Philipp Meyer - The Son

“What I was getting at is that we will need the money up front, Mr. McCullough.”

I took out the checkbook, the money I have been socking away for myself, all I have ever put aside. I thought: I will never be free if I write this.

“I can give you eighty thousand today. The rest I can bring you next week.”

“Just so you know, you are wasting your money. Villa is still running around in the north, Carranza and Óbregon have the middle, and Zapata has the south. Even if she is still… in good health, finding her will be extremely difficult.”

“I am well aware of that.”

I wrote the check. A drop of sweat smeared the numbers.

“Are you sure you want me to take this?” he said.

AUGUST 18, 1917

Sally asked when I was going to accept the reality of our situation. I told her I said prayers every day that she would roll her Packard into a ditch. She laughed and I pointed out I was not joking.

After she collected herself she said she was willing to spend only half the time here, and half in San Antonio, just for appearance’s sake. I didn’t answer.

This afternoon she returned to my office with a bottle of cold wine and two glasses. Admitted she had not been perfect, though I had not been either. She wants to start over. A second marriage, of sorts.

I told her I did not want her around, now or ever, that I would sooner lie with a rotting corpse.

“You were with the girl a month,” she told me. “It is time to grow up.”

“That is the only month I have ever been happy.”

“Well what about the boys?” she said.

“The boys do not respect me. You have taught them that. You and my father.”

She smashed the glasses and stood leaning in the doorway, as María used to do. After she left I looked at the jagged wineglass and wondered what it would be like to push it into her neck. Then I was nearly sick. Follow your footprints long enough and they will turn into those of a beast.

I think about María. I tell myself she was a luxury, like fruit out of season, lucky to have but temporary.

AUGUST 19, 1917

They have buried me alive.

The best of the Texans were dead or had left the state and the ones who’d run things before the war came back. The cotton men wept about paying their slaves, but they kept their land and their Thoroughbreds and their big houses. There is more romance roping beefs than chopping cotton, but our state’s reputation as a cattle kingdom is overboiled. Beef was always a poor cousin to the woolly plant and it was not until thirty years after Spindletop that even oil knocked King Cotton from his throne.

I moved back in with the judge but I could barely stand to be in town, with the better classes strutting around in carriages and the errant freedman or Unionist to be cut down from the trees every morning. It was more and more like the Old States, some neighbor’s nose in all your business, who did you vote for and which was your church, and I considered buying a parcel along the caprock, where the frontier was still open, though the judge was dead set against it. I pointed out the Comanches were on their heels; it was just a matter of time. And we did not have to move there; I could simply buy it. But the judge reckoned the temptation would be too much, and he was likely correct, as I often sat on his smoking porch wondering about N uukaru and Escuté and if I ought to ride out and find them. Likely they were already in the Misty Beyond, but had it not been for Everett I would have left Madeline all my money and lit off to find out.

It was an idle period. I put on a bloom and my pants got small and I developed a taste for nose paint I never shook. The judge encouraged me to find a regular job but I had money in the bank and I was determined to make it work for me — as it did for the better classes. I tried to buy back my father’s headright, which was now well settled, but it had already been split into four parcels and the new owners wouldn’t sell and all my other plans fizzled. My best days were behind me, that was plain.

Meanwhile, the judge thought the opposite. He had moved to Texas to watch it settle up, and now that he’d gotten his wish, he was planning a run for Senate. It was touchy business as Custer’s troops were occupying the capital and no one knew what would happen when they left. The judge rolled the dice and announced on the Republican ticket, which his friends had counseled him against, though he would not hear them. He thought times were changing. A few weeks later he was found shot by the river.

Whatever had been left in me after Toshaway was buried along with the old ram. I refuted my kinship with other men. If anyone knew who did it, they were not saying, and I began to plot a campaign of murder among the Roberts, Runnels, and Wauls, felt the old holy fire begin to spark, but Madeline detected my plan and her words got the better of my judgment. The big house was sold and we moved to the farm at Georgetown. The slaves were now called servants and they worked on shares.

Madeline’s mother and sister felt content to lie around crying about the judge, but so far as they were concerned my job was to sit on a pot-gutted horse watching the freedmen as they trudged up and down the rows of cotton. The days of high living were over; we survived on venison, side meat, and the holy trinity. But I was not content to see the great house fall. And I was not cut out to be an overseer. And the Comanche in me held grubbing in the dirt to be lower than hauling slops. And I wanted to make my money work.

For twenty-eight cents an acre I picked up sections in LaSalle and Dimmit Counties. I considered parcels on the coast but the Kings and Kenedys had already driven up the prices, and the Nueces Strip was rich, well watered, and so cheap I could acquire a proper acreocracy. There were bandits and renegades but I had never minded packing my gun loose, and in that part of the state a man with a rope could still catch as many wild cattle as he wanted, which sold for forty dollars a head if you could get them north. It was not panning for gold, but it was close, and I rode out to save the family’s good name.

THERE WERE FORTY-EIGHT souls in the entire county, the nearest being an old Mexican named Arturo Garcia. He had once owned most of the surrounding country but was down to two hundred sections, and the same day I met him he tried to outbid me on a four-section parcel that linked all my other pastures. My ranch was useless without it. I went to the commissioners’ office and offered forty cents an acre, a gross overpayment, which they accepted.

“Happy to have you in the area,” said the commissioner.

“Happy to be here.”

“We are trying to move folks like Garcia out, if you know what I mean.”

I looked at him. I was thinking I could have bid less for the land but he mistook my meaning.

“Not just because he’s Mexican. My wife is Mexican, in fact. I mean because he associates with known thieves.”

“That is interesting knowledge.”

“I’m guessin’ you got a gun?”

“ ’Course I do.”

“Well, I wouldn’t stray too far from it.”

I would like to say otherwise, but this only convinced me I had come to the right place.

Once again she was a fool, they all knew it, even Milton Bryce. Domestic oil was a dead end, you lost money on every barrel you pumped. But she had a feeling. That was what she told them. Then she put it out of her mind. It was the biggest bet of her life and she was at peace.

She was happy with Ted, she was happy with her children, they were all doing well, even Susan and Thomas. Ben had finished at the top of his class and gone off to A&M. He did not care much for sports but he was conspicuously bright, interested in others, a good listener, the opposite of his siblings, who seemed to believe they had some special arrangement with fate (Susan) or were barely aware of anything outside themselves at all (Thomas). Susan had survived a single semester at Oberlin before moving to California; she would be unreachable for months and then the phone would ring at three A.M. and there she was, asking for some outrageous sum of money. Though she seemed happy. Jeannie would agree to the sum and Susan would tell of her adventures. As for Thomas, the oldest, he continued to live in her house. She was happier about this than she liked to admit, she knew she ought to push him out, but — his eccentricity — it seemed better for him to be close to home. There was the example of Phineas, but Thomas was not him.