Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“McFey knew all about that. He was a guard in Eastham Pen.”

“Why didn’t you say so, Satchel Ass? String the phone out here and bring me my address book.”

“Would you not call me that awful name?”

“I’ll think about it.”

I went inside the house and brought out the telephone on a long cord. I also brought him the black notebook by which he kept in contact with his shrinking army of old friends. Then I went out in the vegetable garden and began hoeing weeds out of the rows, the sun melting inside its own heat on the earth’s rim. When I went back on the porch, Grandfather was wearing his spectacles, looking at the piece of notepaper he had written on and torn from his book.

“One friend of mine knew McFey at Eastham,” he said. “He says McFey was a harsh shepherd and made life as miserable as possible for Clyde Barrow. Barrow may have been raped at Eastham. Maybe repeatedly. A former Ranger told me McFey went to work for the Coronado Oil Company.”

“Coronado is owned by the Wiseheart family,” I said.

“Well, McFey got himself fired for padding his expense account.”

“How long ago?”

“Two or three years back.”

“That coincides with what Roy Wiseheart told me.”

“According to my friend, McFey was always bragging on his access to rich people.” Grandfather looked again at the page he had torn from his notebook. “He did chores for Clara Wiseheart. That’s Roy Wiseheart’s wife, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said, feeling my face constrict. “What kind of chores?”

“That’s what I asked. Know what my friend said? ‘When you work for somebody whose family owns a quarter of a billion dollars, you do whatever they tell you.’”

“That’s what the Wisehearts are worth?” I said.

“You got it wrong. Her family is the one with the big money. Roy Wiseheart married up.”

I sat down on the steps. It had been a wet summer, and the pastures and the low-lying hills were still green. The last of the sunlight was glinting like a red diamond at the bottom of the sky, and hundreds of Angus were silhouetted in its afterglow. Grandfather maintained that our land had been soaked in blood, first by Indians, then by Spaniards, then by Mexicans and white colonists, then by Rangers who virtually exterminated the Indian population after Texas gained its independence in 1836. I picked up a piece of dried mud from the step and tossed it out on the flagstones. “Blood and excrement,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s our contribution to the earth.”

Grandfather removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “You feel your friend Wiseheart took you on a snipe hunt?”

“That’s close.”

“It doesn’t change what you are. The shame is on him. Those people aren’t worth spitting on, Weldon. The Hollands are better than that bunch any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I’ll tell you something else, too. Since you were a little boy, I knew you’d be the one to shine.”

I went into the house and got a carton of peach ice cream that Rosita had brought home that afternoon. I brought out two bowls a

nd two spoons, and Grandfather and I ate the entire carton, down to the bottom, under the porch light, while stars fell from the sky.

LINDA GAIL PINE had hand-dropped invitations to her lawn party through the mail slots of her neighbors’ homes, up one side of the street and down the other. Many of the neighbors were people she had never met. For these, she had written a special note at the bottom: “Let’s not be strangers.” To some, in order to vary her language, she wrote an extra note: “We’ve heard so many good things about you. Bring children if you like.”

She rented lawn furniture and strung bunting from the eaves of her house to the overhang of live oaks that grew in the neighbor’s yard. She hired a catering service and set up a bar under the gas lamp by the back fence and made sure the two bartenders arrived wearing white jackets and red bow ties and razor-creased black trousers, because that was what the bartenders had been wearing at a garden party she attended in the Hollywood Hills.

That morning she and Hershel had received a letter from River Oaks Country Club, telling them their application for membership had been rejected. She dropped the letter in front of him on the dining room table. “What did you put on the application form?” she asked.

“Our income for last year. That’s what they seemed most interested in. I guess it wasn’t enough.”

“What about all the equipment you have? What about the oil well you just brought in? That’s not enough?”

“They’re snobs, hon. We’re working people.”