The tongue, hump, side ribs, and hump ribs were all choice cuts and were usually saved for barbecue. The bones were cracked and cooked and the buttery marrow, tuhtsohpe?aipu, scooped out to be used as a sauce alone, or, as previously mentioned, mixed with honey to make a sweet sauce, or cooled and mixed with pounded mesquite beans for dessert.
The shoulder blades were turned into shovels and hoes. The smaller bones were split, fire hardened, and whittled into needles or awls, or into knives, arrowheads, and scrapers. The hooves were boiled to make a glue used for saddle making, attaching sinew to bows, and nearly everything else. Every brave kept a small amount of this glue for emergency repairs. The horns were used as carriers for the fire drill, and, of course, for gunpowder.
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.
Chapter Seventeen
Jeannie McCullough
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 a
mong the tall buildings. Don’t look up so much, he said. You don’t want to be a tourist.
But she couldn’t help it. Pictures didn’t capture the size of the buildings, which leaned ominously over the streets, ready to fall and crush her at any moment, if a taxicab didn’t get her first. The din of all the trucks and shouting people left her ears ringing and she had a rushing in her heart that didn’t go away until she was well north of the city, on the train to Greenfield, back among trees and pastures. There were a few stray cattle and sheep grazing in the distance, Holsteins and Jerseys, at least I know about that, she thought, it would be something to talk about with her new classmates.
THERE WERE NUMEROUS things that appealed to her about Greenfield. The old stone buildings with their steeply pitched roofs and tall ivy walls, the sunlight like a gauze across the landscape—what passed for summer was like winter in Texas—the dense forests and rolling fields at the edge of the campus. She had not known there were so many shades of green, she had not known there was so much rain and moisture on earth. The campus was only forty years old, though it might have easily been four hundred, the way the vines had taken over the buildings and trees brushed the windows in the breeze. In the few moments she had to herself each day, it was hard not to feel like someone important, as if she were only steps away from being swept up by some prince, or prime minister’s son, who, she now knew, would be English instead of Spanish, though other times she wondered if she did not want to be swept up at all, if perhaps she would be a prime minister herself—it was not inconceivable, times were changing. She could see herself behind a great wooden desk, writing letters to her loyal citizenry.
She did not have much time alone. The days were rigidly ordered: wake-up bell followed by breakfast and chapel, followed by classes, lunch, classes, athletics, dinner, and study hall. Lights out at eleven P.M., a monitor stalking the halls to enforce it.
Her roommate, a small Jewish girl named Esther, cried herself to sleep every night and at the end of the first week, when Jeannie returned from dinner, Esther and all her things were gone. Her father had owned factories in Poland, but he had lost everything to the Germans; the tuition check had not cleared. Jeannie was moved into a nicer room. Her new roommate was a girl named Corkie, who was shy but pleasant, and, unlike Esther, seemed comfortable at their new school. She knew everyone, though Jeannie sensed that she did not have many friends. Corkie had shoulders as thick as a cedar chopper’s, and she was tall, and she went about everything with a kind of resignation: to her long face that would never be pretty, to the red bumps above her lip, to her split and frazzled hair. From the way she dressed—in drab, frumpy clothes—and the inattention she gave her appearance, Jeannie thought she must come from a very poor family, and so she went out of her way to be nice, bringing Corkie desserts she’d smuggled from the dining hall, as she had once carried the buckets of clabber to her father’s vaqueros.
That Monday, when asked at lunch who her new roommate was, she told them Corkie Halloran.
“Oh, you mean the Mighty Sappho?”
That was Topsy Babcock. She was small and pretty with pale blond hair and skin to match, a smile that turned on and off like a traffic switch. Sometimes the smile meant approval, other times disapproval—she was not a person you wanted to disappoint. The others at the table laughed at Corkie Halloran, and Jeannie laughed with them, though she did not know why.
“She was at Spence but they say she was spending a little too much time with one particular girl, if you know what I mean.”
“They should have sent her to St. Paul’s—she would have fit in perfectly!”
Everyone thought this was hilarious. Jeannie just nodded.
THE NEXT WEEKEND Corkie invited several people to her parents’ house, which was only forty minutes from school. To Jeannie’s surprise, many of the people who had made fun of her at lunch went along: Topsy Babcock, Natalie Martin, Kiki Fell, and Bootsie Elliot. Jeannie expected some old jalopy, or perhaps a truck, but instead they were picked up by a uniformed driver in a seven-seat Packard.
