“I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea,” she insisted.
“You aren’t used to talking to people, are you?”
She looked out the window. For a moment, idiotically, she thought she might cry.
“It’s all right,” he said. He reached over and squeezed her hand, then took his own hand back just as quickly. “I’m the same way.”
T
HEY SPENT THE
entire day driving the ranch’s dirt roads. He would skid the truck to a stop, then climb out and stand on the roof.
“What are you looking for?”
“The escarpment,” he said. “But there is so much goddamn brush.”
“There’s brush everywhere.”
“That’s what I just said.”
“It’s not just on our land.”
He continued to look. “I forgot my binoculars,” he said. Then he added: “For someone who owns this much country, you are one sensitive individual.”
She didn’t answer.
“But at least you have good roads. Half the time I drill in Texas I have to bushwhack through three miles of mesquite.”
“We ought to just drill near the Humble fields.”
“That is a good idea,” he said, “except they have been tapping them for twenty-five years. And if we find something they will just have incentive to get those wells reworked, and take even more oil, and your uncle will be mad at me.”
“So we’re just going to start drilling in the middle of nowhere?”
“You know how you are with horses?”
“Yes.”
“I am that way with oil.”
“So you have convinced my uncle.”
He grinned. “We’ll get a shot truck in here and narrow things down.”
“I suppose that will be expensive.”
“It will be a lot less than a dry hole.”
S
HE SLEPT IN
her bedroom and he slept in his. She did not want him to get the wrong idea, though on the other hand she did. She left her door open, just a crack, just in case he came. Which of course was ridiculous. He didn’t even know where her room was and he was not going to come find it in the dark. “You are a slut,” she said out loud. Though of course it had been two years since any man had touched her. And compared to her mother, who was already having children by now . . .
She was awake most of the night. She saw herself marrying him, she saw him using her and throwing her away. She decided she didn’t care as long as he wasn’t rough. Then she was thinking about the glorious life of men—to go off and have whatever experiences you wanted, whenever you wanted to have them—meanwhile here she was, nearly twenty and still a virgin, her only prospect asleep on the other side of the house. He acted as if he liked her but then suppose he didn’t. It was too awful to contemplate. She looked out the window and waited for the sun to rise.
Diaries of Peter McCullough
J
UNE 22, 1917
I stood there with the door open, expecting her to draw a pistol, or rush with a knife, but she didn’t move. She was smaller than I remembered, her clothes ragged, sun-beaten, beyond worn, her skin leather over bone, scabs on her face where she had fallen or been struck. Her hands hung at her sides as if she did not have the energy to lift them.
I tried to recall her age, thirty-three or -four, except she would be older now . . . I remembered her as a pretty girl, small with dark eyes; she now looked her mother’s age. Her nose had been broken and it had set crooked.
“I came to see our house,” she said. “I was hoping to find my birth certificate.” She shrugged. “Of course they assume I’m not a citizen when I try to cross.”
I looked away from her. There was something troubling about her accent—she had spent four years at a women’s college—compared with the way she looked.
“You may have trouble finding it,” I said quietly, referring to the birth certificate.
“Yes, I saw.”
Still I could not look at her.
“I’m very hungry,” she said. “Unfortunately . . .”
Every time I tried to lift my eyes, they wouldn’t. It was quiet and I realized she was waiting for me to say something.
“I’ll try at the Reynoldses’,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Come in.”
S
HE HAS BEEN
living in Torreón for two years with a cousin, but the cousin was a Carrancista and the Villistas had come to his house and killed him, then beaten up María and the cousin’s wife, perhaps done worse. What money she had was long spent and she had been on the road for nearly a month. Finally she’d decided there was nothing else to do but come back here. She reminded me, several times, that she was an American citizen. I know that, I told her. Though of course she looks as Mexican as anyone else.
Was it polite to offer condolences for her family? Probably the opposite. I didn’t say anything. We stood in the kitchen as I heated beans and carne asada, some tortillas Consuela had made, my hands shaking. I could feel her eyes on my back. The beans began to burn and finally she pushed me aside. I smiled at her, I didn’t usually do this sort of thing, but she didn’t smile back. As the beans were stewing she cut some tomatoes and onions and a few peppers and mixed them together.
“If you will excuse me, I am quite hungry.”
“Of course. I have a few things to do upstairs.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off me, not touching the food until I’d left.
I
SAT IN
my study as if all the life had been sucked out of me . . . all the energy I’d once had, my years at university, smashed against the rocks of this place. I nearly picked up the phone to call the sheriff to come remove her, though what my reason would be, I couldn’t say. We had killed her family, burned her house, stolen her land . . . she ought to be calling the sheriff on us . . . she ought to have shown up at our door with a hundred men, rifles cocked.
I considered climbing out the window onto the roof of the gallery—it was only fifteen feet to the ground—I could drop to the grass and walk away, never to come back.
Or I could simply wait until someone, perhaps my father, more likely Niles Gilbert, would take her outside, walk her into the brush, snip the last frayed end. I see Pedro, the tear weeping from beneath Lourdes’s eye, I see Aná’s head tilted back, her mouth wide as if trying to scream even in death.
I decided I would tell her. I had done my best—perhaps she had been watching? I had stood between the two lines and the shooting had begun anyway. I went to the safe and counted out two thousand dollars and put it into my pocket. I would drive her to the hospital in Carrizo or wherever her birth had been registered, procure the necessary papers, and help her on her way, polite but firm; there was nothing for her here.
S
HE WAS TRIMMING
the skin off a mango.
“What are your plans,” I said, as gently as possible.
“Right now I am planning to eat this mango. With your permission, of course.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you remember the times we sat out on our portico?” She continued to peel the fruit. The knife slipped but she continued as if nothing had happened.
