Philipp Meyer - The Son

And so, as the only woman in the house, she was entirely unprepared for what happened when she was twelve, which had sent her running for her father and nearly stepping on a snake. He understood the situation so quickly, before the words had even come out, that she realized he must have known something like this would happen. He began ringing frantically for a maid. The two of them stood in silence. Her father, she saw, was more embarrassed than she was and she knew she was lucky this had not happened in front of her brothers, or in school, or in church; in fact it could not have happened at a better time, walking by herself, examining the tracks by the stock tank.

“Gramammy didn’t say anything about this?” He called again for help. “Where is everyone?”

She didn’t know.

“Well, from a scientific point of view you are a female. And your body is preparing itself so that eventually, many years from now, as a grown woman, you can get married.”

She knew he did not mean married. As she looked at him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his white shirt stained with sweat, it occurred to her that she could no longer entirely trust him. The Colonel had been right; the only one you could depend on was yourself. She had always known it on some level or another and at this realization all the shame faded away from her; she was embarrassed only for her father, who despite his height and big hands was completely helpless. She excused herself and went into Jonas’s old room and took an undershirt from his dresser, which she cut up to line her shorts.

When she went back downstairs a maid was waiting and, after inspecting Jeannie’s handiwork and judging it suitable, explained as best as she was able, half in Spanish, half in a coded Catholic English, exactly what was happening, no, it would not stop, and then the two of them went to town to get supplies.

Glendale has been home two weeks, but he is pale, weak, and still fighting off some infection. Tomorrow they will take him back to San Antonio. Charlie’s arm is better, though not entirely, and there is an image clinging to my mind, which is both of my sons laid out together in one casket.

AFTER A LONG absence, the dark figure has returned. I see him in the shadows of my office; he follows me around the house, though he has not yet begun to call to me (I once saw him rise from the middle of the flooded Red, his arms open for me like Christ). I have unloaded all my pistols. No longer the energy to be angry at Pedro and my father. Visited the graves of my mother and Everett and Pete Junior (snakebite, which I cannot blame on the Colonel, and yet I do).

Of course he senses something wrong. Appears to not know what. A few times he has found me reading in the great room and stopped as if waiting for me to speak. When I did not — where would I even begin? — he shuffled on.

A MAN OF Pedro’s intelligence could not have overlooked it. So my father’s voice — the one inside my head — tells me. The same voice says Pedro had no choice — his daughters had married those men, they had become his family, fathered his grandchildren. And if Pedro had no choice, then we didn’t either. That is my father’s logic — there is never any choice.

Meanwhile my old acts of cowardice continue to haunt. Had I married María (for whom I briefly harbored feelings), instead of Sally (my proper match)… who was thirty-two and twice jilted, who loved her life in Dallas, whose bitterness was apparent from the moment she stepped from the train, who came because her father and my father and her own biology gave her no choice. I was so lonely when I met Peter, that is the story she tells of our courtship. Our fathers arranging the breeding as if we were heifer and bull. Perharps I am dramatic; in truth our first years were quite pleasant, but then Sally must have realized that, just as I always said, I really had no intention of leaving this land. Many families of our stature, she rightly pointed out, maintain more than one residence. But we are not like other families.

THERE ARE MOMENTS I see José and Chico and (impossibly) Pedro himself on the other side of the river, shooting at us. Other moments I remember the event as it truly happened, a half-dozen riders in the dark, dodging into the brush, hundreds of yards away. Perhaps Mexican because of the cut of their clothing, perhaps not.

Being at the rear, higher on the riverbank, I had the best vantage. If I’d taken more time with my shooting, or dismounted… but I did not want to hit them. I thought I might push death aside, if only for a moment, so I held over their heads and emptied my rifle, nothing but sound and fury, the extreme range absolving me of marksmanship. Had I simply adjusted the ladder on my sight… one of the men I intentionally missed likely shot Glenn. The incident might have ended there. Though it is unlikely.

I CANNOT HELP having sympathy for the Mexicans. So far as their white neighbors are concerned, they come into this world coyotes in human form, and when they die they are treated like coyotes as well. My instinct is to root for them; they despise me for it. I see myself in them; they are insulted. Perhaps you cannot respect a man who has what you do not. Unless you think he might kill you. A preference for hardhanded authority seems bred into them — they are comfortable with the old relationships, patrón and peón —and any attempt to change these boundaries they find undignified, or suspicious, or weak.

TO BE A simple animal like my father, untroubled by consciousness, or conscience. To sleep soundly, at ease with your certainties, men as expendable as beef.

WHEN I SLEEP I see Pedro, neatly arranged with his vaqueros in the yard. Eyes open, mouths gaping, the flies and bees swarming. I see him in bed, his daughter dead at his feet, his wife dead at his side. I wonder if he saw them shot down. I wonder if he recognized the men doing it as his friends.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1915

Sally has moved into her own room. Glenn continues to recover in San Antonio; we drive there alternately to be with him. Pilkington has no explanation. The vaqueros suspect dark forces, a bruja at work.

Today Sally began a conversation at supper:

“Colonel, what did you used to offer for a bounty on wolves?”

My father: “Ten dollars a pelt. Same for a panther.”

“What would be a good bounty on Mexicans, you think?”

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’m just asking, Pete. It is a reasonable question.”

“I don’t think you’d have to offer a bounty,” said Charles.

“So is ten dollars too much? Or not enough?”

“I would prefer not to talk like this. Today or ever.”

“I do not even know if you are upset about this, Peter, I can’t even tell. Can anyone else? Does Peter look bothered?”

Everyone was quiet. Finally the Colonel spoke up: “Pete has his own way of handling things. You can leave him be.”

She got up and took her plate into the kitchen, with a furious look at my father. Me, she already hates.

TRYING TO CONSOLE myself that we aren’t alone in our suffering. Two weeks ago the railroad bridges to Brownsville were burned (again), the telegraph lines cut, two white men singled out from a crowd of laborers and shot in the middle of the morning. About twenty Tejanos killed in reprisal — twenty that anyone heard about. The Third Cavalry has been in regular fights with the Mexican army all along the border, shooting across the river. Three cavalrymen killed by insurgents near Los Indios and, across from Progreso, on the Mexican side, the head of a missing U.S. private was displayed on a pole.

In better news, the air smells sweet and the land is already coming back to life. The rain continues to fall and there are adelias and heliotrope, the hummingbirds everywhere in the anacahuita, bluewing butterflies, the scent of ébano and guayacan. The clouds glow at sunset and the river shimmers in the light. But not for Pedro. For Pedro, it is only dark.