Philipp Meyer - The Son

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.