The Fetterman Massacre...

The farm—all two hundred acres of prime cotton land from the time when that much could support the self-delusion of “squire”—is still there. It seems suspended in time and desert quiet (as was once all of southern Texas), remote, where during planting season, a static plume of listless dust follows a lone tractor as it plows and sows into what once yielded, and still only reluctantly will yield little more than huisáche and mesquite. Water has to be piped in from the Rio Grande thirty miles away to soften this hard land into giving up something other than catclaw and quelíte. J.D. Fetterman bought it from a failed rancher as a parcel, out of which came out the bits and pieces that J.D. sold and gave away, and which became Curry, three churches, and the Curry graveyard. The fields, bordered by deep-rooted woods on the east, and distance and the loneliness of Echo to the north, zig-zag their way west around the upper edges of Curry. From their center, you can almost read the burg’s history like the strata on cliff rock laid bare by wind and sand.

A month after J.D. moved his family—his wife Consuélo, two boys and two girls—into the new colonial (revived) home, he buried them in the Curry cemetery, all dead of cholera after a week’s visit to Consuelo’s relatives in Matamóros.They were buried in a plot fifty yards away from the space where Wilhelmíno Cruz’s mother, his only brother, his two oldest and one younger son, along with a stillborn baby girl and a baby boy were already buried. J.D. had a place reserved for himself beside his beloved wife. Will didn’t need a reservation, since at the time, his family were the only Mexicans buried in the Curry cemetery in a space demarcated by two wide roads: one used for maintence vehicles and the other for the hearse. Other Mexicans, with overweening pride, had themselves carted off, or were carted off, to the graveyard at Las Múlas, where schoolboys with shotguns and .22s weren’t allowed to mistake Mexican headstones for rabbits, or the townspeople to bury their horses and their dogs, when they buried them at all.

Will, his three oldest sons and his brother Omár, cleared the land with mule and harness for J.D. They started shortly after the turn of the century and had half of it done by the start of the first war. At the end of it, J.D. was rich from the war’s demand for cotton and living alone in his mansion; and Will had one less son who would never come home from France. The rest of his family died off at a rate no less than expected for Mexicans with their congenitally weak lungs, and an intrinsic rate of inability to rise above their station.

Will himself thought that except for a Mexican’s share of bad luck, he had it good. He had built the house he was living in, not much bigger than the shacks he had built for the rest of the hired help but with tar paper over the plank walls. He raised his own vegetables, livestock for meat and pork, and chickens. His wife and daughters helped feed the help, both seasonal and permanent, for a few pennies

One of the men, a fellow named Daniél Fernández, lived with his wife in one of the shacks, but when his wife, who helped in the housekeeping for J.D., started having children, they moved to a good house inside Curry. After Daniel’s third child was born, he was made foreman, a position that most had conceded to Will, but which he had never been formally installed with. Sometime after the birth of Daniel’s fourth child, J.D. became very ill and moved back east with a sister, and Daniel moved his family into the Fetterman estate.

J.D. didn’t survive to see the end of the second war. Nether did two of Will’s boys. One never made it out of the South Pacific, nor the other out of Italy.

A week after J.D.’s burial at the Curry cemetery, Daniel billed Will for rent. One hour after that, Will began moving his family into a cheap house on the outskirts of Curry that had once housed the appurtenances of maintenance for the Southern Pacific. The last birth in relation to the life of Will Cruz on Fetterman land was a kid, which Will delivered himself and carried in his arms into Curry with the dam walking beside him.

In later years some men accused Will of spite and envy for refusing to help Daniel out before he slid the business toward bankruptcy. Some even hinted at Will’s ingratitude towards J.D. for letting J.D.’s family down. They thought that Daniel had been running the business for the sister back east who didn’t know anymore about farming than Daniel did, and maybe even that the blue-eyed fair-haired traits of Daniel’s children which had drawn sly snickers through the years were just ironically coincidental with J.D.’s own. J.D.’s sister died a week before the farm went into receivership, and the last of J.D.’s fortune and hers were divided among the five Fernandez boys in trust with Daniel’s wife. It was enough to keep them until one of them grew up and developed the skills to run the farm.

Will would only say, “Pride is as useful as your eyes and ears are.”

One day he began work on a wooden frame five feet from the shack his family was living in. It was after the war, and by then the four girls were working as housekeepers throughout Curry, and his sons were pumping gas, and working in the fields just as he was. It’s hard to tell what he ran out of first: money, strength, or desire. He managed to get tar paper around the front and both sides of the house that had begun to take shape. The back could wait on another generation.

He said, “It is good to be first in some things. I will haunt this house before anybody else will,” and one hour after he had hammered in the last nail, he went inside his own house and laid down and died.

Noe.