Remember the Alamo
By Rain Carrington
Book One-Legacy
Copyright © 2019
All rights Reserved
Author-Rain Carrington
Edited by-Bradley Mathis
Cover Illustration by-Rain Carrington
Chapter One
“Get the pump goin’, and I’ll fetch the horse,” McCully Blaylock called to his ranch hand, Teddy.
The windmill was broken again, along with fifty other things he had to work on before the end of the week, and he didn’t have the time or enough help with any of it. That’s what happened when his father racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, then up and died before he let McCully in on the information.
“Boss, this ain’t gonna work. We need new innards, wiring, the wheel’s froze up tight. The only way I got it workin’ last time was a spit ‘n prayers.”
That was about what Mac thought, but if the animals couldn’t drink out in the pastures, he’d have to bring them all closer. Taking out his wallet, he handed his credit card to Teddy, sighing, “Go get one.”
“I’ll try over there at Casey’s place. He might have a used one.”
“Nah, just get a new pump, Teddy. We need to get this place fixed up to sell.”
Teddy’s brown eyes went wide as he swept his hat into his hand, showing his damp brown hair underneath. “Sell your daddy’s place, Mac? He said it’s been in the family since Texas belonged to the Mex’cans!”
It was true. His family had settled Texas a few years before the Mexican war. His ancestor had fought alongside Sam Houston. “There ain’t no way I can cover this debt, Teddy. No way.”
“Damn. That’s too bad, Mac. Damn shame fer sure.”
When he was gone, Mac rode in to the ranch office and sat back in the chair his father had used for thirty years, taking it from his father before him. It was a hard-backed wood chair, sitting behind the huge oak desk that was also as old as the ranch. The history in the office alone was overwhelming, so many of the pictures lining the walls were of their family, as far back as photographs went. Other pictures were cows and bulls, awards they’d won pinned or taped to the frames.
All around the office, his history was laid out like a museum. Yellowed cutouts from newspapers, touting their family’s ranch, their cattle, how they made it through the Depression while so many other ranches went under, or bought by corporations in later years.
The legacy was long, and somewhat dark. Mac’s brother, Wayne, he’d chronicled some of it, doing their genealogy and research for a college paper his third year at Texas A&M down in College Station. That’s where he’d started his college life, taking ranch management, like Mac had a few years before him. Wayne, however, had changed majors after writing the paper, deciding he’d wanted nothing to do with their family’s business. Two years later, he’d graduated with honors from the University of Houston in Engineering and never looked back to their hometown.
That was until that day, while Mac was busy sifting through the mess of papers in his father’s desk, he heard the familiar voice from the doorway. “I hope you’re planning to sell this place.”
Disowned by their father, Wayne hadn’t stepped foot on the property since he’d left seven years earlier. He’d married an African American he’d met at school, had three kids and was happier than Mac could imagine being. “Well, welcome home, brother.”
He got up from behind the desk and embraced his kid brother with a bearhug. Wayne had always been skinnier, shorter and smarter than him, fitting for the baby of the family. “Ouch, man, come on, you creep.”
After letting him go, he pulled back to see that Blaylock grin, so like his own, wide and reaching all the way to his blue eyes. “Creep? You’ve called me many things over the years. I think creep might be the nicest.”
“Yeah, Shan won’t let me cuss anymore. Not even when we’re not around the kids. She says I’ll get in the habit better if I don’t. So, instead of the dozens of foul things I could call you, that you’d deserve, you’re now officially a creep.”
He slapped his brother on the back and waved to the chair in the corner, a faded leather thing that took up too much of the small room. He sat on the desk while looking his brother over. “You got a gut on you now. Shan must not have lost her cookin’ skills.”
“You know she hasn’t, though she’s threatening to turn vegan on me. Says the crap in meat anymore is no good for us.”
“Vegan! You were raised on a cattle ranch!”
“Yeah, that’s what I told her, and she said that’s all the more reason. I can’t win an argument with that woman, Mac,” he said, laughing and his eyes brightening while talking about his wife.
