Philipp Meyer - The Son

It was quiet.

“Show me how to steal a horse,” he said.

THE NEXT DAY I told Ellen about Whipple lurking around the house. We went out her back door and cut through the woods until we were out of town, then went to a swimming hole I knew about. I brought a pair of deer hides for us to lie on.

“These have a smell to them,” she said. “Are they very fresh?”

“A few weeks.”

“My little savage.” She was lying with the sun on her, her legs spread, her arms at her sides. There was a breeze but the rocks underneath us were warm. I could see the waving green of the cypresses and the bare branches of the oaks, and the sky in the narrow place above the stream. It had been like this every day for a month, and it would stay like this until the summer. It was not a bad life.

“Have you ever had another affair?”

“You are a man, aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Men always want to know.”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

“Do you want the real answer or the nice one?”

“The real one,” I said.

“You’re my first. I have never felt as good as the way you make me feel.”

I got up.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought being half Comanche you wouldn’t mind it.”

“I don’t care.”

“Come back.” She patted the ground next to her and I did what she said. After we lay awhile longer she said, “You know there are times I think I might open my legs for nearly anyone, just to keep from going crazy. There are times when I think I would open my legs for Henry.”

“They will sure as shit lynch you.”

“Over a black man, yes. Do you know he won’t even look at me?”

“He’s a Negro,” I said.

“But still he won’t look at me. He knows they would kill him for it, so he’s afraid of me. I feel sick about it all the time. He is more scared of me than Roy.”

I was quiet.

“If I ever move back to England, that will be why.”

I slid up next to her and lifted one leg and eased inside. Then I had the urge to stop and hold her. She wanted me to continue with the rutting. When we finished she fell asleep. I sat up and looked around, watching the stream going over the rocks. There was a mockingbird going through its songbook.

When I opened my eyes it was late.

“When are Cecelia and Henry getting back?”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “I sent them to Austin.”

“We should get dressed.”

She didn’t move. Her long hair, which wasn’t quite gray and wasn’t quite brown, was tangled all around her.

“You know if you keep sending them on errands like that, one day they will run to Mexico.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“And you know they know about us.”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Of course they do.”

“Well, Roy will shoot us both.”

“They’ll never tell.”

“Why not?”

“Well, they like you better than him, for one. And for two, they’re niggers.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“You know.” I watched as she put on her underthings.

“Not really, I’m afraid.”

I knew I was in the right but still I felt my bristles go up.

“If you don’t like the judge, why don’t you just leave him?”

She was shaking her head.

“It’s not as hard as it sounds.”

“Sure,” she said. “I suppose we could run away together.”

“We should.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, honey.”

She pulled back her hair and tied it and then went into the bag for her laudanum.

“You think you’re a bit superior to me, don’t you.” She held her fingers together. “Just a tiny bit.”

I shrugged.

“Well, you’re right.”

She offered me the laudanum. “Would you like to try some?”

“Not really.”

“Good,” she said. “Good for you.”

She took the trail back to town and I waited half an hour or so then walked out after her. There was another set of footprints across the rocks.

THE JUDGE’S THOROUGHBREDS knew me so well that it was not really stealing. Tom Whipple knew nothing about horses. The first time I took him into the stables, they nearly kicked him through the wall. I helped him onto the saddle, then got up behind him.

When we got back, Whipple was so excited he couldn’t stop talking, and, as we snuck away through the woods, it occurred to me that he was going to do something stupid. I watched his feet as he walked ahead of me.

A FEW DAYS later he tried to catch his neighbor’s horse, a hog-backed Belgian draft animal, and instead caught a load of turkey shot. Luckily the barn door stopped most of it. But that did not stop him from blabbering.

I EXPECTED ELLEN to see me in jail but she didn’t. When I mentioned her, the sheriff just shook his head.

“Son, I am tryin to figger how you could have picked a worse person to connubiate with.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Were you drunk?”

“Sometimes.”

“Them aborigines must have scrambled your head, boy. I really had my hopes for you.”

“Is there gonna be a real trial, you think?”

“If there is,” he said, “it will be the shortest one in history.”

She was sitting on the couch, watching Susan suck her blanket and Thomas, with his cowlick and overalls and fat little arms, his red bandanna, she wanted to eat him up. He was trying to make a tower from blocks. The sun was on him and she continued to watch and after the tower collapsed for the twentieth or fiftieth (or hundredth) time, she winked out. Later she came to. Thomas was arranging the blocks; Susan had fallen asleep. It seemed that the rest of her life, before she’d had children, had been a dream. Did she even have a mind at all? She was like an animal chewing its cud.

Now she was awake. She was bored but there was something else, a restlessness so intense that she could not physically sit still any longer, she got up and paced the room and then, glancing behind her quickly — the children still in place — she went out the glass door to the backyard and walked a lap around the high wooden fence. The grass was thick; it was humid under the trees. She could make a drink.

She returned to the patio and watched her children from the other side of the glass. Of course she loved them, but there were times, she did not want to say it, there were times when she wondered what would happen if they simply stopped existing. There is something wrong with you, she thought. There is something very wrong. She’d tried to broach the subject with Hank, but it had not gone anywhere; he’d had no idea what she was talking about, and she’d ended the conversation before indicting herself any further. Hank spent only fifteen or twenty minutes a day with them alone. Though in his own mind, he looked after them from the time he got home until the kids went to sleep: his idea of looking after them was simply being in the same house. She spent as much time with the kids in one day as Hank spent in an entire month. She could not help doing the calculations.

She’d been low since the birth of Thomas, their first. She’d gotten lower when the doctor insisted, six months into the pregnancy with Susan, that she stay home as much as possible. She had begun to wonder about the point. The same as when her father died. Something was wrong with her, here she was surrounded by her growing family, her beautiful healthy children, asking about the point of being alive.

It was beautiful, it was natural, but of course it was something else, something you could never say or they would lock you away forever, it was another creature taking the blood right out of you. She was there in the hospital and then it was as if some malevolent spirit had settled inside her, something had risen and taken hold, one minute she was herself, the next she’d been snatched and pulled under, she had no say, she had never understood how small she was. It was not something you could explain to other people. She had survived.