Philipp Meyer - The Son

The droppings, as a fuel source, improved every season they sat on the prairie, burning longer and slower and more evenly than mesquite. When dried and powdered, the droppings were also used to pack cradleboards for both warmth and moisture absorption, though cattail down, when available, was considered superior.

From the sinew along the spine, as well as the fascia under the shoulder blades, along the hump, and in the abdomen, all manner of thread, bowstring, and bow backers were made. Threads, ropes, and lariats were woven from the long tufts of hair on the head. Pipes were made from the thick ligament in the neck. Arrow straighteners were made from the center bone of the hump, though many preferred to use their teeth.

Scabbards were made from the tail skin, handles for knives and clubs from the tailbones; the trachea was cut and tied to make containers for paints, clays, and makeup. The hard yellow paste inside the gall was used for war paint, the udders dried to be used as dishes and bowls (pottery being fragile, heavy, and generally useless to horse-mounted people). Any unborn fetus was taken and boiled in its sac, and, being more tender than veal, was fed to babies and old people and those with bad teeth. While the pericardium was used for sacks, the heart itself was always left where the buffalo had fallen, so that when the grass grew up between its remaining ribs, the Creator would see that his people were not greedy and ensure that the tribes of buffalo were replenished, so that they would return ever after.

The Colonel died in 1936. Jonas left for Princeton the next year, returning only twice and fighting noisily with her father both times. He was no longer mentioned in the house. Her grandmother, too, had disappeared, but she had not died, only moved back to Dallas to be with her other family.

Her father and brothers took their supper in the pasture or ate it cold after working late. The three siblings would come home from school; her brothers would change quickly and ride out to meet their father; Jeannie would continue her studies. Every Saturday a tutor would drive in from San Antonio and assign her extra work. Her grandmother had insisted and her father agreed to anything that kept her occupied. One day she would rebel; she would do only half of what was assigned. She already knew what she would skip: it was Latin, it was definitely Latin, and the tutor would stare down his long sweaty nose while she triumphantly proclaimed she had not translated a word of Suetonius .

When her schoolwork was done, the silence in the house would begin to weigh on her, and she would put on her boots and clomp around just to hear the noise they made, then eat supper alone on the gallery. She would listen to the president’s radio address and sometimes, if she were especially annoyed, she would leave it on so that when her father came home, he would have to go out to the porch and turn it off. It gave her satisfaction, knowing how angry this made him.

By that time she’d given up working in the pastures. She knew she might be good at it if she continued to try, but the work was hot and long and boring and besides, no one wanted her there. Even the Colonel, who had founded the ranch, had not thrown a loop in the last thirty years of his life — he saw no point to cattle except the tax breaks. Oil was what one ought to be interested in, and now, whenever her great-uncle Phineas came to visit — always with a geologist in tow — she would sit in the backseat while Phineas and the geologist rode up front, talking about shale and sand and electric well logging, which got the geologist very excited. He did not mind that Jeannie was only thirteen; he was happy to ramble on about everything he knew. She could see it pleased Phineas that she listened. The oil business was booming; there were parts of South Texas where you didn’t need headlights to drive at night, there was so much gas being flared, the fire lighting the sky for miles around.

Her grandmother returned every so often, smelling of ancient perfume and peppermint drops, her stern face pointy above a black dress, it was always black, as if she were in mourning for something no one else understood. Nothing could be to her satisfaction: the maids were scolded, her father was scolded, her brothers were scolded; she went down to the bunkhouse and ordered the hands to wash their sheets. Jeannie would be prescribed a long bath to open her pores, which, according to her grandmother, were growing larger each month.

After she’d soaked her face, conditioned her hair, dried herself off, and dressed again, she would sit in the library on the couch while her grandmother cleaned under each fingernail, filing off the rough edges, pushing back the cuticles and rubbing cold cream into her skin. We will make a lady of you yet, she said, though Jeannie had not thrown a rope in over a year and the calluses were long gone from her hands. Every third visit she would bring her entire wardrobe to the library so that her grandmother might assess the fit of her dresses— that one makes you look like a servant girl on the prowl . The offending articles would be packed into a box that her grandmother took to Dallas for tailoring.

Her grandmother always had news from the city, which Jeannie found immensely boring, except for the stories of good girls being ruined, which had begun to feature prominently in her grandmother’s lectures. Still, she no longer fell asleep during these talks; there was a comfort in being told to stay out of the sun— your freckles are bad enough —to watch what she ate— you have your mother’s hips —to wash her hair once a day and to never wear pants. Then her grandmother would take up Jeannie’s hands, as if something might have changed in the ten minutes since she last touched them, but no, there were her stubby inelegant fingers, which no amount of piano lessons could ever fix. Her grandmother’s own fingers were knobby and arthritic and resembled the claws of an animal, but they had once been the hands of a lady, no matter how many years she had wasted on this ranch.

A MONTH OR so after she finished the eighth grade, her grandmother, after giving the usual news from Dallas, informed Jeannie that she had been accepted to the Greenfield boarding school in Connecticut. Jeannie had not known she’d applied. You leave in six weeks, her grandmother said. Tomorrow we’ll take the train to San Antonio and get you some proper clothes.

Her protests, which went on the rest of the summer, meant nothing. Clint and Paul considered it pointless to resist; her father was pleased that there might be a better place for her, going so far as to invoke Jonas as a reason she might be happy up north.

I’m not Jonas , she protested, but everyone knew this was only partially true. Her grandmother gave her pearls and four sets of kid gloves, but this did nothing to assuage her anger; she did not even look at her father when he put her on the train north. She did look at the pearls for a long time that evening, after closing the curtains to her sleeping compartment. They were worth twenty thousand dollars, her grandmother had said; she would not have any granddaughter of hers looking common.

JONAS WAS SUPPOSED to meet her at Penn Station but was an hour late. In which time she stumbled in on a man, his pants down and his rear end very white, pushing up against a woman in a red bustle in the far stall of the ladies’ toilet. She rushed out but after five minutes realized she had no choice and went back into the same restroom, choosing the stall farthest from the man and his friend. Miraculously, her luggage was not stolen. I hate it here, was the first thing she said to Jonas, who got her luggage properly stowed and then took her to lunch. They walked among the tall buildings. Don’t look up so much, he said. You don’t want to be a tourist.