The Son (68 page)

Madeline was still talking. “Or,” she was saying, “you can move us to the Nueces.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Wonderful. September, then.”

“That is barely enough time to build a dugout.”

“Then hire twice as many men. Or ten times as many. I don’t care. But three months from now the children and I will not be living in this house.”

I
N
A
BILENE A
new tailor opened shop every week, and, after making a drive, most of the hands would sell their horses, buy suits, and take the train home. The ones who’d seen a Ned Buntline or Bill Cody show would brag on the incident for months, as if the shows were more real than their own lives. The others passed the winter reading Bret Harte.

The drives got shorter. The International and Great Northern surveyed a line through our pastures. The grass was disappearing but it didn’t matter—the railroads brought the farmers and nesters, people who wanted to live in towns—the land I had bought for a quarter was worth forty dollars an acre when they built.

Had it not been for the children I would have moved to the Klondike. The country was ruined, as a woman would have been after riding the cat wagon. I had never known it could fill up. I had never known there were so many people on earth.

Chapter Sixty-eight

J.A. McCullough

S
he’d come into the great room to see her father sitting next to the fireplace. He didn’t notice her—she remained in the shadows—he was sitting in a chair he had pulled onto the stone hearth, reading from a leather-bound notebook. When he finished a page, he would tear it out, lean forward, and drop it into the flames. There were three other notebooks—they appeared to be some sort of journal—on the floor next to him. She watched for several minutes. Finally she walked over. “What are you doing?” she said.

He was sweating and his face was pale as if he had a fever. For a time he didn’t speak.

“Your grandfather was a liar,” he finally said. He looked as if he would tear up and then sat there like that and she was reminded of the father of her school friend, who had also sat weeping in front of the fire, and she wondered if it was something that fathers did.

He collected himself. “I should get some work done.” He stood and picked up all four of the notebooks and tossed them among the burning logs. Then he kissed her on the head. “Good night, sweetie.”

When she was sure he was gone, she took the poker and pulled the journals out. The flames had barely touched them.

She had not shown her brothers, or anyone else. She had known better. She had known she was the only one who could be trusted with them.

J
ONAS HAD BEEN
acting strangely all day; after school, instead of going out to the pastures to meet their father, he had gone up to his room. She had watched him at dinner, there was something wrong with him, probably the flu. He barely touched his food.

The dishes had been cleared away and Paul and Clint had gone to the library to play cards. She went out to her sleeping porch to read and looked out into the dark and saw a figure walking down the hill toward the stables. His shoulders were hunched and his head was down as if he was embarrassed and she knew immediately it was Jonas.

Even later, she was not sure why she followed him. She walked to the stables and sat in the dark, watching. A light went on. She wondered if her brother was meeting a girl; she wondered who the girl was. But then he was leading all the horses out to the pasture, slapping to get them moving.

She went closer and watched through the cracks in the boards, standing in the dark night, as he dragged hay bales down and stacked them under the loft. When he was satisfied with the pile he’d made, he took a jug of coal oil and poured it over the hay.

“What are you doing?” she said. She opened the door.

He was looking at her and she stepped into the light.

“Jeannie,” he said. He looked stricken.

“What are you doing?” she said again.

“This is the only way he’ll let me leave.”

She had not understood.

“Daddy,” he said. He shrugged. “I thought I would see what happened when I start costing him real money. That’s always been the way to his heart. You can tell on me if you want, I don’t care.”

“I won’t tell,” she said.

“Then go through the stalls and make sure I didn’t leave any of the horses. I’m not thinking straight right now.”

She had walked through the stable, checking each stall.

He had made a torch out of a stick and an old shirt and she watched through the door as he doused it in kerosene and lit it. Then he threw the torch onto the pile. There was a noise and it was bright. He came out and shut the door behind him. They sat on the hill and watched as light began to come through all the cracks in the building, as if a small sun were rising inside it. Smoke began to pour out into the night and her brother stood up and held her to him and then he took her hand and they walked quietly together back up the hill toward their father’s house.

Chapter Sixty-nine

Ulises Garcia

H
e had shaved and his hair was wet and neatly combed. He was wearing a fresh shirt and pants. The shirt was brand-new, as were the trousers; his boots were polished. He brought his leather bag with all the birth certificates, and his great-grandfather’s old Colt revolver, which no longer worked but was clearly engraved
P. McCullough
.

He walked around the porch, looking for her, and saw a pair of open glass doors.

He walked up to them and there she was, sitting in a chair, reading.

She recognized him.

“You must be looking for Dolores.”

“No,” he said.

“I like to have a fire when I come here,” she said. “Even if I have to leave the door open so it doesn’t get hot.”

“It seems nice.”

She waited for him to say something else.

“I work for you.”

“I remember.”

A long time seemed to pass before he could say anything. His head felt light.

“I’m the great-grandson of Peter McCullough,” he said. “I wanted to work for you because . . .” He couldn’t say the rest; it would make him sound like a crazy person.

Her face showed nothing.

From his leather bag, which he had also cleaned and oiled before coming over, he removed all the letters and papers. He took a few steps into the room and handed her everything, then stepped back. He looked around as she read. The room was enormous, thirty meters by forty, he guessed. The ceilings were ten meters tall, a beam construction like an old church. The room itself might have contained three of the houses in which he’d grown up, and he began to think about the Arroyos’ house.

She read the first few pages, but then she was going through the papers faster than she could read them.

“We are family,” he repeated.

Her eyes showed nothing, but he could see that her hands had begun to shake.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” she said.

He pointed again to the papers.