“She’s a keeper, all right. How’s the kids?”
“Big, ornery, smart as can be. Cecil gets all As and has his first crush on a girl. Bette is pretty as a picture, and Casey, well, he’s getting so big, Shan says we need to start weaving our own cloth and sewing clothes for him. He’s growing out of everything so fast, we’ll go broke trying to keep him covered.”
It had been almost a year since he’d seen his nephews and niece, ten, seven and four respectively. Cecil, the oldest, looked just like Wayne, but the other two took after their mother, dark skin and all. That had been the biggest reason for the rift between Wayne and their father.
“I got the pictures Shan sent. Beauties, every one of ‘em.”
After his pride-filled smile started to fade, Mac knew why, as he followed Wayne’s glare, taking in the pictures on the walls. “Yeah, you’d do best to sell, big brother.”
“I don’t want to, but I have to.” Wayne knew nothing of the business being in the red, or anything about the business anymore. Their father had cut him from the will, leaving everything, including the debt, to McCully. Not that Wayne would have gotten the ranch, since the beginning, the Blaylock Ranch went to the eldest son. Still, Wayne wasn’t so much as mentioned.
“Don’t want to? Mac, this place is what’s kept you alone and fucking closeted for all these years, this place and our father! Sell this place, move out of this backwater town and live for once!”
The same argument he’d heard for a decade. Wayne figured, since he got out, married the woman he loved in spite of his father’s years of racist indoctrination, that it would be that easy for Mac to do it as well. It wasn’t.
Mac looked away from his brother’s reddening face, he caught the picture of the three of them, the only one left anywhere on the ranch with Wayne after the split between them.
“That there, when you were, what? Fifteen? We had some good times, Wayne. It wasn’t all bad. Daddy was…he was stuck in old ways, the way he was taught by his own folks. We were lucky we had Mama to ground us from all that hate Daddy spewed.”
“Lucky, yeah, Mac. Lucky and now we’re free.”
Free. Free of the old man’s grumbling, his snips and quips, his hurling of racial and homophobic slurs. “I ain’t free, Wayne. Maybe you are, but I’m stuck here, dealing with this, just like I was stuck dealing with him these last few years.”
Not that he was really angry at his brother. His father’s illness hadn’t been Wayne’s fault anymore than taking care of him had been Wayne’s problem. Daniel Blaylock burned bridges and never looked back, at least with family.
“It would have been kind of hard to care for the man when he banned me from the house.”
The scuffed floor of the room showed the years of boot marks from his father’s constant pacing. He’d never understood why before he’d spoken to Daniel’s lawyer three days after the funeral.
“Wayne, uh, he was broke.” Clearing his throat for the rest, he avoided his
brother’s stare as he finished, “Not just broke. He was in debt. I gotta sell.”
Not a word from Wayne. Instead, he got up from the chair, moved around Mac on the desk and opened the bottom drawer, pulling out Daniel’s bottle of Irish whiskey. After he pulled out the cork, Mac glanced up to see him chugging a huge swallow before he handed it over, grimacing.
“Thanks.”
It was strong, burning his throat, but it helped immediately. Wayne grabbed it back from him and stood facing the wall, the one that held the most faded of the ribbons the ranch had collected from prize cattle. “You know what was funny that I really wanted to tell him before he kicked?”
Not sure he wanted to know, he asked anyway. “What’s that?”
“We got about as much Irish and Scottish as Mr. Michiavelli across town. Maybe less.”
He stopped himself from taking another gulp of the whiskey, which he was happy about, because he would have choked on it. “What the Sam Hill you talkin’ ‘bout?”
Triumphant with his grin and sashaying across the floor like a dramatic drag queen, His sing-song voice explained, “Oh, my wife, the incredible Shantelle Blaylock, bought a DNA kit for the both of us for kicks. It came back that we’re less than one percent Irish, about that for Scottish.”