“Do you want a bandage?”
“No, thank you.” She put her thumb into her mouth.
I looked at the table, then around the room, at the patterns in the tin ceiling. Her shoulders were shaking; her head was down and I couldn’t see her face. But there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be taken the wrong way.
It was like that until I decided to put the dishes in the sink.
“Of course I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“It’s not inconvenient,” I told her.
“It was inconvenient to my cousin.”
“Do you have other family?”
“My brothers-in-law. I’m hoping they’re dead but they are the type to survive.”
Of course it was obvious what any normal person would do. We had provided a place to live for numerous of my father’s old friends, decrepit herders from another age, men who had no families, or who no longer had anything to say to their families; dozens of them had lived out their last days in our bunkhouse, taking their meals with the vaqueros, or with us, depending on how close they had been to my father. But this was a different matter. Or so it would be said.
“I live here alone,” I told her. “My father has his own house a little ways up the hill. My wife has left me; my remaining sons are in the army.”
“Is this your way of making a threat?” she said.
“It’s the opposite.”
“I imagined you might shoot me,” she said. “I imagine you still might.”
The sympathy began to go out of me. I continued to wash the dishes, though they were already clean. “Then why did you come?”
No answer.
“You’re welcome to stay the night. There are plenty of spare rooms on the second floor, just go up the stairs and turn left and pick one.”
She shrugged. She was sucking at the pit of the mango, the juice had run down her scabbed chin. She looked like she belonged on a stoop in Nuevo Laredo, the old combination of hopelessness and rage. I began to hope more than ever that she would turn me down, that a meal in the house of her enemy would be enough.
“Okay,” she said. “I will stay the night.”
J
UNE 23, 1917
My bedroom did not feel secure so I lay back down in my office, door locked. I loaded, unloaded, then reloaded my pistol. I listened for her footsteps in the hall, though the runner was thick and I knew I would likely hear nothing.
Around midnight I unloaded the pistol a second time. Of course I am no different from the others, the same dark urges inside me. I was not afraid of her physically. It was something much worse.
A
ROUND FIRST LIGHT,
I drifted off. Then the sun was coming in; I rolled over and fell back asleep. In the distance was a sound I had not heard in a long time; when I realized what it was I woke up immediately and got dressed.
Downstairs, Consuela was standing at the entrance to the parlor, watching. She saw me and walked away as if I had caught her at something.
María was sitting at the bench, playing the piano. She must have heard my footsteps because her back went straight and she missed a few notes, then continued playing. Her hair was down around her shoulders, exposing her neck; I could make out the vertebrae easily. What she was playing, I didn’t know. Something old. German or Russian. I stood a few paces behind her; she continued to play without turning. Finally I went to the kitchen.
Consuela looked at me. “Should I prepare breakfast for her?”
I nodded. “Is there coffee?”
“In the pot.
Frío
.”
I poured a cup anyway.
Consuela busied herself chopping nopales, tossing them into the pan with butter.
“Does your father know?”
“He will soon enough.”
“Am I to treat her as a guest or . . . ?”
“Of course,” I said.
I wondered how well she had known the Garcias. But of course the Garcias were wealthy and Consuela is a servant. The sun had been up two hours and was filling the house, the warm air coming through the windows. I was four hours late for work. I went to the icebox and pulled out a few chunks of cabrito, then wrapped them in a cloth with a tortilla.
“Let me heat that,” she said.
“I better go,” I said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Should I watch her?”
“No,” I said. “Just give her whatever she wants.”
I
DIDN’T GET
home until well after dark, when I knew Consuela would have gone back to her house. I could smell that someone had been cooking, but the plates had all been cleaned and put away. María was at the table, reading a book.
The Virginian,
by Wister.
“Do you like this one?” she said.
“It’s not bad.”
“The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing.”
We sat there with nothing to say. Finally I decided to bring it up.
“Everything happened pretty fast that morning.”
She went back to the book.
“I think it’s best we talk about it.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “You want to be forgiven.”
The night air was blowing through the house. There was a screech owl outside and the windmill, and, in the distance, the sound of my father’s drilling rig. I sat and listened.
“I’ll leave in the morning. I’m sorry I came.”
I felt myself relax. “All right,” I said.
L
AY AWAKE SEVERAL
hours. Am courting disaster, some cataclysm I cannot imagine; I feel it as the old man knows rain is coming. I want only for her to disappear . . . the thought itself relaxes me. All my noble thoughts vanish—when kindness is truly needed it is scarce as the milk of queens. It seems that any moment a company of
sediciosos
might kick down the door, carry me off to the nearest adobe wall . . .
But that was not what I was really afraid of. I had a memory of Pedro and I sitting on his portico. Aná came out and brought us sweet tea, but when Pedro drank, the tea ran down his shirt and onto his lap; there was a hole under his chin I had not noticed. Then I was standing with my father and Phineas, on one side a deep green pasture, the smell of huisache, the shrubs all around us dotted with gold. In front of us an old elm tree . . . a man on a horse, a rope slack around his neck, people expecting something of me; I could not do it, though it was a simple enough action. Finally Phineas slapped the horse across the hams and the man slid off the back, twisting and kicking, his legs searching for purchase, but there was only air . . .
Humiliation of failure, jealousy of Phineas. And yet I knew I could not have done it, no matter how many chances they might have given me. They were trying to harden me; all wasted effort.
I opened my eyes. I was cold. The wind was blowing through the house, two or three
A.M.
, the windmills creaking, coyotes yipping. I thought of a fawn running in panicked circles, then went to the window and stood looking, there was enough moonlight to see far out over our pastures, ten miles at least. Nothing in sight that did not belong to us.