Philipp Meyer - The Son

She imagined if she had a mother, what that would be like. They would go burying things and digging them back up. Once, in school, she had buried a thick silver ring the Colonel had given her, as deep in the sandbox as she could put it. When she came back a little while later, Perry Midkiff was digging it up. Their teacher was standing there.

“That’s mine,” said Jeanne Anne, pointing at the silver ring.

“No,” the teacher said, “he found it fair and square.”

“But I put it there.”

“Why would you put a ring in the sandbox?” said the teacher. She was young and fat and had no chin to speak of — she would die an old maid, everyone said.

“I wanted to discover it,” Jeannie told them, but even as the words came out, she knew they made no sense. She had lost the ring forever.

THERE WAS PLENTY to dig for at the casa mayor, in the dirt inside the walls, or out in the yard, or down around the old church and the fallen-down jacals of the dead vaqueros. It was rare that some piece of treasure was not unearthed. There was a crumbling Spanish breastplate that her brothers broke into pieces trying to dig out. Plenty of old weapons, so rusted they were barely identifiable: a rapier, a lance head, hatchet and knife blades, a single-shot pistol with the lock broken off.

That particular day, walking along the streambed by the church, they came to a fresh cutbank where the earth had caved. There was a flat piece of wood lying just under the dirt, and Clint, sensing treasure, dug it out and flung it away before leaping back suddenly. Looking up at them, with the bright sun striking it directly, was a human skeleton draped with tattered cloth. Clint reached in and plucked up the skull. It was small — smaller than a muskmelon — and colored a deep yellow. She had thought all bones were white. There was a gold necklace that Clint removed as well. “It’s a girl!” he exclaimed.

Clint made a show of looking at the skull for a while, then tossed it away into the grass. She wanted to touch it but could not. Paul put the skull back in its proper place, put back the coffin lid, and kicked dirt and rocks overtop.

“The animals will just dig it up again, jackass.”

“There’s nothing to eat in there,” said Paul. “We’re the only ones who care.”

Back in the shade of the spring they stripped, though they were all too old now to remove their underclothes. They sat in the cool water, looking out over the pastures and the low crumbled walls of the old church, the Nueces far beyond.

“How old was she?”

“Half-grown,” said Paul.

“Around your age,” said Clint.

After a time they got cold; the temperature of the water never changed, no matter how hot the weather. They ate lunch and sat on the warm flat stones. Not far from the church, a group of cows had been standing in the shade, watching them, and now a bull came into the lower pasture, sniffing the air and following a particular cow. They watched the cow run, stop and look over her shoulder, then run again. Jeannie had a terrible premonition that the animals would step into the coffin, but they did not go anywhere near it.

“They are all like that, aren’t they?” Clint was saying. “They run away but really they are begging for it. Soon he will get what he is after. And she as well.”

Jeannie laughed nervously and squeezed her legs closed. Underneath the hair there were awkward flaps of skin and underneath those, a tiny opening that she knew a man was supposed to fit into, though she could not understand how or why she would ever let that happen, except by some strange agreement, the way she had once allowed Paul to borrow her horse.

“See,” said Clint. He nodded at her. “She knows what I am talking about.”

The cow had run partway up the hill toward them, then seen them and stopped. The bull caught up to her and she had not run and he quickly jumped on top of her.

“Look at that fuckin’ hammer,” said Clint.

They could not see well but it was clear the bull had put something into the cow and was moving it in and out. Finally he slid off her and stood panting and blowing.

“One of these days some big bull is gonna be doing that to you.”

“Leave her be,” Paul said.

Clint punched him but Paul just sat there. Poor gentle Paul. A few years later she would put his death notice on the dresser of his room, where his bed was still neatly done, his bookshelf still full of dime westerns, his school picture still dusted every week by the maids. Small-arms fire, Ardennes Forest . January and the snow waist-deep, and Paul, who had grown up in the Wild Horse Desert, had not even had a proper coat.

Clint had died first, but in Italy. Her brothers had both traveled a long way to die, but that evening, years before either of them had left the ranch forever, Clint had come to her and, without saying anything, had handed her the necklace from the young girl’s grave.

Clint the Cruel. That was her name for him, though she knew it would have hurt him. He made a hobby of trapping birds and small animals, skinning and stuffing them until they did not resemble animals, they were like small lumpy pillows; he had them all over his room. At fourteen, he was an excellent hand, but her father cared only for Jonas. He was the oldest. Clint was a better rider, a better roper; he threw like the old Mexicans — overhand or under, no windup, no extra movement — and he rarely wasted a loop. He could pluck a calf from the herd before it even knew he was there. He was always first to tail a big bull or climb on a gut-twister; she had seen horses sunfishing, trying to turn themselves inside out; they could not get Clint off their backs.

It didn’t matter. Jonas was the oldest and her father paid more attention to Jonas’s various failings — too numerous to list — than to Clint’s triumphs. One day the ranch would belong to her father, and after that it would belong to Jonas. Everyone knew it, including Clint, who had spent two days sick in bed after drinking a bottle of their grandmother’s blackberry cordial.

But Jonas was leaving at the end of the summer and had told her, privately, that he was not coming back. Though she had not believed him at the time.

TECHNICALLY JEANNIE HAD another family, another set of grandparents from her mother’s side. But the other grandmother had died long before Jeannie was born; she might as well have never existed. Her other grandfather died when Jeannie was eight. He was a farmer who had come down from Illinois to buy land the Colonel was selling on promotion. Maybe if his daughter — Jeannie’s mother — hadn’t passed Jeannie might have known him better, but the few times he had visited, he had been so quiet and deferential that he had seemed no different than a stranger. He had not tried to make any claim on her or any of her brothers, and once, after he left the house, her father called him a man who knew his place.

Much later, it had occurred to her that, scientifically anyway, she was a closer relation to this quiet farmer than she was to the Colonel, but she quickly put the thought from her mind. When he died, it was the last she heard of her mother’s side of the family. She did not see much point to them; even the poorest vaquero was higher than a farmer. She was more interested in her uncle Glenn. He had still been a boy when he was first shot, and she imagined she would have done the same thing herself, bravely alerting her father of the Mexicans to their rear, then clutching her heart and dying painlessly. Of course, Glenn had not died. But she would have. They would have named the school after her, and put up a statue, and her teacher would be sorry for letting Perry Midkiff steal the Colonel’s silver ring.

AFTER THE COLONEL passed, her grandmother moved to Dallas, returning to the ranch a few times a year to make sure things were still in order. Jeannie had not expected to miss her. Her grandmother insisted that she wash and dress for supper — which her brothers did not have to do — scrubbing the dirt off Jeannie’s hands, cleaning under her nails with a steel pick. Though she also threatened Jeannie’s brothers with a quirt if they treated her improperly or said something a lady wasn’t supposed to hear. But her grandmother was not home very often.