The Son

J.A. McCullough

Oil was what mattered. The Allies had burned seven billion barrels during the war; 90 percent of that had come from America, mostly from Texas. The Big Inch and Little Big Inch: they could not have invaded Normandy without them. The Allies had sailed to victory on a sea of Texas oil.

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.

By summer we knew that the Penateka, the largest and wealthiest of all the Comanche bands, had been mostly wiped out.

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.

I could not shake the feeling I’d stepped over some line over which I would never return, but maybe I’d crossed it years earlier, or maybe it had never existed. There was nothing you could take that did not belong to some other person. Whatever strings that held me had been cut.

realized I had come on the remains of some ancient tribe that had lived in towns or cities, a tribe so long extinct no one remembered they had ever lived.

By the end of summer, most Texans were certain that if slavery was abolished, the whole of the South would Africanize, no proper woman would be safe, amalgamation would be the order of the day. Though in the next breath they would tell you that the war had nothing to do with slavery. It was about human dignity, self-governance, freedom itself, the

“And this Sun Dance they all talk about?