the stone and I climbed up and lay against it. The house was a mile or so behind me; I could see a few lights, but otherwise, it was dark.

When I had sat long enough I began to get a strange feeling. This has always been a warm place and men had likely sat on this exact rock for ten thousand years at least, as it provides the best view of the surrounding country. How many families had come and gone? Before there were men there was a vast ocean, and I knew that far beneath me there were living creatures turning to stone.

I thought of my brother, who has always pitied me for my temperament, who spends his life inside, obsessed with his papers and bank accounts. When the agarito ripens he can’t smell it, when the first windflowers bloom he will not see them. As for my father, he sees everything. But only so he can destroy it.

AUGUST 7, 1917

Sally arrived this morning. She kissed me politely on the cheek, then greeted María. “Nice to see you again, neighbor.” Then she laughed and said: “This heat can make for strange living arrangements.”

She said she would take a bedroom on the other side of the house and had her things brought up there.

Meanwhile, I was supposed to spend the day with Sullivan, as we have hired a crew to do more cross-fencing.

I intended to tell him he would have to do it without me, but María assured me it would be fine.

“Your wife and I are going to have to be alone at some point. Better sooner than later.”

WE MET THE crew at the gate and drove to the middle of the ranch, explaining what we wanted done. Gates here and here and there… after a few hours I was so antsy my hands were shaking. I told Sullivan I had to go.

Back at the house, Phineas’s Pierce Arrow was parked in the driveway. I got a terrible feeling. Phineas, Sally, and my father were all sitting in the parlor, waiting.

I went from room to room, calling for her, the kitchen, the great room, the library, then searched every closet. Consuela was in my bedroom, stripping the sheets off the bed. She would not speak. I went back downstairs and found the three of them still sitting there.

Sally said: “María has decided to go back to her own people.”

“I am her people.”

“Apparently she felt differently.”

“If you hurt her,” I said, “either one of you,” looking at Sally and my father, “I will kill you.”

They looked at each other and something crossed their faces, some expression of humor. If I’d had a pistol, they both would have died an instant later. There was a red mist and I took my jackknife out of its sheath, opened it, and stepped toward my wife.

“I will cut your fucking throat,” I told her. She smiled and I stepped closer and she lost all her color.

“And you,” I said, pointing the knife at my brother. “Did you know about this?”

“Pete,” he said, “we offered her ten thousand dollars to move back with her cousin in Torreón. She decided to take it.”

“Her cousin is dead.”

“She knows other people down there.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s in a car.”

“Son,” said my father, “it’s for the best.”

I went upstairs to my office. I loaded my pistol and was making my way down the hall when I saw the dark figure, leaning on the banister, waiting for me. The sunlight was on him and I stood for a long time watching: first he had a face like my father’s, then it was my own, then it was something else.

I went back to my desk.

Waiting for them to make the car ready. Leave for Torreón in an hour.

The Federals stuck to our tracks all winter and by Christmas we’d lost half our number. It was plain that if we didn’t leave Kansas we would all end up either shot or hanged; Flying Jacket and the remaining Cherokees decided to absquatulate west to the Rockies. The five RMN men — Busque, Showalter, Fisk, Shaw, and me — decided to go with them. The last we’d heard was Sherman had taken Georgia. If there were other bands of Confederates, we’d stopped running into them.

THE CHEROKEES COLLECTED a few Ute scalps but we avoided the Federals entirely, camping at tree line and generally sticking to the owl-hoot trail until one afternoon in the Bayou Salado we chassed into a small regiment. Normally this would have sent us scurrying over the next ridge, but there were two dozen wagons for only a few hundred men, and they all had eight-mule hitches, and this was not lost on Flying Jacket, either. We hunkered in the rocks and watched them.

“They are pulling something heavy,” he said.

I stayed quiet. I knew exactly what they were carrying but unless Flying Jacket agreed with me, it was pointless. He was near fifty and he’d insisted on being called a colonel and that’s why they made me one as well. He wore his jacket with the oak leaves even when it was a hundred degrees out.

“They’re going to the assay office in Denver,” I said. The war had been nothing like I thought — even the judge was nearly bankrupt — but the longer I watched the wagons, the more I wondered if something might yet be saved from the wreckage. I thought about Toshaway and the raid we’d made into Mexico and I could not see why this was any different.

“If they’re not carrying hides,” Flying Jacket was saying. “Or timber. Or, who knows, perhaps they’re simply that strong now. Perhaps they ride this way for fun.”

“Well, they won’t make the pass at that pace. They’ll have to camp on that bench.”

We continued to watch. The men riding the wagons got off to walk as the road got steeper. It was gold country and they were pulling something heavy. Of course, it could have been anything. But Flying Jacket was coming around.

“I hope we don’t go in and find it’s just a pile of rocks.”

“If we do,” said Flying Jacket, “it will just be a continuation of my entire life.”

He called a few Cherokees over and they talked. Then he turned back to me.

“This cannon they are pulling?”

“Probably a mountain howitzer.”

“With canister shot, if they are worried about being robbed.”

“Yes, but they only have one shot, and they will be firing into their own men.”

“And yet it is strange,” he said.

THEY MADE THEIR camp where we thought they would. There were butterflies in the grass, a hundred-mile view of the mountains, a cold stream running past them. We were at the tree line. It was rocks and dust. The Union men were relaxed, taking their time to set up their tents, making bets on the bighorn sheep, which were white dots on cliffs high above them. A few had Sharps rifles. Once in a while one of the white dots would come tumbling off the mountain, looking like a falling snowman.

ALL THE BOYS were against it. Except for Showalter, who was down with the Indians, we were on our bellies in the rocks, passing the field glasses back and forth.

“This might be a persimmon above our huckleberry,” said Fisk.

“Well,” I said, “it’s what the Indians want, and it’s what Jeff Davis wants, and it’s what we’re going to do.”

“Listen to the fire-eater. The living legend.”