I told her I did not want her around, now or ever, that I would sooner lie with a rotting corpse.
“You were with the girl a month,” she told me. “It is time to grow up.”
“That is the only month I have ever been happy.”
“Well what about the boys?” she said.
“The boys do not respect me. You have taught them that. You and my father.”
She smashed the glasses and stood leaning in the doorway, as María used to do. After she left I looked at the jagged wineglass and wondered what it would be like to push it into her neck. Then I was nearly sick. Follow your footprints long enough and they will turn into those of a beast.
I think about María. I tell myself she was a luxury, like fruit out of season, lucky to have but temporary.
A
UGUST 19, 1917
They have buried me alive.
Eli McCullough
1865–1867
T
he best of the Texans were dead or had left the state and the ones who’d run things before the war came back. The cotton men wept about paying their slaves, but they kept their land and their Thoroughbreds and their big houses. There is more romance roping beefs than chopping cotton, but our state’s reputation as a cattle kingdom is overboiled. Beef was always a poor cousin to the woolly plant and it was not until thirty years after Spindletop that even oil knocked King Cotton from his throne.
I moved back in with the judge but I could barely stand to be in town, with the better classes strutting around in carriages and the errant freedman or Unionist to be cut down from the trees every morning. It was more and more like the Old States, some neighbor’s nose in all your business, who did you vote for and which was your church, and I considered buying a parcel along the caprock, where the frontier was still open, though the judge was dead set against it. I pointed out the Comanches were on their heels; it was just a matter of time. And we did not have to move there; I could simply buy it. But the judge reckoned the temptation would be too much, and he was likely correct, as I often sat on his smoking porch wondering about N
uu
karu and Escuté and if I ought to ride out and find them. Likely they were already in the Misty Beyond, but had it not been for Everett I would have left Madeline all my money and lit off to find out.
It was an idle period. I put on a bloom and my pants got small and I developed a taste for nose paint I never shook. The judge encouraged me to find a regular job but I had money in the bank and I was determined to make it work for me—as it did for the better classes. I tried to buy back my father’s headright, which was now well settled, but it had already been split into four parcels and the new owners wouldn’t sell and all my other plans fizzled. My best days were behind me, that was plain.
Meanwhile, the judge thought the opposite. He had moved to Texas to watch it settle up, and now that he’d gotten his wish, he was planning a run for Senate. It was touchy business as Custer’s troops were occupying the capital and no one knew what would happen when they left. The judge rolled the dice and announced on the Republican ticket, which his friends had counseled him against, though he would not hear them. He thought times were changing. A few weeks later he was found shot by the river.
Whatever had been left in me after Toshaway was buried along with the old ram. I refuted my kinship with other men. If anyone knew who did it, they were not saying, and I began to plot a campaign of murder among the Roberts, Runnels, and Wauls, felt the old holy fire begin to spark, but Madeline detected my plan and her words got the better of my judgment. The big house was sold and we moved to the farm at Georgetown. The slaves were now called servants and they worked on shares.
Madeline’s mother and sister felt content to lie around crying about the judge, but so far as they were concerned my job was to sit on a pot-gutted horse watching the freedmen as they trudged up and down the rows of cotton. The days of high living were over; we survived on venison, side meat, and the holy trinity. But I was not content to see the great house fall. And I was not cut out to be an overseer. And the Comanche in me held grubbing in the dirt to be lower than hauling slops. And I wanted to make my money work.
For twenty-eight cents an acre I picked up sections in LaSalle and Dimmit Counties. I considered parcels on the coast but the Kings and Kenedys had already driven up the prices, and the Nueces Strip was rich, well watered, and so cheap I could acquire a proper acreocracy. There were bandits and renegades but I had never minded packing my gun loose, and in that part of the state a man with a rope could still catch as many wild cattle as he wanted, which sold for forty dollars a head if you could get them north. It was not panning for gold, but it was close, and I rode out to save the family’s good name.
T
HERE WERE FORTY-EIGHT
souls in the entire county, the nearest being an old Mexican named Arturo Garcia. He had once owned most of the surrounding country but was down to two hundred sections, and the same day I met him he tried to outbid me on a four-section parcel that linked all my other pastures. My ranch was useless without it. I went to the commissioners’ office and offered forty cents an acre, a gross overpayment, which they accepted.
“Happy to have you in the area,” said the commissioner.
“Happy to be here.”
“We are trying to move folks like Garcia out, if you know what I mean.”
I looked at him. I was thinking I could have bid less for the land but he mistook my meaning.
“Not just because he’s Mexican. My wife is Mexican, in fact. I mean because he associates with known thieves.”
“That is interesting knowledge.”
“I’m guessin’ you got a gun?”
“ ’Course I do.”
“Well, I wouldn’t stray too far from it.”
I would like to say otherwise, but this only convinced me I had come to the right place.
J.A. McCullough
O
nce again she was a fool, they all knew it, even Milton Bryce. Domestic oil was a dead end, you lost money on every barrel you pumped. But she had a feeling. That was what she told them. Then she put it out of her mind. It was the biggest bet of her life and she was at peace.
She was happy with Ted, she was happy with her children, they were all doing well, even Susan and Thomas. Ben had finished at the top of his class and gone off to A&M. He did not care much for sports but he was conspicuously bright, interested in others, a good listener, the opposite of his siblings, who seemed to believe they had some special arrangement with fate (Susan) or were barely aware of anything outside themselves at all (Thomas). Susan had survived a single semester at Oberlin before moving to California; she would be unreachable for months and then the phone would ring at three
A.M.
and there she was, asking for some outrageous sum of money. Though she seemed happy. Jeannie would agree to the sum and Susan would tell of her adventures. As for Thomas, the oldest, he continued to live in her house. She was happier about this than she liked to admit, she knew she ought to push him out, but—his eccentricity—it seemed better for him to be close to home. There was the example of Phineas, but Thomas was not him.