Kiki said: “You’re the one who got stuck with that Jewish girl, aren’t you?” She was the dark-haired version of Topsy, though her hair was cut just below her ears, almost as short as a boy’s, and it was said she’d had a surgery to make her nose smaller. Since arriving at Greenfield Jeannie had spent more and more time in front of the mirror at bedtime, inspecting herself. Her nose had straightened considerably but her eyes had no character, they were the color of fog or rain. Her chin was pointy, her forehead high, and the scar across her eyebrow—which she had always been proud of because it was like the scars her brothers had—made her look like a man. It was a deep scar, you could not miss it.
“McCullough . . .” Topsy was saying. “That’s Jewish, isn’t it?”
The other girls tittered, except Corkie, who looked out the window.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m kidding. Of course it’s not.”
Jeannie was quiet the rest of the drive. There were very few houses. The roads were small and winding and yet they were paved. There were tall hedgerows, red barns, the ubiquitous stone walls. Everything was in shadow, the sun came weakly through the trees and the sky felt small and closed in. There was a chill in the air, though it was only September.
Topsy and Kiki and Bootsie had gone to primary school together; the others seemed to know each other in the same ways, she guessed, that she knew the children of the Midkiffs and Reynoldses. The second silent girl in the car, Natalie, had long chestnut hair and a large chest that she slouched to conceal. She made a point of looking out the window, not making eye contact with Jeannie, though, like everyone else, she smiled at whatever Topsy said.
It was a relief when the car turned into a stone gate and made its way up a long driveway with big trees on both sides. There were acres of grass, she had never seen so much green healthy grass in her life; she tried to calculate the number of head you could support here (an acre per head? It seemed possible) but knew better than to say this out loud.
At the top of the hill the house appeared. She began to feel embarrassed. It was not any larger than the Colonel’s house, but it was more grand, with arches and pillars and towers, dark granite, marble statuary, a look of weathering as if it had been standing since the time of kings.
“What does your father do?”
The girls all looked at her. Corkie gave her a look as well and she knew she’d made some sort of mistake. But it was too late. Corkie said: “He goes to his firm in New York and he plays racquets at the club and he rides and shoots a lot. And he works on his novel.”
“What kind of firm is it?”
“You know . . .” Corkie shrugged.
Bootsie Clark said: “Poppy’s father rides and shoots as well, I imagine.” Poppy was what the others had decided to call Jeannie. “He’s a cowboy. Isn’t that right?”
“Cowboys are hired men.”
“So what does your father call himself?”
“A cattleman.” She was about to add, but that’s not where our money comes from, when the other girls cut in:
“Does he go on those epic rides, then? Up to Kansas?”
“Those ended in the eighteen hundreds.”
“That’s too bad,” said Bootsie. “They looked very exciting.”
She was not sure if it was worse to respond or to let it drop. “They didn’t really drive them like in the pictures. They had to walk them or they’d lose all their weight.”
“How does Corkie’s house look?” said Natalie, changing the subject. “I guess yours must be bigger.”
“Not really.”
“Of course it is. We hear everything is bigger in Texas.”
She shrugged. “It’s not as nice as this, though. It’s not nearly as green.”
“How many acres do you have?”
It was a rude question—the last thing you would ask someone in Texas—but she knew she had to answer. “Three hundred ninety-six sections.?
??
“That’s not so much,” said Topsy.
“She said sections, not acres.”
“How much is a section?”
“They don’t even call them acres. An acre is too small.”
“How much is a section,” Kiki asked, for the second time.
“Six hundred forty acres.”
For some reason this caused all the girls, with the exception of Corkie, to break into hysterical laughter. Corkie was watching the driver, waiting for him to open the door.
“Are you going to be a cattlewoman as well?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What are you going to be, then?”
“She’s going to be someone’s wife,” said Corkie. “Just like the rest of us.”
THAT AFTERNOON, THEY went riding. Below the main house was a stable with twenty or so horses, an immense corral that they called an arena, and a large pasture. It was all set in a manicured wood but she did not ask where the property ended. There were men in the shadows, cutting branches and loading them into a cart.
She was wearing jodhpurs and knee-high boots borrowed from Corkie’s younger sister. She felt ridiculous, but everyone else was dressed the same way. She presumed they were going for a long ride, four or five hours, and she wished she had eaten more at lunch.
“I imagine you must have horses,” said Natalie.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you?”
“There isn’t really enough room for them in Tuxedo Park.” She shrugged.
“There’s room for Jews, though,” said Topsy.
“Topsy and Natalie were neighbors with the girl you roomed with.”