“You will leave this house right now,” she said. “Mr. Colms will have your check.”

He was about to say more but she was not paying attention. As if he were not there, she casually pushed herself up from her chair and walked to a low marble table and picked up the phone there.

She dialed and their eyes locked.

“This is Mrs. McCullough. There is a man in my house who refuses to leave. Yes, he is here right now in the room with me.”

She nodded at him and waved him out. He could feel his body begin to move, toward the door.

“His name? Martinez, or something.”

It felt like he’d been splashed with hot water. He marched forward to take back the papers, but she misinterpreted him, she backed away too quickly and tripped over her own feet, he reached to catch her but she twisted away and fell in front of the fireplace. Her head made a noise on the stone hearth. The phone went out of her hand. He could hear someone talking on the other end.

“Mrs. McCullough?” He was whispering.

She did not respond. Her eyelids were trembling, they were not quite closed and not quite open.

“I did not touch you,” he said to her.

She said nothing. She made no move, her eyes were open now but they did not fix on anything and he knew that she was going to die.

He collected his papers and put them into his case, looked around to see if he’d forgotten anything else, then walked toward the door. He had killed her. Not by touching her, just by existing.

He went outside but in the distance he saw one of the ranch trucks cresting the hill and came back in. Of course they would find him, they would figure it out, they had ways of doing that. He had not touched her.
You are a Mexican in the house of a rich lady,
he thought.
They will not care if you touched her or not
.

He waited for the truck to pass outside and wandered through her house, looking for another exit; what a house it was, the rugs so soft his feet made no noise at all, art and statues everywhere, dim light, it was like something from the movies. He shook himself out of this, reached the kitchen; beyond it was a door that led outside.

His mouth was dry. He went to the sink and drank from the tap, he had not touched her.
They will kill you,
he thought.
They will not care.
This was obvious.

The water was helping. His heart began to slow. He smoothed a few drops from his shirt, thought of all the ways he might explain himself, but no one would believe him, he would not have believed himself.

Later he was not sure how he came to this solution, but it occurred to him this quickly: there was an immense gas stove and he dragged it away from the wall. The gas came right from the property, that was what all the hands said, directly from the ground beneath. He took his Leatherman from his belt, reached behind the stove, and unscrewed the copper line.

Out on the porch, he closed the door quietly behind him. All around the land spread out in the dusk, there was nothing in sight that did not belong to the McCulloughs.

He considered stealing a truck but that would leave him afoot once he reached the border. He could see the lights in the housekeeper’s cottage, in Bryan Colms’s house, in the bunkhouse; he began to walk toward the McCulloughs’ private stable, praying there was no one there, but there were no vehicles, and when he reached the stable he left the lights off.

He had been inside before to muck the stalls and he knew which horse he wanted. He put on a bridle, threw a blanket over her, and saddled her quickly. Bryan Colms insisted on calling her a gray, but she was white, of course.

Then he led her out of the stable, downhill, away from the house, and put his heels to her. The stirrups were short.

He had not made it far when there came the loudest noise he had ever heard. The horse took the bit in its teeth, but he didn’t care, as long as he was heading toward the river. He hazarded a look behind him; there was a dust cloud all around the house, though it was still standing. Then there were flickers and he saw the flames. A few miles later he looked back and the light had spread from one side of the horizon to the other.

W
HEN HE GOT
to the river he reined up to look around. The sky was enormous. The lights of America, which had blotted out the stars, had faded. His legs were beginning to seize and his abdomen and back were cramping as well. “You’re a strong horse,” he said. He kissed it on the neck.

Then they eased down the bank. It was easy to cross, the river was shallow; it was no longer even a river.

What had the historian said? Nineteen or twenty people. He had stopped by the man’s house and the man had shown him the picture they had taken of the Rangers and townspeople posing with the bodies of his family.

“Who are they?” he had asked. “Who is who in the picture?”

The historian had shrugged. “No one knows. No one knows what any of the Garcias looked like.”

The white men were standing in the sun, their faces clear, while the faces of the men on the ground might have been molded from clay. The historian had shrugged again and shown him some other pictures, Colonel McCullough’s dugout, long-dead cowboys, horses and old cars. To him, the picture of the dead Garcias meant no more than these other things.

Ulises had not been able to stop thinking about it, it was like discovering a cancer in your own body, the thought of the uncles and aunts, great-aunts and -uncles, an enormous family, wiped out. He continued to ride. But of course he had equal blood from both sides. He was not some victim. One half of his family had killed the other. Both of those things were inside him.

The Americans . . . he allowed his mind to roam. They thought that simply because they had stolen something, no one should be allowed to steal it from them. But of course that was what all people thought: that whatever they had taken, they should be allowed to keep it forever.

He was no better. His people had stolen the land from the Indians, and yet he did not think of that even for an instant—he thought only of the Texans who had stolen it from his people. And the Indians from whom his people had stolen the land had themselves stolen it from other Indians.

His father had come to this woman asking for help and the woman had denied him. His grandmother had come and had been denied. And now he had been denied as well. Yet this same woman had given twenty million dollars to a museum. Millions for the dead, nothing for the living, it was people like her who ended up in charge. He had to remember those things. He was still young. He would remember.

In the meantime he would go back to his grandfather, and then, he thought, to Mexico City, where there were no problems with the cartels. Business, politics, he didn’t know, but it was as he’d suspected, the days in which you held your head up because you were a man, because you had roped an eagle, those days were gone. The Americans, it seemed, had known this.

He would go a few more miles and rest for the night. After that . . . he didn’t know. But he would be someone. No one would forget his name.