Texas Gothic Read Online Free PDF Page A

my aunt a note to let her know I’d antagonized her neighbor.
    It was as good an excuse as any.
    The dogs seemed happy with my new sense of purposeand trailed after me to the back of the house, their nails ticking on the tile floor, my own Bremen Town Musicians.
    I headed for the desk where Aunt Hyacinth ran the business of Goodnight Farm. With the lights on and the ceiling fans turning, the workroom didn’t look much like a sorceress’s inner sanctum, though Phin’s equipment gave it more of an alchemist’s-lab vibe than usual, and I was pretty sure Aunt Hyacinth would have hated the blackout curtains. The room had once been the back porch, but Uncle Burt had enclosed it years ago. Potted plants crowded the space, and shelves of jars and bottles—green and brown and clear glass, all hand labeled—lined the walls, along with books of every vintage. Bundles of drying herbs and flowers dangled from the ceiling, and copper and iron pots hung near a large fireplace, their bottoms blackened by flame. At home, Mom cooked plenty of potions over the gas stove in our kitchen. I’d even seen her use the Crock-Pot. But Aunt Hyacinth was a traditionalist.
    The dogs flopped onto the cool stone floor, sighing deeply. Not even I was immune to the peaceful energy that permeated the house and grounds. It was the same at my mom’s shop, and my aunt Iris’s, too. Positive magic—the only kind that Goodnights do—has that effect. Even people who don’t recognize it as supernatural feel it.
    This was why I’d been reluctant to come to the farm. It was part of the figurative bubble where my family lived, where magic was reasonable and
tangible
. It messed with my thinking and blurred the lines I’d carefully drawn between my private, family world and my determined publicnormalcy. It made me do stupid things like get into an argument about ghosts
—ghosts
, of all things—with a jackass cowboy.
    After the computer booted up, I dashed off a note to Aunt Hyacinth, feeling virtuous. And
then
I opened a browser window and typed “McCulloch Texas ranch.”
    There wasn’t much. No homepage, just a business listing. Primary Location: Llano County. Production: Cattle and calves. Owner: Dan McCulloch.
    The second link led to a
Texas Monthly
article: “The Disappearing Independent Rancher.”
    I had a rudimentary understanding of the industry. Cattle were raised on pastureland, like the acreage surrounding Goodnight Farm. There were many small independent ranchers, but a large spread took a lot of money and resources. The article was basically about how drought, the cost of transportation, and the economy made things hard for the ma-and-pa operation. Cattle barons had given way to corporations. The author cited the McCullochs as one of the largest ranches in the state to remain a family-owned business. No shareholders, just Ma and Pa McCulloch.
    Impressive, especially after I saw a map of the ranch. It was big. Really big, sprawling on both sides of the Llano River. Except for one small white spot in the middle—Goodnight Farm.
    A book fell off a shelf with a heavy thump that made me jump. I spun the chair toward the sound, but everything was still. The dogs had barely roused from their snooze, and the rest of the books were lined up neatly, nowhere near the edge. It seemed Uncle Burt had decided to be helpful.
    I retrieved the hardcover volume from the floor.
Texas Ranches, Circa 1920
. The pages had fallen open to an older map of the area, which showed that a hundred years ago the McCulloch spread hadn’t reached nearly so far. It had been the biggest of about ten ranches in this bend of the river. The family must have bought up all the other land over the last century, because now there was only the one blue blob, wrapped around Goodnight Farm like a fat corpuscle trying to devour a stubborn cell.
    Aha.
    I sank back and the chair sighed beneath me, echoing my disappointment. Was that what Ben McCulloch’s antagonism was about? The