Fragile Beasts (7 page)

I don’t have to go far before I see Shelby walking toward me coming from the barn.

She’s changed her clothes since we talked this morning. She’s wearing a flannel shirt that’s threadbare enough and large enough that it could belong to Jerry. Her jeans are baggy and torn at the knees. She’s wearing a pair of black work boots, caked in mud, with the yellow laces untied. Her lovely auburn hair, so like my mother’s, is pulled back in a ponytail and covered with a dusty blue ball cap.

She’s staring glumly at the ground, kicking at stones and watching them skitter away from her oversized boots.

She’s a capricious girl: sweet and appeasing one moment; stubborn and cocksure the next. It would be easy to label her as moody or emotional, but I’ve observed her around others and she’s entirely in control of herself. Of the three sisters, she is my favorite. However, all three of them are dangerously volatile when pushed out of their roles. That whole family is entirely too thin-skinned and excitable. Spending a day with them, I feel like I’m surrounded by little yappy lap dogs with expensive clothes and good haircuts.

I wonder if Shelby’s outfit was put together for my benefit. She knows I don’t approve of girls dressing sloppily or masquerading as boys.

She’d be an absolute picture on a day like today wearing a sundress and sandals and a shawl. What a shame.

She looks up, catches my eye, and pulls her cap lower.

“A pretty young girl like you should not dress like a hobo,” I tell her sternly.

“Hobo?” she wonders.

“Yes, hobo,” I repeat impatiently. “Tramp, bum, derelict, vagrant, vagabundo. What is the politically correct term these days: housing challenged?”

“That’s not funny, Aunt Candace.”

“Shelby, I think you owe me an apology.”

“For what?”

“For saying that I never did anything nice for anyone.”

She drops her head and begins kicking at the whitewashed gravel again.

“You know what I meant.”

“No, I don’t know what you meant other than what you said.”

She sighs.

“I just meant that you have
so
much. You have this huge house and all this land and so much money, and there’s only you. Don’t you ever feel like sharing it? And I don’t mean sharing it with charities and foundations. That’s being nice, too, but I mean sharing it with someone you love.”

“But I don’t love these boys. I don’t even know them.”

“Then would you at least meet them?” she asks, a smile lighting up a face so full of innocent benevolence that I can’t help but wonder at its true intent.

“No, I most certainly will not meet them.”

The smile is gone.

“See, that’s what I mean. You won’t even consider it. Why not?”

“Shelby, this is ridiculous. It can’t happen. You have to understand. Even if I wanted to do it—which I absolutely do
not
—old women can’t walk around picking up teenage boys off the streets and installing them in their guest bedrooms.”

“You can do whatever you want. You’re Candace Jack.”

“Shelby, please. You sound like your father when you talk that way.”

“Dad says I sound like Grandfather when I talk that way.”

“It’s true that my brother might have said the same thing, but he would
have meant that I can accomplish whatever I want because of who I am. He wouldn’t have been implying that just because I’m wealthy and respected …”

“And feared,” she says under her breath.

“… I’m exempt from following the same moral guidelines that everyone else does.”

“Dad says that’s one of the perks of wealth.”

“Yes.” I rub my temples. One of my instantaneous Cameron headaches has arrived. “I’m sure he does say that. Legally, I simply couldn’t do it.”

“I see what you mean. You’d have to get permission from their mother.”

The smile returns, and she rushes to my side and takes my hand.

“I have a better idea. Instead of meeting them, meet their mother.”

I shake my head at her.

“Come with me,” I tell her. “Let’s take a walk.”

We start down the drive toward the road. She keeps her hand in mine and begins to swing it the way she used to as a little girl when we’d take these same walks together, and for a moment my eyes sting with tears that I don’t want or understand.

I’ve been entirely too emotional lately, and I fear it’s one more uncontrollable, annoying aspect of aging.

“You don’t understand about their mother,” she goes on. “She’s awful. She’s …”

“She can’t be that bad.”

“She is!”