Thomas was content to live with his mother and she was content to have him, he had a car, a large allowance, trips with his friends. He’d been a gorgeous child and it had ruined him; even now he expected to be the center of things. A man in love with his own face, that was how Ted put it, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him, he really did look like a young Peter O’Toole, the fact of which he was enormously proud, so much so that she was often tempted to point out that Peter O’Toole did not live with his mother.
As for his eccentricity, he hid it so well that she sometimes wondered if she were mistaken, though other times she was certain, and scared, and waiting for him to be caught in public. In truth, there was not much to be worried about. Everyone knew Tom McCullough, and Texans were good at ignoring things they didn’t want to see, it was a leftover from the frontier days when you couldn’t choose your neighbors.
Yes, her children were happy. It was a real pack, even Susan. These were good years. And perhaps because of this she continued to unwind her properties, to undiversify, she sold the steel company and the insurance company she had bought with Hank, most of the real estate, she plowed it all into oil, domestic acreage, which everyone was happy to sell her. It happened so easily she sometimes wondered if she was walking into her own suicide—financial suicide, at least—which would leave her family greatly diminished.
She wondered if it was the same liberated feeling that allowed her father to blow his inheritance on the ranch. Though her father was an actual fool. This was something else. She had gone touring around the Middle East with Cass Rutherford and while he found nothing amiss, in fact he thought things were getting better—the infrastructure, the competence of their drillers and geologists—she found the whole thing disturbing. Twenty years earlier, it had been men on camels. Now it was housing blocks, trash everywhere, people staring you down on every street corner. That was the problem with television—everyone saw what you were taking—what these Arabs saw was rich foreigners buying up their oil at ten cents on the dollar. By the end of the trip, she felt so corrupt and depressed that she’d considered getting out of the business altogether.
After a few weeks at home she came to her senses, but the uneasy feeling remained. Something was going to happen and the overthrow of Mosaddegh was a miracle unlikely to ever be repeated. And so she had begun to look at domestic acreage. She was a fool, though later they would call it women’s intuition, though it was not, it was just a question of seeing what was actually in front of you, instead of what you wanted to see.
Oil went nowhere. Then Bunker Hunt bet big in Libya and got massacred and the Egyptians went into Israel and the embargo hit. The boom had lasted ten years. And still this dissatisfaction. She had won her bet but they would not recognize her.
They
being
. . .
she was not sure. The world? Her dead father and brothers and husband?
You expect a medal,
she thought. And she did. It was not entirely unreasonable, some notice from the other operators, a bit of recognition, a mention of her alongside the Richardsons and Basses and Murchisons, the Hunts. She was certain—ragingly certain—that if Hank had pulled off what she had, his name would have been included. Maybe she had a victim complex. That’s what they wanted her to think.
She focused on her home life, maybe for the first time ever. Here was her medal: a happy house, happy children. Ben and Thomas and all their friends, who, like them, had gotten exceptions from the draft. They made her house their own, drinking and swimming at all hours, it was like being an older sister, young people drunk in the kitchen, drunk in the yard, they would tell her their problems.
T
HEN, QUICK AS
that, as if a single twig had been holding it all up, it was over. Ben was down at the ranch; his truck went into a bar ditch. Milton Bryce had gone with her to see him—he did not look himself, she was not sure how, he had only a single black eye—they had parted his hair wrong—she walked out of the room and they had handed her something sweet—a Coke?—and then she was thinking of her brothers and then she remembered nothing.
They had buried him and then nothing more was expected, she had sat down in the old familiar house and everything became gauzy and unreachable. She had allowed, in some far corner of her mind, that something might happen to Thomas or Susan—their judgment was terrible, the risks—but Ben had been the linchpin, the steady soul. And if he . . . she had a feeling she would lose them all. She had failed in some fundamental way. They had been right about her all along.
Thomas also seemed to sense this, to sense that his brother’s death was her fault, that there was some power she had failed to exert, over the driving habits of young men, or the sharp curve in the road, or the bar ditch that flipped the truck. One day he went out and never came back. Susan called to say that he’d arrived in California; he’d driven all night. Gone forever, as it turned out. She sold the house in River Oaks and moved in with Ted.
She could admit it was different from losing her husband. She knew she would survive, she knew she would recover,
do not take this as a lesson,
Jonas told her, but she did, she had expected too much, and if it was not a lesson, then what was the point?
E
VEN IF
G
OD
existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.
She was bitter, Ben had changed her, first for the better and then for the worse, she was furious and defeated, when she was not too low she assembled a vast dissertation, praise from various figures, approval from the Colonel, success in business, the covers of magazines, her marriage and worthy lovers and her saving of the McCullough name, it buoyed her for a time, it held her above the darkness, but always, always, she plunged. None of it mattered.
The boom continued.
Time
magazine came around again: now she was the woman who’d predicted the embargo. Incidentally, was she a feminist? No? Back on the cover she went, not entirely defeated, though it was not the same, not the same. A publisher approached her about a memoir, something inspirational for other people, women, they meant, your life story, the way you think and solve problems, something for the young to take inspiration from, though likely they meant housewives.