Philipp Meyer - The Son

There was nothing higher in her mind than a Texas Ranger. “I am glad they are dead,” she said about the Garcias.

“They were good people who had bad luck,” he said. Then he added: “Bad things can happen to good people.”

Daughters — that was one bad thing that could happen to you. Once she had overheard her father telling a reporter, who was visiting for the occasion of the Colonel’s hundredth birthday, saying: “First you pray for sons, second you pray for oil. You look at the Millers over in Carrizo, they used to own eighty sections, but they had nothing but she-stuff to pass it to.”

She went right up to her room and at supper she pretended to be sick. After that she had not minded when the Colonel talked bad about her father.

THE GARCIA HOUSE had been built in the 1760s, one of the first settlements in the area; it sat on a rise over the Nueces River valley where, even with the rest of the land dried up, a spring still flowed from the rocks. The house, which resembled a small castle, was built of heavy stone blocks. There was an observation tower, nearly forty feet high, for keeping watch over hostile territory, and the casa mayor’s windows were tall slits, too narrow to climb through. There were plenty of gun ports as well, which she imagined had spit death at heathen Indians.

The roof was long collapsed and inside the casa mayor, mesquite and huisache grew up among the debris, along with a few oaks and hackberries that were already higher than the walls. From the outside, the casa mayor now looked like a walled garden, a safe and inviting place, though it was not. The floor was dirt and there were rusty nails and springs and bits of jagged wood, not to mention the thorns of the huisache. She was not allowed inside but she went anyway, picking her way carefully to the tower. After clambering over more half-burned beams and thorny brush, she could reach the stone staircase that wound around the inside of the tower, all the way to the top, though there was no longer any platform. She would stand on the narrow top stair, in the sun, looking out over the country as it descended to the Nueces River, then back toward her own house, and beyond that McCullough Springs, with its two- and three-story buildings and big stone bank. When the Colonel first moved here he had lived in a jacal, and then a house made from timber. That house had burned after the Colonel’s wife died and he’d built another one from stone.

She had to squint to ignore the farmers and laborers like ants in the fields near the river, and she would avoid looking toward her own house and the town, and try to see the land as it had once been. A poor man’s paradise — that was how the Colonel described it. But she preferred to imagine herself a princess, courted by all the sons of hacendados; there would be seven and she would have no interest in a single one and would lock herself in the tower and refuse to eat, until the poorest and ugliest of the seven revealed himself to be a prince in disguise, whereupon they would sail away to Spain, where it was cool and the servants would feed her plums.

Other times she pretended to be Mrs. Rosalie Evans, the Englishwoman her father always talked about who, just a few years back, had barricaded herself in a tower just like this one, and, in the name of democracy, had shot it out to the death with the Mexican communists who had come to take her land.

When she got too tired standing in the tower (there were only the narrow steps, a four-story plunge just beyond) or her eyes hurt from the glare, she would strip off all her clothes and sit in the spring, the best on the McCullough property. The vaqueros gave the casa mayor a wide berth and she knew she would never be discovered.

Mostly the spring ran down over the rocks toward the river, but it had once been dammed, and off to one side was a stone spillway that carried water to a cistern under the house. She could hang her head through the opening and smell the damp. From the cistern another stone trough carried the overflow to a bathing pool below the house and from there a third spillway diverted to a sink for washing clothes or pots, and from there the water would flow to a large earthen terrace, now overgrown with mesquite and persimmon, which had once been the kitchen garden. It was like the Roman ruins they showed in schoolbooks, but here she could walk along the edge of the old bathing pool, imagining it full of cool water, and sit in the shade of live oaks. In the distance were rolling hills and oak motts and buffalo, she imagined, grazing along the river. Though of course there would be danger; she would want a pistol for Indians. She could not imagine a more perfect life.

In the pasture below the house were more stone walls and rubble, the remnants of a church and other important buildings, the purposes of which were now a mystery. Many of the old corrales de leña still stood and the Garcias’ spring still flowed, but someone had knocked out the dam so the water no longer reached the spillway. The casa mayor had gone dry like everything else. The stream now flowed in its original bed, down past the old church, where occasionally, especially after a hard rain, it would dislodge interesting things. Small bits of tin whose purpose she could not identify, uncountable shards of colored glazed ceramics, broken cups the Colonel said were for drinking chocolate. Antler buttons, brass screws, various coins and fragments of bone.

Only the children had interest in the casa mayor. The Mexican hands, if forced to fetch cattle from the pastures nearby, always crossed themselves. They could not help being ignorant Catholics. And the Garcias had not been able to help being lazy, cattle-stealing greasers and she felt sorry for them, even if they had shot her uncle Glenn.

Occasionally, it seemed strange to her that lazy greasers would construct elaborate stone houses, complete with cisterns, bathing pools, and various gardens, but on the few occasions those thoughts rose to the surface of her mind, she reminded herself that people often did strange, unaccountable things, like the Brenners, whose two sons had been shot robbing a bank in San Antonio, or the Morales family, who had worked for the McCulloughs three generations until their daughter ran off to become a prostitute. So Clint told her. He had scratched his name into the soft caliche walls of the casa mayor, C–L-I-N-T, in letters as tall as he was.

ONE SCALDING-HOT DAY during the summer, when there was no school, and she was bored with swimming in the stock tank, she and Clint and Paul rode up to the hacienda.

They took a meandering route, passing along the way a spring none of them had ever seen before, not as large as the one by the casa mayor, but a spring nonetheless, which flowed into a stream lined with persimmons, grapes, and oaks. They rode to the edge of a swimming hole — where it was clear you might gig as many frogs as you wanted — noting the place so they could return to it later. There were streambeds all over the ranch, but they were mostly dry, filled with sand, their courses marked with the skeletons of dead trees. Irrigation, the Colonel said. It had dried everything up. Which was another thing about the old Garcia place — all the springs there still ran, it was the best-watered section of the entire ranch.

Jonas, her oldest brother, was not with them. He was about to go away to college in the east, and as punishment, their father did not let him take a single day off the whole summer. Paul and Clint, the middle children, had decided not to work in the heat. Years earlier, she had asked Clint if he thought their father should get another wife, so they would have a real mother, and Clint had said we already had a mother, except you killed her. By being born, he added.

The only satisfaction she got was hearing Clint whipped for a very long time. Still she knew it was true. Their mother had died giving birth to her. God’s will, her father said. Though another time he said it was because he hadn’t gone to church.