Their father’s pride in his rumored ancestry was notorious. He’d gotten an Irish four-leaf clover tattoo when he was sixteen. “You’re makin’ that up.”
“Nope. Funny thing is…a lot of our ancestors, that didn’t come from Germany and Greece are from Mexico.”
Before he could fathom that, he took another swig of the whiskey, then another, and added one more before he whispered, “It’s a damn good thing he’s dead. That woulda killed ‘im.”
“Now, I don’t know if it was on Mama’s side or his mostly, but my DNA is fifty-two percent south of the border, and thirty German. There’s a couple other things, and with the eight percent Greek, we’re a bag ‘o nuts. Explains our straight black hair.”
“And Daddy always said it was the black Irish,” Mac said, laughing.
“That’s what I thought.”
Thinking back to the ancestors he’d met, he remembered something. “Remember how Great-Grandma Kay would never go outside without her hat and gloves? She said the sun didn’t agree with her?”
Wayne pointed at him and laughed, “I’ll be damned! I’ll bet she tanned real well.”
“He’d have lost his ever-lovin’ mind.”
They took the drinking into the house, sitting on the big sofa in the living room, the dusty box television set to a news station on mute. The house was similar to the office, old, leather furniture, dusty shelves with a few western novels and ceramic horse and cowboy boot knickknacks. There were rag rugs on a wood floor that needed a good sand and polish, and the curtains his mother had made when he was five hung over the windows. He guessed they hadn’t been washed since she’d died, by the looks of them.
“Too bad you hate the place. This would be a great house for you, Shan and the kids.”
“Too far from work,” he mentioned. “Besides, too far out for Shan. She’s a city slicker.”
From Houston, Shan had been a nervous wreck the few times she’d been there, citing too much space. “Yeah, I guess. I like my place, right near the city, but not quite there.”
He’d moved from the ranch years ago, though he worked it nearly every day. “What’re you gonna do now? Find another ranch to work?”
That was a good question. “I wanted my own, thought about it for years, but never had the cash. I figured I would just wait and take over when Daddy was too old to work this one. Never saw this comin’.”
“And how is that? You were here, workin’ all these years, and you had no clue he was in the hole all this time?”
“Nah, he kept the books, told me he didn’t trust me with his money. He paid me on time every month, bought cattle at the sales, paid the hands. I never knew he was mortgaging the place to do it.”
“How the hell did he get so much on the place? It’s not like it’s worth that. You’ll be lucky to break even. And, listen, I’ll help all I can if it’s not.”
He appreciated it, but that wasn’t going to happen. Wayne had three kids and a mortgage of his own. “I’ll cover it. I’ll sell the cattle, the property and whatever equipment still works.” The thought of it all, the time, the work, it felt like the weight of the ranch was pressing him into the hard-packed soil that surrounded the place. Pretty soon, he’d be flat, lifeless, another victim of the Blaylock and Sons Cattle Company.
The bottle near empty, Wayne was loose enough to confess, “I hated him, Mac, but I didn’t. Does that make sense?”
“It does. I felt the same. I blamed him for Mama dyin’, blamed him for you, and for good reason.”
“And, for you never having a steady guy? I blamed that on him too, big brother. If he’d have ever thought you were gay…Jesus, I hate to think it.”
Wayne was right, of course. Daniel Blaylock with a gay son, that would have been the end of him, at least in his father’s eyes. “After what he did to you, comin’ home with Shan, the things he called her, there was no way I’d tell him. I wasn’t ashamed of myself for being gay, I was ashamed of him, the way he saw everyone not like him as less than human.”
Sighing, Wayne set the empty bottle on the wagon wheel coffee table, reasoning, “It’s over now. May his bigotry die with him.”
“Maybe it was good you fell for her and I’m gay. If we weren’t the things he tried to teach us to hate, we might have ended up like him.”
Bitterness tainting his voice, Wayne growled, “Me for marrying a beautiful black woman. Smart, successful, beautiful, and he hated her.”