“I know that she left their father for another man and left the boys with him, but you don’t know the circumstances.”

“It’s not just that.” She shakes her head vehemently. “I knew her before she left. And I just saw her again at the funeral.”

“What exactly did she do that was so terrible? Did she beat them? Did she fail to feed them or get them their booster shots? Is she an alcoholic?”

“I don’t really know about any of that. I don’t think so. She’s just mean and selfish.”

I laugh.

“You’ve just described the majority of the human race.”

“No.” She continues shaking her head. “I wish I could make you understand.”

She looks up at me and pleads with her dark eyes.

“You’re the only one who could put her in her place.”

“Don’t try manipulating me.”

“Okay,” she says with a pout, “it’s just hard to see someone you like have a bad mother. Especially when you have a good mother.”

I think about Rae Ann, pretty, vacuous, annoying, affected, misguided, overindulged Rae Ann. She has her flaws. She has many flaws, but neglecting her children is not one of them.

“You understand what I’m saying, right?” Shelby asks. “You had a good mother, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What was Great-Grandma like?”

Her question catches me off guard. I don’t think she or her sisters have ever asked me about either of my parents. Cameron used to ask me about them when he was a child because his own father would never talk about them.

“You know she died when I was young. Not quite as old as you are now.”

She nods solemnly.

“That must have been the worst thing in the world.”

“It was.”

I pause for a moment to gather my thoughts.

My mother has long ceased being a person whom I can describe to others. I can’t remember the sound of her voice or the smell of her skin or even any of her physical characteristics other than a pink scar on her hand I used to trace with my finger when she would hold me on her lap and rock me to sleep and the long hair she used to unpin from the top of her head every night before bed and I’d watch pour down to her waist like a copper waterfall.

She represents a certain time to me, a time when my life was filled with hardship and hunger, yet it was somehow more peaceful and enjoyable than any life I’ve known since, a time when I felt safe and could still hope.

“We were very poor,” I tell Shelby. “What I remember most about her was that she was always working and she was always tired.”

“But you knew she loved you?”

“Yes, I knew she loved me.”

We walk on in silence for a while. I scan the green hillsides looking for
Ventisco even though I know my search will be in vain. We won’t see him near the house. He’s a wild thing living among tamed people. He stays away not out of fear or even dislike but simply because he has no use for us.

“Do you like this boy?” I decide to ask her.

“We’re friends. That’s all,” she answers, but I detect a slight blush to her cheeks.

“Do you like the other one?”

The blush deepens.

“I like both of them.”

She stops suddenly and looks me directly in the eyes. Hers are genuinely pleading.

“Aunt Candace, I can’t explain it to you. It’s just that … I know if they go live with her, she’s going to destroy them.”

I’m listening to her and watching her face, when something beyond her in the field catches my attention.

A heavy black shadow emerges from the tree line, tosses its head several times, then bounds forward at a slow, rollicking gait.

“Look,” I whisper to her.

She follows my line of vision and turns around at the fence to face the hills sloping upward and away from us.

“I see him,” she says excitedly.

The bull, silvered by the sunlight, raises his head as if he heard her. He stands perfectly still, a magnificent broad-shouldered ebony creature who obeys nothing but his own will.

“He’s beautiful,” she breathes.

He is so reminiscent of Calladito I can’t help but recall the first time Manuel pointed him out to me at Carmen del Pozo’s finca. “Éste es para mí, y yo para él,” he said.
That one is for me, and I’m for him
.

In his heavy, muscled body was such a concentration of unthinking power that the only word that came to my mind was “beast.” Here was the beast of all beasts. What creature could possibly threaten him? I imagined it would be easier for a man to chip away at a wall of coal with a toothpick than to try and conquer this dense, black mass with only grace and a cape.

I had seen bulls in America, but Calladito was my first exposure to El Toro.

“How long will he pose like that?”

“He’s not posing. He’s seen us and he’s deciding if he’s going to charge or not.”

