“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.
WHEN 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.
Chapter Seventy
J.A. McCullough
She had seen the Garcia boy come in; she had known him from across the room. She had known from the moment he spoke that he was telling the truth.
She no longer fit inside herself. All her life she had known she would ride off into the dark, but now the land was as green as it had ever been, the sun was running, she had been wrong, she could see her brothers far ahead of her. They were young, and she made up her mind to catch them.
Chapter Seventy-one
Peter McCullough
After four days of driving he reached Guadalajara. He stopped in front of her house, a small adobe structure with peeling yellow paint and a tended garden.
That night, after she had fallen asleep, he put on his pants and shirt and went out to make sure the car was still there. It was dark and quiet; most of the lights in the neighborhood were out. He had been surprised that so many had electricity at all.
He wondered if he had stolen the money because he was a coward, because he was worried about changing his mind. He decided it didn’t matter. He went back inside to wake her up. They loaded the car and drove off into the darkness.
For a time they moved every few weeks, staying in hotels under different names. It was quieter in the south and they had one child in Mérida and a second near Oaxaca, but when the war ended he began to worry they would be found, and in 1920, after Carranza was deposed, they moved to Mexico City.
There was a new government and the city was overflowing. There were bankers and industrialists, exiles and artists, musicians and anarchists; there were cathedrals and sprawling markets and gaudy pulquerías
, murals going up everywhere, streetcars running through the night. Motorcars jostled with donkeys and horsemen and barefoot peasants. He guessed it would drive him insane. It didn’t. He would lean over the edge of their apartment building and watch the street; he had never seen so many people in his life.
“You don’t like cities,” she said.
“It’s better for the children.”
It was not just that. He was losing his memory; Pedro and Lourdes Garcia seemed impossibly young, likewise his mother and father; he could barely remember his own childhood; he could barely remember last year. If there was anyone watching from the dark corners, he never knew it. Each night after the sun set he would go and stand over the street and put his hands to the warm stone, a million lives passing just beneath him, millions more yet to come, they were all just like him, they were all free, they would all be forgotten.
Chapter Seventy-two
Eli McCullough
1881
I had told myself I would sell out by ’80. The rains were good and my two-year-olds had brought $14.50 and then a German baron, looking to stock a range in Kansas, promised ten dollars for spring yearlings. The hands sold their horses and took the train home, but I wired Madeline that I would be delayed. I had built her the house on the Nueces but by then she had stopped expecting I would come home at all.
I rode the long way down, past our old hunting grounds. I shooed cows from our camp on the Canadian, where the dogwoods had grown up straight and tall, higher than a man could reach. I looked for days, but I could not find the graves of Toshaway or Prairie Flower or Single Bird. The ground had gone to rocks and the trees had all been cut for firewood.
As for my brother’s grave, at times I have been certain the Indians led us up the Yellow House, and other times I have been equally certain it was the Blanco, or Tule, or the Palo Duro. I rode the length of the Llano, following the edge of the caprock, hoping I would be sparked, that I would feel the spot when I came to it. There was nothing.
I ARRIVED HOME to find my men all waiting for me on the gallery.
“Nothin’ better to do?” I said.
Then I saw the house.
“What was all the shooting?” I said.
No one answered.
“Who did the shooting?”
THEY HAD BURIED them under a cottonwood on a hill overlooking the house. It had a good view of things. Madeline, Everett, and a hand named Fairbanks.
Madeline had been shot in the yard and Everett had been shot trying to pull her into the house and the three surviving hands, two of whom were shot as well, had driven the bandits back. All anyone knew was it was renegade Indians. No one knew which ones.
“Were they scalped?”
Sullivan followed me up the hill. He had a sense for things. I took a shovel and set to digging and when we could smell the grave gas and Sullivan saw I wasn’t going to stop, he held me to the dirt. A penny for three measures of barley, hurt not the oil and the wine. My wife and son had not been scalped and neither Peter nor Phineas had been scratched.
THE ARMY THOUGHT the perpetrators to be a renegade group of Comanches. They had trailed them to Mexico but had not gone over the water. Sullivan led me to where the Indians had stood in the corral. It was Lipans. The toe of an Apache moccasin is much wider than a Comanche’s, which comes to a point, and the fringes are shorter and drag less. The Apache has a bigger foot. And the arrows had four grooves.
There were three and twenty hands and they all stood up to ride. The oldermost was twenty-eight, the youngest sixteen, and to ride on a group of Indians—they had thought those days were gone forever. If you were free to go back in history, to fight the great battles of your ancestors . . . you should have seen their shining faces.
The party of Lipans split seven times on rocky ground and the trail was weeks old but if I ever believed in a Creator it was for this reason: it had rained before the Lipan attack and then gone dry, leaving their tracks as frozen into the earth as the marks of the ancient beasts. Twelve riders, tracks of the unshod ponies leading right to the water’s edge.
We did not slow down when we reached the river. In Coahuila the tracks stopped; it was hard dry ground. I did not get off my horse. I looked into the book of the earth: I was Toshaway, I was Pizon, I was the Lipans themselves, afraid to stop looking behind me, knowing I’d killed where I should not and yet the ponies I’d taken would save my tribe another year.
The others saw nothing. A grieving man on a pale horse. They followed on faith alone.
By dusk we stood on a hill overlooking the last of the Lipan band. They had lived in the country five hundred years. We waited until their fires had gone dark.
We dynamited the tipis and shot the Indians down as they ran. A magnificent brave, his only weapon a patch knife, charged singing his death chant. A blind man fired a musket and his daughter ran forward, knowing the gun was empty; she swung it toward us and we shot her down as well. It was the last of a nation, squaws and cripples and old men, our guns so hot they fired of their own will, our squarecloths wrapped the fore-grips and still every hand was branded.
When the people were finished we killed every living dog and horse. I took the chief’s bladder for a tobacco pouch; it was tanned and embroidered with beads. In his shield, stuffed between the layers, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
WHEN THE SUN came up, we discovered a boy of nine years. We left him as a witness. At noon we reached the river and saw the boy had followed us with his bow—for twenty miles he had kept up with men on horseback—for twenty miles he had been running to his death.
A child like that would be worth a thousand men today. We left him standing on the riverbank. As far as I know he is looking for me yet.
About the Author
PHILIPP MEYER is the author of the critically lauded novel American Rust, winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was an Economist Book of the Year, a Washington Post top ten book of the year, and a New York Times Notable Book. He is a graduate of Cornell University and has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow. A native of Baltimore, he now lives mostly in Texas.
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Credits
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SON. Copyright © 2013 by Philipp Meyer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-212039-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-229358-9 (international edition)
EPub Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062120410
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