Philipp Meyer - The Son

“It’s all right, son. You’re a good cattleman. But you don’t know a goddamn thing about making money. And that’s why you got me.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“Do some figuring on what our minerals are worth at a hundred an acre, which is where Reynolds and Midkiffs are selling.”

“Tens of millions,” I said.

“Then figure what they’ll be worth at a thousand an acre. Or five thousand.”

“Why do you even care?” I said.

“This is what is going to happen. A couple dozen drillers and oilmen are going to spend the next year or two proving our leases. That is when we will sell.”

I want to believe he is wrong. Unfortunately, I know better.

“What’s happening with that girl?” he said, but I was already walking away.

WHAT IS HAPPENING with María is that we have both been sore for days. The first night after Piedras Negras I slipped quietly from her room, but within an hour I’d returned and since then we have not spent more than a few minutes apart.

This morning I woke just after sunrise. I lay there, listening to her breath, taking in the odor of her hair and skin, dozing, then waking up to look at her again, washed over in the light and the pleasant feeling of being near her.

It occurs to me that I have not seen the shadow in several days; I have not thought about Pedro’s ruined face or Aná’s scream. In a moment of sheer perversity, I try to call the images back to mind, but I cannot.

I HAVE ALWAYS known I am not the sort of person other people are inclined to love. They are blind to what I see in myself; with a glance they decide that my judgment ought not to be trusted. My singular luck, so far as they are concerned, was to be born into this great family; elsewise I would be some scrivener, renting a dim room in a filthy city.

It occurs to me that María may wake up one morning and see me as the others do, that her love may prove deciduous, though so far it is nearly the opposite; I see my own childish gaze reflected in hers, I catch her looking at me when my back is turned, I wake up and she is leaning on an elbow, watching me. We are drunk on each other. As for my so-called ailment — which I had presumed was a symptom of age, and Sally had presumed was yet another symptom of my unmanfulness — there has been not a single sign. If anything, the opposite: my body is possessed by an unending desire to be connected with her (just the thought…); we never separate after making love and she will often roll on top of me and fall asleep while we are still attached.

This morning she read to me from the Song of Solomon; I read the second of the Heloise and Abelard letters to her; when we are together it seems our mere existence is a transcendence of all that is wrong with the world, but as I sit now I wonder if there is some darker element, a man having relations with someone who is not his equal, though of course she is, in every way except in power, which means she is not. She is free to go and yet not free, as, aside from our room here, she has no place to call her own.

“WHERE DID YOU go?” she says, when I return.

“To my office.”

“You were gone so long.”

“I’ll never do it again.”

“Do you ever write about me?”

“You are most of what I write about,” I say. “What else would I write about?”

“Since when?”

“Since the first day.”

“But then you were unhappy. Perhaps you should destroy those pages.”

“I was confused,” I say.

“I’ve been thinking about the story of your father and the dead men…”

I hesitate for a moment; this could be nearly any story of my father. Then I realize what she is talking about.

“… and there is one I’d like to tell you. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind getting your journal?”

“I have a strong memory.”

“But a lazy body.”

“No, it’s true. My memory is my curse.”

She runs her fingers through my hair. I get up and get my journal, just for her sake. On the way to my office I pass Consuela straightening up my bedroom, where I have not slept in five days. She doesn’t look up.

HE WAS A Coahuiltecan, the last living one on earth. His people were older than the Greeks and Romans; they’d been living here five thousand years by the time the pyramids were built, and to them, all the other races of the earth were like scurrying ants, who appear in the first warm days but die off in the first frost.

But finally their own winter arrived. The Spanish appeared and then the Apaches, who continued the work of the Spanish, and then the Comanches, who continued the work of the Apaches, until, by this day in the spring of 1836, this man was the only survivor.

On that day my great-uncle Arturo Garcia saw the Coahuiltecan kneeling in his pasture, looking for something, and as the Indian was nearly blind, Arturo went to help him. After several hours in the buffalo grass and nopales he found the missing item, a marble of black obsidian, which Arturo presumed had mystical properties. Arturo had been born on this land, as had his father, and he knew that no rocks of that nature are found in the area.

Arturo was a wealthy young man, with a remuda of blooded horses, a beautiful wife, and a sixty-league grant from the king of Spain himself. His house was full of silver, pieces of art, and the weapons of his family, who had been knights in the olden times. Every morning he woke before the sunrise and watched the light come in, illuminating his land and his works and all he would leave for his sons.

Arturo had blood, and was known to cut out the hearts of his enemies, but he was also the sort of man who — despite having one hundred men working for him, a small town to look after, a beautiful wife and four children — would help an old Indian look for a marble.

Of course he didn’t believe in seers or oracles; he was not a stupid peasant. He and his brother had both attended the Pontifical University, his ancestors had founded the University of Sevilla, he had grown up fluent in French and English and Spanish. But that day he was not feeling so intelligent. The Anglos had, against all odds, won the battle against his people at San Jacinto, and he was worried for his family.

The victory made no sense. On one side was a professional army, a powerful and ancient empire on which the sun never set, and the other a pack of ignorant barbarians, condemned criminals and land speculators. Though Texas had briefly been open to the Anglos, the borders had been closed since 1830, and yet they continued to illegally sneak into the state to take advantage of the free land, free services, loose laws. It was not unlike what happened on the fringes of the Roman Empire, when the Visigoths overran the imperial army. Perhaps God curses the proud.

Arturo asked the seer if he could put a question to him, and the seer said of course, but there was no guarantee of any answer.

Arturo said: “Will I lose my land?”

The seer said: “Go away, do not disturb me with questions of a material character; this is a place of the spirit, of philosophy, of the nature of the universe itself.”

(This is not really what the Indian said, I interrupt.)

(The fact that he was an Indian has no bearing on his intelligence. She puts her finger to my lips.)

That night he couldn’t sleep, thinking about all he had to lose. He returned to the seer the following morning.

“Seer, will I lose my land?”

And the seer said: “You have the best horses for five hundred miles, the biggest house, the most beautiful wife, an ancient lineage, and four healthy sons. I am a blind, penniless Indian. You should be the one giving me the answers.”

“But you are wise.”

“I am old. So old that I remember playing at your house before it was there.”