“He was taught that,” Mac reminded him.
“So were we, Mac, and I don’t care what you say, if I hadn’t married Shan, I still wouldn’t hate other races of people like him. Would you hate gay people?”
“Who knows? I can’t say, Wayne, and neither can you. It’s good we don’t, but that don’t mean one little thing wouldn’t have changed that. Me likin’ women? Maybe I’d have seen guys like me as wrong.”
“I don’t. Never did.”
The sun was down, the lights on, and still, it felt like the day had just started. The list of things to do was endless. “How am I ever gonna get this place ready to sell? As is? I won’t cover half that debt, even with the cattle and equipment.”
“Get a manager to do it.”
“I can’t afford Teddy being here. How am I going to take on a manager?”
His brother, the genius in his own mind, laughed. “Talk to Shan. She knows people that do this kind of thing. They come in, assess things, then get all the work done at the lowest cost, plus look for the buyers like a broker. They take their commission from the sale. A big company just sold off that way, made a bundle off the sale. There are a lot of tricks that bumpkins like you and I wouldn’t know.”
“Bumpkins,” he laughed, remembering being called that by the city kids during a basketball game. “I had to look that up to figure out what it meant. Man, I was mad as a hornet.”
He thought about it, leaving the sale in the hands of someone else, and something akin to becoming territorial kicked into high gear. Having some stranger on the land that his family had lived on and worked over two hundred years?
“I’ll think about it.”
Chapter Two
Up before dawn, Mac was out in the pasture, counting heads. Each cow he ticked off got him closer to being free of his father’s debt. He hadn’t expected Wayne, but when he saw his brother, riding up on one of their father’s favorite horses, he waved him over with a grin.
“Didn’t think you would remember how to ride.”
“It’s like riding a bike,” he joked, pulling the chestnut gelding next to Mac’s grey paint, his sunglasses giving away that he was hungover. “How the hell are you so perky?”
“Took a shot of hair ‘o the dog in my coffee. All fixed up.�
��
“Jeez, Shan would kill me. I guess it’s good you’re unattached.”
Never in his life had he thought about being attached in the first place. Sex was one thing, could be done in the city, facelessly, namelessly. A boyfriend? He couldn’t imagine it. “Guess so.”
Teddy had fixed the windmill, fixed two long pieces of fence and brought in a cow who’d stepped in a gopher hole, getting her fixed up before she came up lame, and did it without having to call the vet. If he did survive this, it would be much to the credit of that man. “What the hell am I gonna do with Teddy? He’s got a family.”
“He worked this ranch a long time. There’s other ranches he can work.”
Knowing he was pushing worries on himself that he didn’t need, Mac sighed, “Yeah, I guess.”
There were clouds over the south horizon, a flock of birds coming their way from the west, but the wind wasn’t making itself known and everything was still and quiet. Even the lowing of the cattle was sparse with them grazing the new patch of grass where Mac and Teddy had herded them to that morning.
“Mac, I know this decision isn’t easy on you. Man, if I could take it, I would. I won’t be upset to see this place go, and maybe that’s messed up of me, but it’s true. For all the good memories here, there are twenty bad ones, ones we didn’t have, they were just here already. You feel them when you step across the property line. That row of slave houses falling apart down by the creek is reason enough.”
Mac winced, feeling that all the way into his gut. “I asked Daddy a hundred times to tear them down.”
“That isn’t gonna cleanse the place, Mac. You can tear them down, but the stink of what they were, what they represent is going to last forever here. Rid yourself of them, of this place, and start living.”
He saw his brother off that evening, wishing he’d stay but unable to make the plea with words. Wayne had a life, had a family and was happy. Mac didn’t know what he had besides a world of debt and an empty home.
Dusty, faded, that was the home. There was nothing bright or clean about the place. Wayne was right, he needed to move on from it, from the house, the ranch and the past. There was nothing tying him there but years of being drilled about heritage and legacy.
Remember the Alamo (Legacy Book 1) Page 1