Philipp Meyer - The Son

“It’s a foolish activity,” he said, taking up the arrowhead she’d begun. “Though if you make a knife, you can do anything. One day I will take all the arrowheads I’ve made and scatter them around the ranch and then maybe in a thousand years, some historian will find them and make up stories that aren’t true.” Then he looked up. “There is a thrush in that granjeno.”

She looked out over the pasture, but she didn’t see anything. The sun was bright but it was early in the year; the grass was still green and the live oaks beginning their springtime shed.

“They have told me there is a German named Hertz,” he said, “who has given his name to, among other things, the way flint breaks when you strike it. It is always the same way.” He held up a chip. “Though of course Hertz did not discover this. In fact the man who did discover it has been dead two million years. Which is how long people have been knocking rocks together to make tools.” He took another flake. “Remember that,” he said. “None of it’s worth a shit until you put your name on it.”

The shooting could be heard as soon as it got dark. Near midnight about fifty men came to the gate, carrying torches, shouting for us to turn over the Mexicans.

They hesitated there in the road — fifty men or not, it is no small thing to trespass on McCullough land — but after a long period of milling around, one of them put his foot on the bar and began to climb over. At which point we opened fire over their heads. Charles put his automatic Remington to good use, unleashing all fifteen rounds as the crowd broke and fled down the road. We spent a good deal of time afterward stomping out the fires that started when they dropped their torches.

Later Niles Gilbert and two others from the Law and Order League drove up and pleaded with me to kick the Mexicans out, lest the town be burned.

Charles shouted: “So go shoot the assholes who are burning your town. It ain’t like you don’t have enough guns.”

“How many men do you have, Peter?”

“I’ve got enough. And I’ve armed all the Mexicans as well.” Which was not true.

“This isn’t going to turn out well for you,” he said.

CONSUELA AND SULLIVAN had been cooking all night so there was plenty of beef and cabrito. By morning half the families had asked permission to stay at the ranch until the town was safe. The other half loaded up with food and water and began to walk or ride across our pastures, toward the river and Mexico. They are going into a war zone but apparently it is preferable to this.

Naturally they all believe the Colonel is responsible for their salvation — who else could it be but Don Eli? This rankles greatly but I did not bother to correct them. How they will ever get democracy I don’t know — they are very comfortable with the idea that powerful men rule their lives. Or perhaps they are simply more honest about it than we allow ourselves to be.

My father was well behaved, entertaining all the children on the gallery with his Indian stories, showing them how to start a fire with two sticks, giving archery demonstrations as well (he can still draw his old Indian bow, which I can barely pull back myself). He was happy and at ease and laughed a lot — I do not remember seeing him like this since before my mother died. Perhaps he was meant to be a schoolteacher. As we watched the refugees walking and riding toward the river, their belongings piled on mules and carts, he said: “That’ll be the last time we see any of ’em moving south, I’d imagine.”

And yet they love him. They go back to their jacals at night, which are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, while he goes back to our house, a sprawling white monstrosity, a thousand years’ salary for them, or a thousand thousand. Meanwhile their children are stillborn and they bury them near the corrals. Who are you to say they ain’t happy? That is what a white man will tell you, looking you straight in the eye as he says it.

AFTER THE LARGEST group of Mexicans left, a group of us went door-to-door in town and gave everyone we didn’t recognize five minutes to be on their way. Campbell put up new signs: ANYONE CARRYING A FIREARM WILL BE SHOT AND/OR ARRESTED.

By six o’clock the streets were deserted. Fourteen houses have been burned. Sergeant Campbell is leaving tomorrow to get medical attention for his wounds. Apparently he has gotten quite a hiding for not going south to protect the big ranches: two hundred sections is considered middling. But, thanks to Guillermo’s sugar remedy, his arm does not appear to be getting any worse.

To help me relax I read the newspapers for the first time in a week. A storm hit Galveston yesterday, killing three hundred. A great victory as the last one killed ten thousand, ending Galveston’s reign as our state’s queen city.

SALLY CALLED AT FIVE A.M. Glenn’s fever appears to have broken.

AUGUST 18, 1915

Today at the meeting of all the remaining townspeople, I suggested that the train station be named after Bill Hollis (killed at the Garcias’), a motion seconded and carried. Feel extremely poorly for Marjorie Hollis. While Glenn was repeatedly mentioned by name in all the newspaper articles as having been wounded, and Charles singled out for leading the charge on the Garcia compound (each time mentioning he is the grandson of the famous Indian fighter Eli McCullough) — Bill Hollis was only mentioned once, in the local paper.

Afterward I wondered why I did not suggest the station be named after one of the many dead Mexicans.

AUGUST 20, 1915

Storm giving us a good soaking. Everyone in high spirits. Except me. Can’t sleep — faces of the Garcias have returned — spent most of the morning in a nervous daze, searching for things to do, as if I did not find something to occupy my mind… I avoid looking into the shadows, as I know what I’ll find there.

Visited with the Reynolds family, inquired about the surviving girl, who we all now know was María Garcia. Apparently she locked herself in their spare bedroom and then disappeared during the night, stealing an old pair of boots, as she had no shoes.

Ike motioned for me to follow him out to the gallery, where the others couldn’t hear us.

“Pete, don’t take this the wrong way, but if I were that girl, I might believe I was the only living witness to a murder.” He held up his hands. “Not that I’m saying she is, but from her point of view…”

“I was against it from the start.”

“I know that.” He scuffed his boot. “Sometimes I wish there was another way to live here.”

By the time I’d been with them a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche, though they kept a bright eye on me, like some derelict uncle who’d taken the pledge. Dame Nature had made my eyes and hair naturally dark and in winter I kept my skin brown by lying out in the sun on a robe. Most nights I slept as gentle as a dead calf and had no thoughts of going off with the whites. There was nothing back there but shame and if my father had come looking for me, I hadn’t heard about it.

Escuté and N uukaru still ignored me so I spent my time with the younger boys; we’d graduated to breaking the band’s horses and soon we would go to hold the remuda during the raids. A steady trickle of unbroken ponies came off the plains: whenever a herd was spotted, the fastest braves would ride out and rope them and the animals whose necks didn’t break would be brought back to camp. Then their nostrils were held shut until they sagged to the ground. They were tied that way and left for us to handle.