As if on cue, he takes a step backward, lowers his head to show us his horns, and paws the ground several times.

Shelby grabs my arm and pulls us back from the fence.

“Oh my God,” she gasps.

I can feel her heart beating in her hands.

“Don’t move. If you don’t move, he can’t see you. We’re far enough away that we must be a blur to him.”

“Could he break through the fence?”

“It’s possible.”

He decides not to charge. He snorts a warning in our direction, then walks back into the trees, taking his time, slowly bobbing his majestic head from side to side like a king acknowledging his subjects.

“That was intense,” Shelby says.

She loosens her grip on my arm and while I watch her begin to calm down it strikes me that although fear and love can be faked like any other emotion, they are the only two, when genuinely felt, that can’t be hidden.

M
y brother grew up poor and determined while his son grew up rich and useless.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon many times, and I’ve never quite understood how these dynamic, driven, visionary self-made men can fail so miserably and consistently at raising their children.

I think a large part of the problem comes from the fact that they’re torn between the values that made them capable of becoming successful and the values they’ve embraced since their success. They preach one set and act out the other set, and as everyone knows actions speak louder than words, especially when the words are critical and the actions are a never-ending stream of undeserved rewards.

Any sensible person would realize a man can’t expound upon the ethics of hard work and the necessity of making his own way in the world and then buy his son an extravagant sports car when he turns sixteen and expect the boy to care at all about making his own way. He can’t preach about moral decency and honesty and then when his son comes to him because he forced himself sexually on the underaged daughter of one of his father’s coal miners the father responds by giving the miner a great deal of hush money. Months later when evidence of the boy’s crime is gone, the father lays off the miner and blackballs him so he and his family are forced to move away. He can’t stress the importance of education, then allow his son to spend his college years drinking and whoring and barely maintaining a C average. He can’t lecture about the need to understand the world community and then lead his son to believe that a spring break spent in the Bahamas and a cruise ship stop in Cozumel constitutes “going abroad.”

But probably the most insurmountable difference between these generations is that the principle that drove the fathers the most is completely absent from their children’s lives: survival of the fittest.

My brother wasn’t a saint. He made his money on the backs of other men and was indirectly responsible for many of their deaths and directly responsible for two in particular. Yet he worked harder than any man I’ve ever known, took care of his family, and gave generously to his community.

Can killers have ethics? I believe so, just as I believe a mother—a giver of life—can have ice in her veins.

I understand that Cameron was not brought up well and that all his faults are not of his own making, but there comes a point when a boy must take on the responsibilities of manhood, and the first one he must tackle is choosing what kind of man he will become.

Cameron chose wrongly.

I’ve been blessed by his presence this evening. He and Rae Ann have just arrived.

I’m not happy about this. I suspect Shelby had a hand in it, but I’m not sure why she would want them here.

She claims this was her mother’s idea, that she suddenly realized coming to my house this evening would be a convenient opportunity for her to see Shelby, who attends a private boarding school that is a ninety-minute drive west from her parents’ home and a twenty-minute drive northeast from my own. Rae Ann has calculated that by coming here to see her daughter she will save herself some time; exactly how much she’s not sure. The inability to do the math sounds like Rae Ann, but paying an impromptu, nonobligatory visit to me does not.

Yet here they are, the two of them emerging from Cameron’s big black Cadillac.

Shelby’s sisters are away at their respective colleges.

The oldest, Skylar, is a self-absorbed, stunning blonde with the vulgar vocabulary of a cranky pop star.

Starr is the middle daughter, the troublemaker, the car crasher, the marijuana smoker, the caught-naked-with-a-boy-in-her-parents’-bed-all-before-the-age-of-seventeen daughter. She shares her father’s tendency to pick fights and Rae Ann and Skylar’s fair coloring but not their shiny glamour. She’s the final member of the blond trifecta: mother, daughter, and holy terror.

“Hi, Aunt Candy,” Rae Ann calls out, waving wildly with one hand and clutching her hideous Chihuahua with the other.