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Meyer is just as unsparing as he describes a white lynch mob in 1915, descending on a Mexican-owned ranch neighboring the McCullough land, murdering the extended family for the sin of horse thievery, though the actual thieves were not in the vicinity. The incident recalled the words of a Comanche chief, 66 years before, telling Eli how the land has been always been ripped from one group by another. “Of course, we are not stupid, the land did not always belong to the Comanche. Many years ago it was Tonkawa land, but we liked it, so we killed the Tonkawa and took it from them . . . And now they try to kill us whenever they see us. But the whites do not think this way — they prefer to forget that everything they want already belongs to someone else.”
The frontier code suits Eli. But the despairing Peter, in love with a Mexican woman, can hardly abide the savage theft that has so enriched his family. Conscience did not suit the Texas borderland.
As the novel turns to 2012, Jeanne Anne lies dying, collapsed on the floor in her great ranch house, contemplating how the ruthless sensibilities she inherited from Eli have left her wealthy, successful but estranged from her children, with few emotional connections in the place Texas has become.
Meyer writes with such considerable scope, and so well, about the awful events that allowed the United States to wrest that land from the Mexicans and the Indians. “In the distance I could see the Nueces and the green river flats all around, the sun continuing to rise, catching in the pall of dust, the air around the casa mayor turning a brilliant yellow-orange as if some miracle were about to occur, a descent of angels, or perhaps the opposite, a kind of eruption, the ascent of some ancient fire that would wipe us all from the earth.”
Those beautiful words described the aftermath of a massacre.
Fred Grimm is a Miami Herald columnist.
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