“You’re looking great, Peggy Jean,” I said.
She picked up the tray and walked ahead of me onto the side porch, which was furnished and built to look like an eating area in a simple home of sixty years ago. The walls were unpainted slat board, the ceiling posts wood and lathed with bulbous undulations in them; the long plank table was covered with a checkered cloth; an old-time icebox, with oak doors and brass handles, stood in the corner; a bladed fan turned lazily overhead. I stood by the open window and looked at Wilbur Pickett dropping a shaved and beveled fence post into a hole.
“Last year I inherited half a city block in downtown Houston,” Earl said to me, smiling, a glass of iced tea in his hand. He was a handsome man, at ease in his corduroys and soft burnt-orange shirt, his fine brown hair combed like a little boy’s across his forehead. There was nothing directly aggressive about Earl, but his conversation always had to do with himself, or what he owned, or the steelhead fishing trips he took to Idaho or up on the St. Lawrence River. If he had any interest in anyone outside his own frame of reference, he gave no sign of it.
“But it’s my worst nightmare,” he went on. “A failed savings and loan had the lease on the site. The government seized the savings and loan, and I can’t do anything with the property. The government doesn’t pay rent on seized properties and at the same time I have a six-figure tax obligation on the land. Can you believe that?”
“This has something to do with me?” I asked.
“It might,” he replied.
“Not interested,” I said.
He winked and squeezed my forearm with two fingers. “Let’s eat some lunch,” he said.
Then he followed my gaze out to the horse lot where Wilbur was working.
“You know Wilbur?” he said.
“I’ve bought horses from him.”
“We’ll invite him in.”
“You don’t need to do that, Earl,” I said.
“I like him.” He cut his head philosophically. “Sometimes I wish I could trade places with a guy like that,” he said.
I was soon to relearn an old lesson about the few very rich people I had known. Their cruelty was seldom deliberate, but its effect was more injurious than if it were the result of a calculated act, primarily because the victim was made to understand how insignificant his life really was.
An elderly black man, whose name was John, went out to the horse lot to get Wilbur, who looked uncertainly at the house a moment, then washed his hands and forearms and face with a garden hose and came in through the kitchen. He pulled up one of the cushioned redwood chairs to the table and nodded politely while he was introduced, his shirtfront plastered against his chest, his neck cuffed with fresh sunburn.
“Y’all pardon my appearance,” he said.
“Don’t worry about that. Eat up,” Earl said.
“It looks mighty good, I’ll tell you that,” Wilbur said.
But Earl was not listening now. “I want to show y’all a real piece of history,” Earl said to the others, and opened a blue velvet box, inside of which was a huge brass-cased vest watch with a thick, square-link chain. “This was taken off a Mexican prisoner at the battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The story is the Mexican looted it off a dead Texan at the Alamo. I have a feeling this was one day he wished he’d left it at home.”
The men at the table laughed.
Earl opened the hinged casing on each side of the watch and held it up by the chain. The watch twisted in a circle, like an impaired butterfly, a refracted, oily light wobbling on the yellowed face and Roman numerals.
“That come from the Alamo?” Wilbur said.
“You ever see one like it?” Earl said.
“No, sir. But my ancestor is supposed to have fought at San Jacinto. That’s the good part of the story. The bad part is the family says he stole horses and sold them to both sides,” Wilbur said.
But no one laughed, and Wilbur blinked and looked at a spot on the wall.
“John, would you bring a second glass for everyone so we can have some wine?” Earl said to the elderly black man.
“Yes, sir, right away,” John replied.
“Y’all have to come up on the Gallatin in Montana,” Earl said. “We catch five-pound rainbow right out the front door.”
Wilbur had picked up the watch from the v