Philipp Meyer - The Son

He didn’t answer.

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Are Jonas and Clint in bed?”

“They’re with Daddy.”

“Can you see down to the gate?”

“Stop asking questions.”

It was quiet and then he added: “I can’t see anything.”

“What’ll happen if they come through?”

“I imagine Daddy will shoot them. I saw them carrying the Lewis gun a few hours ago.”

Her father must have called the governor because the next morning a company of Rangers drove down from San Antonio. The day after that he agreed to let the sheriff search the property, all quarter-million acres. The Blounts were never found, but she knew as well as anyone it would have been like needles in a haystack.

OF THE FOUR children, only she and Jonas liked school. Paul and Clint found it boring; their father had no use for it either; the compulsory attendance laws were another sign of the government reaching into his pocket. The school was in McCullough Springs, named after her great-grandfather. After the Blount incident her father set out to mend relations, agreeing to pay for a mural that had long been planned for the school, a pastoral scene showing Americans and Mexicans working together to build the town, but when the mural was finished, it showed skeletal Tejano farm workers stooped in an onion field, eyes bulging, a few ragged crosses in the distance. A patrón bearing a passing resemblance to Jeannie’s father sat astride a black horse, keeping watch. The mural was painted over and Jeannie’s father gave up trying to be nice to the townspeople.

The McCulloughs paid most of the school’s expenses, though the Midkiffs and Reynoldses chipped in as well. The children of Mexicans attended free, though never for very long; they came and went throughout the year, a month here, a month there, the truant officer never went after them. There was no point trying to be friends; they would disappear for half the year and when they came back she would have to start all over. The children of the white farmers were better, but when they visited the ranch she could see how they wished they lived there instead of her, and an uncomfortable eagerness would come into their manner. Eventually she had stopped being friends with anyone. The only person she had much in common with was Fannie Midkiff, but she was three years older and crazy for boys. She was bound for a sorry end, they all said, Midkiff or not.

BEFORE THE COLONEL died, so long as he had the energy, she was allowed to sit with him and do her studying. The Colonel spent his mornings on the west gallery, out of the sun, and his evenings on the east gallery, also out of the sun. The visitors never stopped: a man from the government (a Jew, they said) came with a recording machine and the Colonel would talk into it for hours. There were daybeds on the galleries so he might sleep whenever he wanted; he slept and slept, that was what he did mostly; One day I will sleep forever, that is what he told her.

He never slept for very long, though. He was always up in time to shoot a snake trying to get across the wide dirt yard, hoping to reach the cool under the porch. Someday we will live in a house that doesn’t have a damned dirt yard, said her grandmother. That will be the day we get snakebit, said the Colonel.

If Jeannie happened to be nearby when the Colonel woke up, he would send her for ice. Or mint; he had planted a patch around one of the stock tanks. He seemed to live off juleps. She would crush the mint at the bottom of the glass and add three spoons of sugar and fill the glass with ice. Sometimes, before he added the whiskey, he would let her suck on the sweet minty ice.

When it was not too hot, she and the Colonel would go on walks, shuffling through the tall grass under the bright sky, stopping to rest in an oak mott, or a copse of cedar elms, or along the streams if they were running. She was always missing things: deer, a fox, the movement of a bird or mouse, a flower blooming out of season, a snake den. Though she could see twice as far as he could, she felt blind around him — she noticed practically nothing except the sun and grass. She often wondered if he were making things up, but every time they went walking, he recovered some keepsake — the bleached skull of a possum, a shed antler, a bright wingfeather off a yellowhammer woodpecker. He walked very slowly and often had to stop and lean on her for support. If it were not too dry when they came on a snake den, he would send her back for a jug of kerosene to pour down the hole, but it was dry most of the time. Sometimes when they stopped to rest he would ask her to dig a thorn out of his hard yellow foot. He didn’t wear boots; he could no longer keep his balance in them. He wore only Indian moccasins. Indians — the real Indians from the reservation in Oklahoma — would give him things like that, and when they left, he got a sad look and would be short with her father or anyone else who bothered him. Jeannie was his favorite, it was plain to everyone, and her father pretended not to care, though she knew he did.

If the Colonel was busy and she did not have schoolwork, her job was to gather the milch cows from the pasture and milk them, smelling their sweet breath and listening to the sound of the pail, tinny at first, then soft as it filled with milk. Her brothers hated the job — it was not proper work for a vaquero, being swished in the face by the cow’s dungy tail — but there was a satisfaction at seeing the animal’s relief, the sounds she could make with the streams of milk, playing them against the sides of the pail. It was not a song, but it was something like one. The milk was taken to the kitchen, strained, and either put into the icebox or left out for the cream to rise and be skimmed off. The domestic staff were allowed to have all the skimmed milk they wanted, but everything else was for the family. They always had more milk than they needed and often entire buckets would clabber and one of her brothers would carry it out to the bunkhouse for the vaqueros. It was something she missed later in life, clabbered milk with brown sugar and fruit. When pasteurization came along, they said clabber wasn’t safe, though she’d been eating it all her life.

When she was not gathering the milch cows she was looking after the dogies; technically this was her brothers’ job as well, but they rarely attended to it. When a calf was orphaned, the hands would drive it to the pens near the house. Jeannie would tie a cow to the fence, then splash the cow’s milk on the dogie’s head. She allowed the cow to smell her own milk on the orphan, then brought the dogie to the cow’s udder. Usually the cow would kick the strange calf away, and Jeannie would have to wait a while before repeating the process. Sometimes the cow gave in immediately and allowed the dogie to suckle; other times it took days. Clint and Paul were always buying horses with their dogie money; no one knew what Jonas did with his. She gave hers to her father to hold, and when she was twelve she opened an account in San Antonio, depositing nearly ten thousand dollars.

WHEN SHE COULD not sit on the porch with the Colonel, her other favorite place was the old Garcia house, which, though the Garcias were long dead, was still called the casa mayor. She had known from a young age what happened to them.

“Pedro Garcia didn’t have any sons to work the ranch,” her father said, “and his daughters all married bad men who ran Pedro into debt. The bad men started stealing our cattle and then they shot your uncle Glendale.”

“So we went and shot them back.”

“No, the Texas Rangers went to their house and tried to talk to them, and we went along with the Rangers. But the Garcias started shooting at the Rangers.”