“What are you doing in Wichita Falls?” I said.
“Don’t worry your head over it.”
“There is nothing she can do to us.”
“This has gone on long enough. There is one person on earth who cannot be here and you have brought her into this house.”
“You are not going to change my mind,” I said.
“Every day I see you now you’re out on a dike. You think I don’t notice that for ten years you don’t bother to wash and now you’re wearing collars?”
I didn’t say anything.
“This ain’t a grass widow you get to tap free, son. This one will cost us the ranch.”
“You may leave now,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Get out of my office.”
LATER I COME across María in the library. I am pretending to look for a book, when she says, apropos of nothing: “How is your work going?”
“I’m not really working,” I say.
She smiles, then gets serious again.
“Consuela tells me things.”
“Whatever she is telling you, I won’t let it happen.”
“Peter.” She shrugs and looks out the window, past the trees. I look at the skin along her neck, her collarbones, the edge of one shoulder, I look at her arms, still thin. “ . . . I shouldn’t be here anyway. This is the last place I should be, in fact.”
“I’ll take care of my father.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Where else do you have?”
She shrugs and it is quiet and I watch her face changing. After a moment she decides something. “Do you have time to sit? If you are not really working?”
She is on her chair facing the window. I go to the couch.
“Don’t worry about my father,” I say.
She stands up and comes over and sits next to me. She touches my wrist.
“Sooner or later, I’ll have to leave. Days or weeks, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
She touches my cheek. We are so close and I wait for something to happen, but it doesn’t. When I open my eyes she is still looking at me. I lean forward, then stop myself; she is still looking at me, and I kiss her, just barely. Then I lean back. I am seeing spots.
She puts her fingers through my hair.
“You have good hair,” she says. “And yet your father is bald. And he is short, and you are tall.”
I can feel her breath.
“You will forget me,” she says.
“I won’t.”
I wait for something to happen. We’re leaning against each other. I work myself up and turn to kiss her again, but she only gives her cheek.
“I want to,” she says. But then she stands up and walks out of the room.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Eli McCullough
1852
A few weeks later Judge Wilbarger’s wife and I were lying naked on her couch, in my mind to spite the judge, in her mind because she was high on laudanum and being naked on the couch was a comfortable place to be. She had sent the Negroes to Austin on errands. She had the sort of face you saw in old books; it was pale and very delicate and I guessed that at one point she’d been the kind of woman that men would have killed to be with. And I guessed that she knew this, and knew it was not true anymore.
“How old are you, really?”
“Nineteen,” I said.
“I don’t care, you know. I just want to know more about you.”
“Seventeen,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Sixteen.”
“Will the number keep going down?”
“No, it’s sixteen.”
“I’ll take that. It’s the perfect age.”
“Is it?”
“For you it is.”
She was quiet. I wondered how it was that a woman like her would ever end up with a man like the judge. I wondered if she had loved him. Then I was thinking about the Comanches.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No,” I said. Then I said, “Why don’t you go back?”
“To England? I’m very respectable here.” She laughed. “No, of course I’m not. But what would I do there?”
“Better than Bastrop, probably.”
“Probably.”
I was looking at her smooth belly and wondering if she’d ever had children, but something told me not to ask, so instead I said, “I don’t understand why you won’t go back. Even I don’t like this place.”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
IN THE MEANTIME, being in town so much, I began to see the same kid over and over until I was sure he was following me. I knew his name was Tom Whipple; he was thirteen or fourteen, but barely five feet tall and lazy eyed to boot. Finally I caught him waiting for me around the judge’s house, which I took for a bad sign. I followed him home and waylaid him in the woods behind his house.
Though I had him on the ground, for some reason he didn’t look afraid. “You’re the wild Indian,” he said.
“I am.”
“Well, the Indians killed my father. I guess now you’ll kill me, too.”
“You have been following me,” I said.
“They say you go around stealing horses from people.”
“I borrow them.”
“They say you kill people’s chickens and hogs.”
“I quit doing that weeks ago.”
“They say that someone is going to shoot you.”
I snorted. “Well, I would like to see them try it. I could whip every one of these alfalfa desperados.”
“My daddy was a Ranger,” he said.
I’d been in town long enough to know this wasn’t true; his father had been a surveyor, and the whole party had been killed by Comanches. Or so it was told. Most people couldn’t tell an Apache from a Comanche from a white man dressed in buckskin.
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.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Jeannie McCullough
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.
A feeling of being tricked came to her constantly, betrayed by her own body, she had thought it existed for her own enjoyment and she was angry and jealous of Hank, who had paid no cost, who, as she lay in the hospital bed, held her hand and looked lovingly into her face and told her to breathe, breathe; meanwhile she was on a plane that had lost its engine, plummeting toward open water, toward annihilation, breathing was the last thing on her mind. She had not stopped being angry about that, either. His sure advice on matters he knew nothing about.
She was being unreasonable. There was no point thinking about it. She stood on the patio, watched her children through the window a few moments longer, wondered what she would say if a neighbor saw her or the nanny came downstairs or Hank came home. She went back inside. She called the nanny on the intercom and asked her to pack a bag for Susan. Thomas was old enough to be looked after; Susan she would take to the office. She still went in a few times a week to visit her old life. You are being a baby, she thought.
She put Susan in the front seat of the Cadillac and felt an immediate relief, even before she left the driveway. Susan began to cry. Jeannie lifted her and held her in her lap as she drove. Twenty minutes later they were in front of the office, and after a long elevator ride she handed Susan off to the secretaries, who were happy to have her, happy to hold a child, happy to avoid work, she didn’t know and didn’t care, she only wanted to be alone.
She went into her office and shut the door. It was hot, pleasantly so—it was all windows. It was a green view over the city, which was growing, growing, the East Texas country was lush and wet, it was the Deep South. Hell in the summer. She loved her children. She had expected something different. She had expected them to be like her brothers, or like foals or calves, helpless at first, but quickly capable of looking out for themselves.
What
she had not expected was so much need. They said it was love but it was not love at all, if she was honest, they had taken far more than they could ever give. Perhaps they had taken everything. “That is wrong,” she said out loud. “I am wrong for thinking that.” She sat there, not daring to breathe, looking out over the skyscrapers, filled with people, she could see them bustling, sitting in their offices. There was no one like her. You are pathetic, she thought, think about your own mother.
In the other room, she heard Susan begin to cry; the sound brought her out of the chair, she was moving toward the door before she even knew what was happening. But of course the girls could handle it. She went back to her desk—stacks and stacks of papers—it was ridiculous, she had no context for any of it, she began to read at random. A landman’s report, a geologist’s report, a deal long gone bad. It was hot. The questions were pointless. She’d known what she was getting into (except I did not, she insisted, I did not know), her life was ruled by the needs of others; the only need she could not indulge was the one she felt nearly every day, to get into the car and begin driving and never stop.
Sometime later she woke up sweating. The sun was still coming in. She wondered if the air-conditioning was on. She shuffled the papers, throwing out the old ones, but it was pointless, it would take her months to catch up. She went to the divan and fell asleep again. Then it was past five. Nothing had been done.
She checked her face in her compact: puffy, the fabric had marked her, there was a pretty girl in there somewhere, with good cheekbones and perfect skin and a nice mouth, but it was not visible in the mirror; all the color was gone except for under her eyes. Her teeth were yellow, her hair was like something dried up in the sun.
She winked out again. When she came to it was dark. She touched herself up and she went back out into the office.
Susan was asleep in the remaining secretary’s lap. Everyone else had gone home and the girl was not moving, just sitting there, looking helpless.